I wouldn’t even consider buying a car because of their policy around car play. Won’t even look at it.
Why can’t it just work like a dock for any device? Why does it have to be carplay or android auto with locked down protocols?
Because of ✨capitalism✨.
It’s an anticompetitive practice, that’s why.
They’re all preparing to remove choice as we start to lose competition due to Trump Economy
Fuck Trump, but this one is a bipartisan effort that has been ongoing since the Clinton administration accelerated the deregulation train. There has also been very little action towards anti-competitive practices for a very long time.
Don’t get suckered into a red vs blue mindset here. This is a battle against corporate and billionaire abuse of power.
EDIT: If I am being honest, I was all onboard the deregulation train back in the nineties. I was young and ignorant. I never imagined the damage it would bring.
There has also been very little action towards anti-competitive practices for a very long time.
Obama establishing the CFPB was a pretty big win for Americans.
Slightly related. Wtf happened to the Apple CarPlay 2.0 thing that was supposed to fully integrate into the center console and digital dashboard screens that would allow the in-built UI to be overridden completely?
From an engineer at one of the legacy car manufacturers, they don’t want CarPlay 2 because it has privacy controls. They don’t want to give up so much access to the car, then have to access it over Apple APIs limited by privacy controls
I came to this conclusion shortly after posting this. Thanks for the confirmation.
Manufacturers are contemplating how to win back control over the UI of their vehicles. They remain completely oblivious to why CarPlay succeeded in the first place.
https://www.astonmartin.com/en-us/models/db12
I think, it is in this car
I ran into this with my 2013 Kia Sorento ICE (which was subsequently totalled. :( )
When you replace the on-board infotainment system, there’s an interoperability package that has to be installed to make sure the existing functions of the vehicle continue to work.
Think of it like a translation layer, everything on the dashboard that went through the old system, has to be hooked up to the new system. Also complicated by steering wheel controls.
When it was all said and done, I had the full array of cameras that I wanted (turn signal cameras are amazing!) and everything worked…
Except the one little button that changed the interior lighting. It was forever stuck on red.
Now, for an EV, it’s essential everything work properly. I can totally see GM shutting that down.
This is kind of like the complaint about EVs not having AM radios… yeah, there’s a reason for that!
https://www.autosinnovate.org/posts/blog/not-cheap-a-3.8-billion-fix-for-am-radio-in-evs
Putting your vehicle main control inside the head unit is absurd to begin with.
Right, not sure why the steering wheel controls would even come into play. Android auto and Apple car play units from 2014 that I bought can directly accept the industry standard steering wheel controls cars use. I was able to use this stereo in a Honda from 06 and a Subaru from 2015. There are also wireless adapters for cars that didn’t have the feature from the factory. If it broke it was a conscious decision.
In their case they’re using a variant of Google for automotive, so enabling apple carplay and android auto is literally a checkbox on GM side
They’re doing extra work to disable it because they want to render the car worthless when after a few years when the os is outdated and the user doesn’t pay a subscription for maps
Don’t buy cars like this, that’s the only thing that will help.
And considering it’s GM, it’s not really hard to avoid buying them when there are better options.
Don’t you dare give consumers what they want.
Does all EV require travel destination for battery preconditioning ? If so EV have kind of spying as a feature.
No.
Why would you want an infotainment system in your car? I don’t get it. All I want when I’m driving is navigation and music/podcast, and I can just use my phone for both
Frankly I would like to not use Apple CarPlay / Android Auto — however, the built in software needs to actually usable and continuously updated.
I particularly want to see better non-touch input. Rotary dial + buttons à la Mazda, and much better voice input. I live in a multilingual region, and it consequently renders most in-built navigation voice commands useless, as it won’t understand language switching. Even Google assitant has issues with this despite supporting multiple input languages, usually resulting in me saying the entire command in the same language as the address. (Or just giving up if the name and street are in two languages).
But with built in systems that only support one language at a time, I just can’t say some of the addresses since I don’t know how it wants me to mispronounce them in English.
I also have found media playback frustrating in any modern vehicle. This is likely a lot harder to solve, but the inability to switch playlists or change playback settings without my phone connected to Android Auto is frustrating when in vehicles without it.
I know this is very ranty and not that big of a deal, it’s just frustrating seeing so little progress in the past decade on this front — and in some aspects like human interface design of vehicles, they have frankly regressed. If I look at the voice input systems on cars from 15-20 years ago there has been huge improvement, but even 10 years ago to now it doesn’t feel that different. Maybe a few new commands, but the quality of recognition / utility of the system is lacking.
continuously updated
Hahaha… hahahahahahahaha
Some of the newer auto manufacturers do that. Telsa, Rivian, etc. Those companies all have good in-house software developers. Almost everyone else farms this stuff out, which is why it’s never updated.
