31–40 of 130 posts
I was thinking about getting a volvo, not a google car, so this is a deal breaker for me.
Get a BMW
https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/20/bmw-to-switch-apple-carp...
Finally a car manufacturer realizes it can't out-compete a software company at making good software. The reason infotainment sucks so hard is that car companies want to "own the experience" and also want to cut costs, so they underinvest and create poor experiences.
This Volvo hardware is going to be a minimum of 3 years old before it ships and will have to function for 10 years+.
How good is your 10 year old phone? How does it match up to the average consumer experience today? How's the speakers, camera, audio, OTA software, and display compare to what's available today?
Not owning the software ecosystem is a good first step but will be severely hampered by not aligning hardware development cycle expectations.
Finally a car manufacturer realizes it can't out-compete a software company at making good software. The reason infotainment sucks so hard is that car companies want to "own the experience" and also want to cut costs, so they underinvest and create poor experiences.
I think there's a larger story, which I'll explain through a personal anecdote. I purchased the Samsung Gear 3 LTE smartwatch because I've always hated how mobile phones get in the way of personal interaction, but then was very disappointed to find out it ran Tizen and not Android Wear, which means no Google Assistant. So one the one hand you have Google Assistant: great voice recognition and queries against the Goog…
Considering the lifecycle of a car vs an Android device, they better just build in a touch screen w/ a HDMI + USB connection, and let the compute brains get swapped out inexpensively ...
already solved for, just support android auto or carplay and let the consumer decide.
Finally a car manufacturer realizes it can't out-compete a software company at making good software. The reason infotainment sucks so hard is that car companies want to "own the experience" and also want to cut costs, so they underinvest and create poor experiences.
Nope. There's a current mismatch between automotive hardware life cycles and consumer software life cycles. This Volvo hardware is going to be a minimum of 3 years old before it ships and will have to function for 10 years+. How good is your 10 year old phone? How does it match up to the average consumer experience today? How's the speakers, camera, audio, OTA software, and display compare to what's available today?…
They can still shoot themselves in the foot by intentionally buying underpowered hardware, but that won't be the fault of hardware trends, it'll be the fault of making a bad initial choice.
Considering the lifecycle of a car vs an Android device, they better just build in a touch screen w/ a HDMI + USB connection, and let the compute brains get swapped out inexpensively ...
already solved for, just support android auto or carplay and let the consumer decide.
Think of all the car owners with iPod connectivity crying in their new 5 years old cars all over the world. By the way, today's iPhones do not support iPod connectivity. And I'm talking about protocol, not about hardware port. Which is a hassle to replace in quite a few vehicles too.
Why can I trust a multi-national company to track movements and locations over time of a personal vehicle ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone with concerns about privacy and thinking about buying a car in Europe should have eCall in mind. An European citizen unwilling to have an embedded system that tracks location, accesses mic and transmit GPS data has three options: burn the SIM card module, buy a pre-April-2018 car or something outside the EU.
By the looks of it ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tC_NX5D8AA ) the latest Suzuki Jimny still doesn't have a built-in navigation or anything like that, it will probably be on my to-buy-list in 6 or 7 years when (and if) I decide to buy a new SH car. I like my cars with a very plain and simple interior, just AC and a basic radio/CD player it's perfect for me.
Suzuki's Jimny is one of the few (if not the only) 4x4 available that is not an SUV. At least around here.
If you're looking for minimalism, you should take a look at Bollinger's B1 (https://bollingermotors.com/)
Google - "You are our product"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. There's a current mismatch between automotive hardware life cycles and consumer software life cycles. This Volvo hardware is going to be a minimum of 3 years old before it ships and will have to function for 10 years+. How good is your 10 year old phone? How does it match up to the average consumer experience today? How's the speakers, camera, audio, OTA software, and display compare to what's available today?…
Hardware improvement cycles are not some the same curves they were 10 years ago. So, short of a massive breakthrough, the improvement we can expect in the next 10 years will much, much smaller than what we saw in the last 10 (which was already much smaller than what we saw in the 10 before that). They can still shoot themselves in the foot by intentionally buying underpowered hardware, but that won't be the fault of…
That said, I generally agree with you: I think a lot of the advancement we'll see in the coming years will be in the VR/AR space, which will present a different enough experience that users won't be comparing it to existing interfaces.