So far, everything that my car replaces with a touchscreen that used to be a physical switch is a complete downgrade.
My car features a D-pad on the wheel that also works if you swipe over it, resulting in bad inputs and causing all kinds of frustration. It's my first new car and I'm feeling like I want my old car back. I seriously hate touchscreen controls and my only physical input is faulty
The biggest disappointment was manufacturers moving away from the DIN standard. Companies like Pioneer and Alpine (even defunct companies like Eclipse) have had highly functional and usable touchscreen DVD/stereo/GPS units since at least ~2005. Things like GPS, bluetooth and voice control all seem to work without fail on the units I've had (my only issue has been a folder limit on USB drives). They also focus on sound quality, so you can get higher quality audio from the unit via RCA jacks to an amplifier. All of this for <$500 with GPS, <$200 without GPS. If the car companies want tight integrations (things like OBDII tying into display, climate controls) an OEM developed touchscreen makes sense, but as a consumer, using a 20 year old OEM touchscreen is painful. Modularity (the DIN standard) solved this, by allowing easy upgrades, but I guess that doesn't help move newer cars.
Infotainment systems are one of the biggest selling points if you've seen any car ad lately. Why let the customer upgrade the unit and keep that same car for a decade, when you can make that impossible and then entice them with the latest infotainment system so they buy a new car every few years.
Right, and that is what I don't get. The "fancy tech" isn't really that great relative to alternatives available in the past, but everyone is somehow unaware. Aftermarket stereos were mainstream during the 80's-90's during the tape->CD transition, so more people knew that they could upgrade, but in the mid-late 00's, hardly anyone seemed to know that you could swap a stereo out relatively easily. For modern cars I've looked at, the dash kit for swaps makes it insanely expensive. Popular vehicles may have custom aftermarkets, but niche cars are out of luck. So many people just look for any reason to get a new car, I guess that is just a side effect of treating cars like replaceable appliances?
When I bought my last car (Honda Fit), I was stuck with the base model because it was the only one without a touch a screen.
I test drove the upgraded trim package. It was nicer in every way but the damn touch screen, which was a non-starter. I had to wait three months for a cheaper car to come in, instead of buying the upgraded package on the spot.
At some point a manufacturer will get wise and start selling manual controls as an upgrade.
Mazda already wised up and removed the touchscreen in their newer models, everything in the infotainment is operated by a little rotary/dpad-thing located near the gearshift. I think it's quite nice, input wise.
Software wise it's a complete mess. The software itself is actually pretty OK, the navigation is just very verbose and it's strange that I can't just update it myself. The startup is also quite annoying. It's an embedded computer in a car, it should be instant.
Android auto support is a trashfire. It occasionally (when i drive for more than an hour) crashes the entire infotainment system, forcing it to reboot (a 1 minute process). Thankfully it resumes from where it left off after the reboot.
Well that's disappointing. As I pointed out in another comment, as of March 2020, Android Auto became wildly unstable in my 2015 Mazda. However, I put the blame on it having a version of Mazda AIO Tweaks from 2018, and possible version incompatibilities with the Android Auto on my phone. But... perhaps there are software issues at a deeper level here, if even the newer ones which officially support Android Auto are so unstable!
For me, Android Auto will crash frequently if using maps or Pandora, and will almost always crash instantly if I try to use both. It wasn't nearly as unstable before March 2020, though.
I had this issue, too. It helped to replace the AA headunit module in AIO with a binary having this fix https://github.com/gartnera/headunit/pull/174.
Since then, AA works great for me
They've had those dials since their first touch screens. It's the biggest reason for my brand loyalty for mazda. Touch screens allow you to make really complicated interfaces, but if your screen can only be navigated by a dial, they can't. Which is way better than everyone else.
It is a touch screen, but the "touch" part generally only operates while stopped and in navigation. I think they might also allow touch for android auto/apple car play, but I'm not sure.
The touchscreen is still there on my 2020 model. but I always use the roulette to navigate. It's a bit akward at times but it's much better than taking my eyes off the road to try and line up my finger on the touchpad. It's disabled in Android Auto mode, and probably in CarPlay but I never used it.
I too had problems with Android Auto when using my old phone, it constantly crashed. When I switched to a Pixel 4a in 2020 I no longer had any issues. It works like a charm.
