5 ms·
Most of them are still so slow, unresponsive and laggy that they break any illusion of "touch" when interacting with the UI. The iPad is almost 10 years old no
by pi-rat 7y ago
Most of them are still so slow, unresponsive and laggy that they break any illusion of "touch" when interacting with the UI.
The iPad is almost 10 years old now.. come on..
- Dig1t 7y agoCar tech is _insanely_ bad; I don't understand why, but it boggles my mind.
- seabird 7y agoUS automakers are ridiculously wasteful, slow-moving, and don't really give a shit about anything. These companies are risk-averse for a reason, but you would be floored if you could experience first-hand the sort of bureaucracy and complacency you have to deal with when working with an automaker. I live somewhere that basically revolved around the auto industry until recently, and everyone else I've met that has dealt with automakers has had the same experience.
- itake 7y agoArmchair Electrical Engineer here: The parts used in cars need to handle a lot of vibration and heat and last 10+ years. The tech lags behind consumer electronics because consumer electronics don’t need to work in these difficult environments.
- deathanatos 7y agoMy phone will turn 9 this year, and the only reason I'll have to replace it will be the ever increasing bloated nature of mobile apps.
- kristopolous 7y agoThe software is terrible though. There is no vibration consideration that justifiably makes software horrible. Every vendor has their own telematics tech. You need to use their horrible app to unreliably access your car. Why not have a single standard api for say, lock and unlock, headlights on and off, etc ... The manufacturers think that by being covetous and proprietary it'll work out best for them in the end. It's a 1970s way of doing software: Zero open platforms, Zero open standards, Zero open source, blackbox machines with a completely proprietary pay-as-you-go manufacturer-specific system. I manage a fleet of Hyundais we got through a special partnership with Hyundai of South Korea and we weren't allowed to directly talk to their proprietary "BlueLink" technology. That was kept as a Manhattan-level company secret. Instead we had to go through a third-party authorized company who also wasn't given the information. They were the only ones authorized to reverse engineer it (and they were bozos). So we had to put our own telematics into the cars because Hyundai decided to be so covetous and secret about theirs. These cars ship with a USB port and 3.2GB free on their in-dash computers. It has "apps" on it but not really because you can't add any additional ones. Why isn't there a way for me to make my own apps? There isn't even some crippled Qualcomm BREW style way of doing things - there's nothing. Write software, place on USB stick, install on car. Why is this impossible? Come on now, we're almost 1/5th of the way through the 21st century. Then when it comes to Android/iPhone Auto it can't read OBD2 or CAN information such as battery voltage, fuel level, odometer, speed, no nothing. It can um, play music, take phone calls, and show maps. Whooppee. It's entertainment integration, not car integration - there's some apparently super secret firewall between the phone and actually getting useful information from the car, when plugged into the actual car. Why not just put up some permission request dialogs and only allow signed software? This has been a solved problem for 20 years. What on earth... We could do early mechanical failure detection, OTA software updates through the phones, data gathering to know if components are failing to avoid expensive recalls or wrongful death lawsuits. This would save Manufacturers billions. But they want to have their secrets as if they're shipping their own little enigma machines. It's like one of the iterations of the Internet TV ideas from the early 90s of how Comcast and Time Warner would write a bunch of shit software running on a tv appliance and that would be consumers interface to the internet. What a terrible idea. But with cars it's the reality we live in. Expensive, bloated, crappy products with aggressive vendor lock-in and required subscriptions. Just Awesome.
- xena 7y agoThen our industry needs to be regulated. Period. Either we have vendor lock-in or a standard that is literally illegal to not follow.
- kristopolous 7y agoI don't think that's needed. One of the manufacturers needs to get with the times and make an open platform and an app store and developers will come. Once one of the cars starts getting useful excellent third party software that can say, do parallel parking or smart cruise control or some other killer feature (maybe a car "doctor" that guesses what's wrong with a vehicle at actionable levels), the other manufacturers will eat shit for a while with their own in-house clones and fail then finally give in and adopt the open standard. They're better staying out of the software game entirely. But someone has to take the first step.
