241–250 of 438 posts
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A no nonsense infotainment system doesn’t sound like the kind of thing people will spend $25billion a year on.
Good for them? Why should a good infotainment system cost $25B/year in perpetuity? Doesn't anyone solve problems anymore?
Automobile companies tried for years to make a decent infotainment system in cars, and almost universally they were all terrible no matter how expensive the vehicle. Finally Android Auto and CarPlay gave everyone what they wanted - decent access to music on their phone, call capabilities that actually work, and program integration with things they actually use with internet service they already have. Then manufacture…
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This is an incredibly myopic take bordering on arrogance. The infotainment system of a vehicle needs (as in, is mandated) to be as safety compliant as the rest of the vehicle's software so your steering doesn't lock out when the display crashes. Writing software for safety critical systems is not a task most developers are familiar with.
Uh, what? If my infotainment system is capable of influencing my steering or any safety-critical function then malpractice has been committed. Infotainment needs only read (one-way) capability on the vehicle.
you'd hope that there'd be some kind of filtering to prevent the infotainment system from sending (arbitrary) CAN messages, but I recall some crazy demos of researchers pwning a car's accelerator after rooting the center console.
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Just an anecdote - I own a Volvo XC60(with Sensus not AAOS) and 99% of the time I'd rather just use the built-in OS than Android Auto - AA is slow to respond and imprecise(clicks are almost always recognized as swipes rather than clicks, problem which doesn't happen in the built-in OS), and every time you need to do something it locks you out for 5 seconds to look at the road, even though it's my passenger using it.…
To be fair Volvos entertainment system is by far the best one I've used so far. Night and day compared to a lot of other manufacturers
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Can you give examples of this? I was recently looking for a car and saw the discounts and credits for a Tesla and thought it was finally time to go electric. Then I started researching the interface and saw so many people talking about how clunky it was and they decided to just use bluetooth with their phone to listen to music rather than the interface or even worse hacks where they setup a web server on their phone…
I bought a BMW i4, not a Tesla 3, so this is just my comparison. But Tesla software works really well, they have navigation to chargers, something that doesn’t really work in the BMW, you are pretty much on your own. They have sentinal mode, and it actually doesn’t suck like BMW’s drive recorder does. You can open your car with your phone, like for real via UWB, not just some NFC thing that works only in one place, o…
Yes, Tesla sentry mode is really good, but I really cannot live without a parking front and lateral cameras in the narrow streets of Europe. Specially without a working PDC system.
I’m very happy with my i4, best car I’ve ever owned. And much better that all my Tesla experiences.
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My personal opinion: 1. The navigation works really well for me. Including routing via superchargers 2. The UX of not needing a key. The bluetooth phone key works so much more reliably than other car manufacturers (n=1) 3. The screen is very responsive. Touch UI is fast. 4. The backup and side camera view is the best I’ve seen on cars. 5. Record the last X minutes from all cameras when you honk (someone backed into m…
2-8 do sound great. They are the reasons I was looking at a Tesla. Hadn't even heard of some of those. The car I'm looking to replace is a 2009 toyota corolla commuter car that is really starting to have maintenance issues. The right speakers even stopped working a few years ago. The speaker on my phone is better so I just put the sound all the way up and use that. The audio sucks, but it's easy. I sit down, press pl…
For some strange reason the Spotify app in Tesla doens't have the option to download playlists, it will only buffer ahead and cache things. I've had it happen that it stopped playing because it lost connectivity and I tried to shuffle ahead quite a few times. I think all Teslas come with at least 60GB of internal user accessible storage, you can also expand that by just plugging in a USB-drive in the glovebox. The Tidal app in Tesla does offer offline playlists, and much higher bitrate. I think Tesla is doing their audio engineers a disservice by the atrocious bitrate that they provide through the Spotify and Apple Music app. And Tidal is borderline unusable if you want innovative and ground breaking features like Shuffle, but apparently that is coming this "holiday update".
You don't need to have a "Premium Subscription" to use Spotify or any other streaming service in a Tesla, you just set up a hotspot on your phone and it will automatically connect to it. I've also seen some people connect a mobile hotspot to the glovebox USB-port. Some of them even come with additional storage and things like internal battery so it'll stay connected even when the car powers down the infotainment system. If you have an iPhone it's a little more convoluted, but it's easily sorted out with just using a Shortcut to enable hotspot that fires automatically when it connects to your car.
Tesla does a lot of things very well, and some things just don't make any sense at all. Like when they removed the "repeat playlist" option in Spotify for a year or so. It made impossible to use shuffle, as you'd usually reach the end of the playlist within a couple of shuffles, and it would just change to radio or something. It still supported the option, I could toggle it on in the Spotify app on my phone, they just removed the UI element. Luckily it came back not that long ago.
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> every time you need to do something it locks you out for 5 seconds to look at the road Whoever came up with that wasn't entirely right in the head: so now people will stare at the device for another five seconds wondering what they did wrong. Sound of impact.
Or just push the button on your steering wheel and use voice control. You (mostly) do not have to touch the screen at all.
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Just an anecdote - I own a Volvo XC60(with Sensus not AAOS) and 99% of the time I'd rather just use the built-in OS than Android Auto - AA is slow to respond and imprecise(clicks are almost always recognized as swipes rather than clicks, problem which doesn't happen in the built-in OS), and every time you need to do something it locks you out for 5 seconds to look at the road, even though it's my passenger using it.…
To be fair Volvos entertainment system is by far the best one I've used so far. Night and day compared to a lot of other manufacturers
you know whats unsafe? Getting rid of physical buttons and putting everything on a touch screen with no tactile feedback and constantly changing the position of things - looking at you tesla. All things considered though: im not likely to buy any new car. I'd rather buy an old and busted early 70s boat, and stuff in modern running gear.
My Mazda disables the touchscreen once the vehicle is going more than ~10 km/h, yet CarPlay is very usable. It's got a physical knob that rotates through the various on-screen widgets in a fairly predictable order. Most of the apps I use are also good about keeping their CarPlay interfaces very consistent across time, so it's possible to learn the "tab" order by muscle memory and not really need to look at the screen…
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As a data point, I buy used cars because they are not a tool I use for work so they are not like my laptop. It's pointless to pay the full price for a car: it is 100% a cost, the car has not ways to give me back some of the money I spend on it. So my cars are always about 5 or 6 years old when I buy them. I optimize for price and costs of running and maintaining them. What's important is that they handle well, brake…
How long do you keep such cars? Also, 5/6 years old depending on mileage & make is usually the time for some expensive part replacements. Eg. water pump, thermostat & related sensors for BMW F30.
(this car pre-dates the emissions scandal, I checked.)