So I suspect it could be your phone, or something related (the cable, the type of USB plug, etc.).
For me, I tried a Pixel 3 and a Oneplus 7 Pro, with two different cables, and the instability issues were the same. So it's not clear to me that the issue is outside of the head unit.
For the first 2 months of me owning my car (it's a 2021 mx5), I had to force close spotify immediately before plugging the phone into the car (It was like a 30 second window) or the car would refuse to output any audio. Without any change to the cable or the car, and with the same handset, the problem suddenly disappeared. The only thing I think of that could have fixed it is an over the air update for my phone.
Either way, it's branded "Android Auto". I'm going to blame Google for anything that doesn't work optimally. If they cared, they could certify their product.
I misread your previous comment has the problem originating _inside_ the headunit. Just wanted to clear that up since my response probably seemed pretty superfluous.
No, you read it right. I mean - clearly I don't know the origin. My Mazda OEM head unit was slow and unstable out of the box, and continued to be so when I installed Mazda AIO Tweaks (with Android Auto.)
Specifically running Android Auto became more unstable in March 2020, without being the head unit updated. In other words, probably the phone (Android Auto) was updated. Possibly in a way that was backwards compatible with OEM Android Auto, but not the AIO Tweaks version.
That's a long of saying, there's probably multiple potential sources of problems and failure; not clearly the hardware/software of the head unit, and not clearly the Android Auto software. But a bad combination of the two.
But it's all guesswork on my end! When I see others having the same issues with OEM Android Auto, it does make it seem more of a clear Android Auto software issue. (And we haven't really ruled out idiosyncrasies of the handsets and USB cables.)
really! This definitely makes me note to be sure to strongly consider mazda next time i'm in the market. I don't want any of that stuff.
All US cars now come with a screen, because backup cameras are now legally required. So I guess most of them say if there has to be a screen anyway, of course it should be a touch screen with controls, or it's just sitting there useless when you're not using the backup camera.
I don't want a backup camera or a screen at all, but if I have to have one, at least don't make it a touch screen, please.
It's a real shame that "computerizing everything" meant taking all the shit we hate from computers, like long bootups, complex failure conditions, constant restarting, and complicated inferfaces and putting that into everything while making nothing better.
I'd recommend giving Mazda's infotainment a chance. It's not pretty, but it gets out of your way enough that you get to enjoy the car. That was kinda the point of getting a miata in the first place.
I once had a GMC (that was in most other ways terrible), that embedded the backup camera screen behind the rear view mirror glass. There was a direct connection between it and the backup camera. The backup camera was triggered by the backup lights, so no head console integration was required.
That was nice. Hopefully, some manufacturer will cater to the touchscreen backlash crowd,and it'll become popular.
like it replaced the rear view mirror, you didn't have a windshield-mounted mirror anymore when backup camera was engaged?
I guess that makes sense -- I'm kind of surprised it's legal!
although I guess the windshield-mount rearview mirror isn't actually legally required anyway, for instance in trucks/vans/other situations with obstructed sightlines to back of car.
Anyway, what you describe sounds really cool and subtle in a good way, like the kind of thing we imagined we'd get in the future, when we imagined the future would be designed well, instead of the hacky poorly designed terrible UX future we've got.
I had a rental three row SUV (was supposed to be a compact, but when the first two assigned cars weren't in their spots, they gave me something that was there) with a video augmented windshield mounted mirror. It would run during forward operation too, and it was kind of nice --- couldn't see much with that long of a vehicle and tinted rear window, but it was hard to use, because going from long focus looking forward to short focus looking at a screen a foot away, and going back to long focus forward was weird. Also, it was distracting because you could kind of see the actual mirror image if you looked at the mirror while your eyes were long focused.
> because going from long focus looking forward to short focus looking at a screen a foot away, and going back to long focus forward was weird
You don't normally find this a problem with windshield-mounted mirrors? I wonder what the difference is, and if you'd get used to it if driving regularly.
Could likely get used to it, but not in a few days. Once I turned it off, I felt a lot better.
I don't notice a focus change going from looking out the windshield to looking through the mirror. There almost certainly is one, but it's not as drastic, because you don't focus on the surface of the mirror... and, as you note, it's what I'm used to.
It makes sense. I wonder if a higher-res screen would also not have you focusing on the surface; shouldn't a high enough res screen be to your eyes just like a mirror? I'm just curious now why it's different!