- JohnFen 7y agoI absolutely don't want any car that uses apps at all. I don't want a computer on wheels. I just want a vehicle.
- kristopolous 7y agoSorry, those days are mostly over by hook or by crook. We might as well try our best to make this brave new world tolerable.
- Retric 7y agoOn the other hand size, weight, power consumption, and heat dissipation are all vastly less important. Vibration is also generally easier to deal with than shock as these things don’t need to survive the 10’ drop tests. Car electronic systems suck because they are not a major selling point.
- hungry_Zeus 7y agoAutomotive electronics tend to have an operating design range from -20 to 120C ambient. Not that they see this kind of ambient temp but usually they have to be AEC-Q:100 qualified. Think about solar loading. Touchscreen (VHB tape, backlite, etc) all have to withstand intense temperature swings and last longer than a typical consumer electronic. If you look at the some of the Automotive testing, its pretty intense (High temperature Operation endurance testing and Thermal shock testing) in comparison to commercial grade testing. Usually car manufacturers have to spend significant amount of Reliability testing before the launch the product to avoid recalls. Tesla missed some of the typical automotive testing and the early Tesla vehicles had a bluish Mura after a year and some the adhesive layers on the TFT panel started seeing issues and they had to replace the screens on a rather large number of cars
- nitrogen 7y agoBut like another commenter said, that still doesn't explain crappy software.
- de_watcher 7y agoIt's very hard to do software when the hardware has the priority. You spend a lot of time fighting with its quirks and drivers.
- hungry_Zeus 7y agoYes, Crappy automotive SW is solely because most if not all infotainment SW is written by third party vendors. GM/Ford/FCA have engineers who are good at drafting Requirements and throw these said requirements over the wall to vendors like panasonic, bosch, Lear etc. They write 100 page documents on how the system needs to behave and these OEM vendors need to deliver these infotainment black boxes without any significant issues. (You can imagine why, if the infotainment board (Say intel or Qualcomm FW) has a bug that was found in production; they would need to update over USB or some other form debug method and reflash on the side of the production line and this cost hundreds of millions). Again tesla has done a great job and implemented OTA and some of the automotive companies are following suit but this still does not help them much as the updates are given by the vendors whose sole job is to cover themselves (So most updates will go through a year of testing even for minor changes to make sure not to brick anything)
- cgy1 7y agoMaybe most consumers don't really care as long as they're able to connect their phones to it to play music. Thus, their margins being tight enough as it is, car makers see the infotainment system as a good area to pinch pennies.
- acdha 7y agoMicrosoft’s car system through at least 2018 can’t handle more than a few thousand tracks. It used to crash and reboot but they “fixed” it by popping up a modal dialog requiring you to dismiss it to use anything on the entertainment system and playing a warning message — every single time you plug in a phone, even if you’re just using Bluetooth audio!
- cortesoft 7y agoThe Tesla one is pretty good
- gjs278 7y agoeven tesla is laggy for me at times. needlessly slow and frustrating when trying to use the maps and driving. and their audio features “navigate to broadway” (?) like come on
- m463 7y agoModel S/X - #1 thing they could do for safety is to minimize touches to get to a function, and also increase the size of touch targets. examples would be: touches to raise air suspension or adjust climate temperature without accidentally turning on seat heater. Model 3.. no dashboard. a tragedy. Not only are critical displays to the side, the controls are even further to the side.
- greglindahl 7y agoThe S has climate control on the steering wheel.
- m463 7y agoOr LCD brightness. Or sunroof percentage. something is gonna lose. :)
- greglindahl 7y agoHow many times per year do you adjust the LCD brightness on your S?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- londons_explore 7y agoPresumably some people adjust it every day as the sun goes up and down...