121–130 of 537 posts
The screenshots there make me feel pretty good about keeping my car from the 90's if that's the current state of new cars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is just global manufacturing. Plus a little bit of feature parity. It seems maybe tesla is the one fighting it. I think the original model S used steering wheel stalks from mercedes? Now they do so many things themselves (or don't do in case of stalks), to the point of making their own chips for the machine learning stuff.
Re: Tesla - at least in the early days, they did the same thing a lot of boutique manufacturers did: https://www.theautopian.com/how-tesla-engineers-saved-millio... Re: "global manufacturing" - yeah, but there's also a choice being made there. I own an older BMW, and there's been a very clear shift away from what was once a differentiated product to a kind of blah middle-object, which is almost certainly in pursuit o…
I'd be curious for someone to explain what this is, and what happened in 2005 that changed this.
> I use only three apps when driving: Google Maps for navigation, Spotify for music, and Castro for podcasts. The number of cars on sale today with these three apps available is zero. My car (a Volvo) has two of these three apps built-in. I stopped reading the rest of the article.
CarPlay mostly works, and although it has issues it's definitely user-focused. CarPlay doesn't prevent car makers from tracking vehicle activity. In the end, consumers don't give a shit about the in-vehicle infotainment. It sucks, or it's AA/CarPlay. The first generation of iDrive showed that rich people people will buy cars in spite of the in-car stuff. In fact, most car infotainment sucks, yet people still buy cars…
GM's plan is to sell a subscription service that covers all the things you already pay for on your phone (maps, music streaming, etc). It's why they're killing CarPlay, because they know that even if their service is good, nobody will pay $20/mo for shit they already get for free on their phones. Basically, their goal in life is to be a worthless middleman who takes peoples money while providing no real value to soci…
Tangential I know, but I giggled at yet another example of Google's incompetent branding and product naming. How a company filled with so many brilliant people can be so bad at brand strategy is baffling to me.
It's pretty funny to me to see an Apple user complaining about lack of interop with other ecosystems. You've chosen your walled garden; now it's time to realize you're stuck in it. The author seems to blame everyone but Apple for this, though. Apparently it's Google's fault that his preferred podcast app isn't available on Android. What about the app developer, who has decided not to support Android? And it's the aut…
I disagree with this love of hooking my $1000 phone to my $30000 car. Everywhere else in my house, I try to make gadgets independent of one another. I remember when a printer worked only when it was hooked to a PC to be its server. That was bad. It’s much better for my printer to hook to the network directly. Some thermostats require a phone to program them. That’s bad. The thermostat should have full functionality a…
I so much prefer hooking up my phone, rather than having to authenticate every device I own to all the services I want to use. And given that most of the services that I want to use in the car are also services on my phone, e.g., GPS maps, music, podcasts -- why would I want to have to use a whole new app for this purpose? I love that when I search for something with Google Maps it knows, typically in a letter or two…
Having to hook the phone to the car is s giant leap backward. We’ve got Gmail: email from any device. We don’t say: My phone has all my email, I hook it up anytime I want to read mail, if the battery is dead or I forgot my phone, I’m screwed. No, we use Gmail from a tablet, phone, PC, etc.
But for some reason people believe it’s an awesome advance that we can hook the phone to a car, as if it’s impossible to build Google Maps into a $30000 car.
> Google jumped on this opportunity by releasing Android Automotive. Unlike Android Auto, Google's equivalent to Apple CarPlay, Android Automotive runs natively inside the car and any carmaker is free to use it. Tangential I know, but I giggled at yet another example of Google's incompetent branding and product naming. How a company filled with so many brilliant people can be so bad at brand strategy is baffling to m…
CarPlay mostly works, and although it has issues it's definitely user-focused. CarPlay doesn't prevent car makers from tracking vehicle activity. In the end, consumers don't give a shit about the in-vehicle infotainment. It sucks, or it's AA/CarPlay. The first generation of iDrive showed that rich people people will buy cars in spite of the in-car stuff. In fact, most car infotainment sucks, yet people still buy cars…
GM's plan is to sell a subscription service that covers all the things you already pay for on your phone (maps, music streaming, etc). It's why they're killing CarPlay, because they know that even if their service is good, nobody will pay $20/mo for shit they already get for free on their phones. Basically, their goal in life is to be a worthless middleman who takes peoples money while providing no real value to soci…
Toyota should also plan to expand their manufacturing capacity to pickup GMs lost sales to anyone under the age of 60.
Lol
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, theoretically they could make money by selling additional services. Tesla sells "Premium Connectivity" for ~$10/mo, though it might be against the license agreements traditional manufacturers have with dealers to sell enhancements directly to the consumer. IMO it's more about control over the user experience. You don't want your customers' UX to be dependent on the whims of Apple or Google, because now you're…
Every traditional European car manufacturer sells services directly to customers. Not sure about the US/Japanese/Korean, though.
Unfortunately, I don't think they're planning on offering it free to my model or earlier, and I don't know if the same deal exists for ICE cars.