I think you'd need a lens arrangement to make the image appear inside the mirror. It's not just related to binocular vision either, if you have focus a camera on an object appearing in a (flat) mirror, the focal distance is going to be pretty close to the distance from the camera to the mirror + the distance from the mirror to the object.
Now, I don't think you need to get this exactly right, but if you could make the video image appear at a focal depth close to to the length from the mirror to the back window, it would be a lot easier on the eyes than the image appearing at a focal depth of about a foot. I'm not good with optics though, so don't ask me how to do that! :D
I had a rental with a video rear view mirror (you could turn it off it and became a regular rear view mirror) and I actually liked it - the car had a small rear window so you got a wider field of view from the video, and it was clearer at night with less glare.
my similar system in a Toyota only replaces the left-most ~1/4 of the rear-view mirror, so it's still pretty usable as a rear-view mirror when it's active.
The rotary dpad thing is worse than a touchscreen IMO. instead of just touching the thing you care about, now you have to scroll around to find it, which is very dangerous when driving
> At some point a manufacturer will get wise and start selling manual controls as an upgrade.
Will they really?
Most consumers invest very little effort in researching most of their purchases, and are remarkably tolerant to specific kinds of annoyances. I wish that they invested more effort, but based on my observations of my friends and family (who will spend e.g. about 20 minutes researching their $600 phone purchase), they won't, with a few outliers.
An imperfect comparison might be the amount of effort that the average techie spends on purchasing a MicroSD card or USB drive (usually on Amazon). How many people, even programmers, will spend time looking for durability or third-party performance benchmarking numbers? How many will look for child/slave labor in the manufacturing of the device, or rare earth materials sourced from areas in conflict?
I, personally, know that I should do the above, but I don't - partially because Google is so incredibly bad at finding the information, but also because I know that because most other people don't care, a lot of the above information might not exist at all.
I think most people look at it in a cost/benefit way. If it takes them three hours to research, they've spent 3x $hourly_rate + $item_cost—which in many instances may be more expensive than just selling off an item they can't stand and getting a different one. (To the extent that people do this even when it would pay for itself, I think it's mostly the result of just being in the habit.)
I try to view it instead as being paid (albeit at a lower rate) for my off time. (And if you do this for everything, you'll tend to spend less, have more in the bank, and the amount you get 'paid' will increase over time.)
I think a car is definitely one product that the typical consumer does at least some research on, given that it's such a large purchase. Consumer Reports certainly grades infotainment systems and maybe that's having some impact in manufacturers choosing better options. Although maybe that's less impactful from the sales boost that comes from dealers showing off "neat" features of the touchscreen.
That's the same reason I bought the base model of my last car. Besides the steering wheel, you end up interacting with the center console the most. It really should be one of the top considerations in buying a car vs fancy wheels, a cool spoiler or a turbocharger, etc. After all, a lot of body components & engine modifications can be added after market. You're going to have a much harder time "fixing" that center console...
It’s too bad the manufacturers don’t just make APIs with swappable standard sized hardware instead of integrated systems.
An average car lasts 12 years. How many 12 year old tablets do people want to use?
My first car was a 15 year old beater with a tape deck. It was trivial to rip it out and put in an (at the time current) CD player. I pity the poor kids who are going to be stuck with these cars down the road.
It's probably reasonable to assume that car touchscreens are designed more to "look cool" at the time of sale than to actually be usable over the life of a vehicle. Car salesmen get to show off all sorts of high-tech bells and whistles, and that's more immediately impressive to buyers than the long-term practicality of physical knobs and switches.
One off-the-shelf touchscreen... vs. lots of little custom-molded and printed analog parts that have to be assembled by costly robots or costlier humans. Big savings, I think.
Whatever the case, it sure isn't because people like touch controls in their cars. Holy shit, what a universally reviled "feature."
Touchscreen engineer here. There is no such thing as an 'off-the-shelf' capacitive touchscreen.
There is always custom engineering to match the customer's housing and bezel, tune the analog characteristics to the electrical environment, and handle other requests like a safer/thicker cover glass, optical bonding to the LCD, and low friction or hydro/oleophobic coatings on the surface.
No one is denigrating this work, but it's obviously easier to consistently get right than the fiddly processes GP describes. There is a rectangle of a particular size, and various substances are applied to it.
You didn't mention UI design, which is the worst aspect of this technology.
I think this is part of it, "iPhones are cool, and this is like a giant iPhone!", but I think a larger part of it is that it's easier to design/program for and actually possible to update after the fact if that's required. There's probably something here for using the same parts across a whole line of cars, too vs testing and fitting buttons.
Hopefully, those same customers will know better when coming to buy their next car after that, therefore reducing desire for touchscreen controls and hopefully, their extensive usage
I doubt that'll happen. It'll probably take the same trajectory as (smart) TVs: these crappy designs become the industry norm and it becomes very difficult to find alternatives.
I'm of the opinion that the only touchscreen that belongs in a car is a barebones non-networked Apple CarPlay / Android Auto pass-through for sound and navigation. All other controls are physical.
Also, why can't we just have a fucking shelf or a bracket.
Ever since radios stopped being a standard rectangle, and the dashboard was filled with kevlar sacks and explosives there's nowhere to put anything down.
As of 5-6 years ago some (many? most?) cars still had a good old standard double-DIN slot for the infotainment unit, if you popped off the dashboard's plastic cover.
No clue if that's still true; I think it has become less true over time for sure.
There are benefits to automakers for retaining that standard form factor. Most factory-branded infotainment systems are made by a handful of OEM manufacturers like Bose. Bose makes systems for multiple automakers. So the double-DIN form factor has persisted, it's just hidden.
Problem is, for most cars, the climate controls and shit are all bundled into that infotainment system. So you can slot a standard double-DIN stereo into most modern cars, but you need a replacement dashboard panel and fairly elaborate kit to replace the OEM climate controls and whatever else.
My wife has a 2019 Subaru Crosstrek that gets this exactly right, IMO.
There is a touchscreen. IMO, you want that for Apple CarPlay / Android Auto. Mostly for nav.
But for everything else, there are big grippy analog controls. There are also analog volume and prev/next controls for the touchscreen. I believe the interior was designed with the concept of, "everything should be operable, even if the driver is wearing gloves."
> There is a touchscreen. IMO, you want that for Apple CarPlay / Android Auto. Mostly for nav.
More importantly, federal law requires that new cars must have back-up cameras. Car manufacturers are doing the obvious analysis of, if we need to have a screen in there anyway, may as well make it a touchscreen. And if we're going to make it a touchscreen, may as well save some money by eliminating a bunch of physical controls.
I don't like it—I plan to drive my 2002 Tacoma into the ground specifically to avoid getting a car with a huge touchscreen UI—but I kind of understand it.
Yeah this is how my Hyundai Kona (2020) works and I think it's a good bridge between both. Touchscreen for CarPlay navigation, knobs on the dashboard, and additional buttons on the steering wheel (volume up/down, skip, mute, answer call).
Why is this? You'd think these massive corporations could afford the best SWE's in the world. And yet, the average infotainment system in a new car today is literally worse than an iPad from 2010.
I worked in infotainment for an Automaker. The engineers are fine. The hardware is often limited (because of expense or contacts), and the development timeline is 2-3 years.
Also, infotainment is not a make-or-break feature of the car. It might nudge people a little, but it’s not the thing, so it’s not as high a priority.
I will say for my former employer that I could get a better salary at almost any software company than there. The work was interesting though.
Ditto here, I used to do infotainment flashing and testing. It's quite an interesting industry. These days I mostly work on sensor packages for development vehicles, so my infotainment knowledge is a bit stale.
A lot of automakers leave too much to their suppliers, and take too much on faith. The testing and validation is often happy-path only, show that it is capable of functioning properly, not that's incapable of functioning improperly. Pathetic but thrifty, as long as there are no standards for these things.
Mazda's gaffe here is that the boot-loop prevents the rear-view camera from working, which is a NHTSA requirement. So their 'courtesy replacement' is an attempt to avoid the shame of a true recall, as I understand it.
SWEs working at these companies are probably hamstrung in what they can do.
From cheap economobiles to six figure luxury cars, I've yet to see an infotainment system that works better than CarPlay.
The last bastion for factory infotainment systems is that CarPlay/Android Auto doesn't integrate with factory HUD or instrument panel displays (whether the instrument panel is a big LCD itself, or a small one nestled between the gauges). But I hear even this is changing in some recent models. Once that revolution is finished, then I don't see why I'd ever use the factory infotainment software ever again instead of just CarPlay.
It seems like the manufacturer is responsible for 'integration' of CarPlay into their systems. On a recent 2021 Hyundai Sonata rental, the Carplay system crashed multiple times while driving and forced me to pull over, unpair the phone and reconnect to get it working again. I don't think I have ever used any Apple software that was this glitchy. Makes me think that there is some screwups the manufacturer can still do despite Carplay coming from Apple.
Car companies do a lot of revenue, but margins are slim. When you actually have to build something out of metal and glass you have to be fixated on cost cutting.
Which is crazy, I've never chosen a car because it costs 1k more or less, but I have ruled out several manufacturers because their UI is awful, and I'm sure it doesn't costs $1k to put half a dozen real switches in
I drive a 2005 stick shift that sits on a Toyota Corolla block. It has a dumb radio with real buttons, and no power windows or power locks.
It's amazing. Maintenance is cheap, stuff works. I have a Bluetooth FM radio dongle, and the audio quality is less than ideal, but my speakers are crap too, so who cares. I threw on a dash mount for my phone to do navigation and music, and it's wayyyy better than even decks with Apple CarPlay or Android Auto (particularly since most of that stuff, until very recently, required you to plug in a cable).
I'm going to drive the thing into the ground. Really not looking forward to the idea of buying a car full of computers to replace it.
That being said, fuel economy isn't _great_. If the odometer is to be trusted I get around 25 mpg, but I don't drive all that much, and I just don't think a hybrid or electric vehicle is worth the price, both upfront (particularly in this market) and maintenance (for the hybrids only, electrics seem to be maintenance-free).
25mpg definitely doesn't sound right for a Corolla. That's roughly what I can get in my fullsize car if I try not to "stretch its legs" too much ...and it's got a big V8.
That is essentially what Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are. The phone generates a secondary screen with a simplified UI and projects that to the car. The car displays it as a video and returns touch events to the phone.
"Simplified UI"? I think you mean the confusing UI that isn't the one I learned before I was trying to switch lanes on the freeway.
Some day, I hope a lawyer will team up with a UI researcher, and then sue car manufactures for "safety theater" features like this that endanger people.
One of my favorites? The click through legal disclaimer that blocks my view of the backup camera screen every single time I pull out of a spot in a parking lot.
A runner up is "we can't let the passenger type a destination into the navigation system because the vehicle is moving"
Unfortunately, the devil is in the details of that "essentially" and "simplified UI". CarPlay seems magic (though admittedly I don't own an iPhone), but Android Auto has been riddled with problems around whether the deck or the phone has control, weird memory leaks, and critical controls or settings missing from the "simplification". Every time I've used it as a passenger, I find myself unplugging the phone, fiddling with the Maps or music UI on there, and then plugging it back in (often only to find out that the pairing got reset somehow and the car needs to be put in park before I can complete the onboarding again).
I had a rental with Apple CarPlay, it worked well but I still got the impression that the system in the car played a big part... it was an interface but I'm not sure it wad driven by my phone. That of course means it could be at the whim of some silly car infotainment type setup. At least that's the impression I got.
It's 100% driven by your phone, what you're seeing is just a video stream from the phone. The infotainment system essentially acts as a dumb terminal. The phone feeds it video, and it feeds the phone X,Y touch coordinates. It also feeds the phone some data about the car, but there is no way for the car to directly modify the interface since it's literally just a video stream.
Some car companies are trying to charge a subscription fee for heated seats, too. They obviously control whether it's enabled or disabled, but my point was that when you're using it the car doesn't control the interface.
To reduce all inputs to a single button that you tap in different patterns to trigger different functionality or to remove all physical ports (including the fuel tank inflow) with wireless equivalent that only work with approved hardware? The folks I want to get into the car game are mechanics from the 90s that believe a switch with a nice deep "click" for feedback is the best thing ever invented.
I think touchscreen controls are fine as long as the car also has voice commands that work well so you don’t even have to look anywhere else while driving much less touch the console
So far, everything that my car replaces with a touchscreen that used to be a physical switch is a complete downgrade.
My car features a D-pad on the wheel that also works if you swipe over it, resulting in bad inputs and causing all kinds of frustration. It's my first new car and I'm feeling like I want my old car back. I seriously hate touchscreen controls and my only physical input is faulty