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I've only used a Lexus that had a touchpad. I do however regularly use a Mazda with its commander knob, and it is far safer than a touchscreen in my opinion. Yo

I've only used a Lexus that had a touchpad. I do however regularly use a Mazda with its commander knob, and it is far safer than a touchscreen in my opinion. You can do most navigation without looking at the screen, with just an occasional glance to confirm you're doing what you think you're doing. Whereas a touchscreen requires constant attention while you're manipulating the screen. The only thing that annoys me about Commander Knob + Android Auto is that AA still forces attention breaks as you scroll through big lists (e.g. Spotify playlists) which is really stupid because you're not usually looking at the screen if you know you need to scroll say 75% down. You're just looking occasionally to see how far you've made it. By making the task take longer, it's reducing safety. The biggest safety issue by far with Mazda+AA is Google's baffling regression in handling voice input for common tasks while driving.

pzduniak 3y ago
>Google's baffling regression in handling voice input for common tasks while driving Is it just me or is Google Maps voice input in AA completely busted now? I used to be able to press the "Search" bar on the touch screen in the app, say the search term and it would just show the results. Likewise for adding stops along the way. Now for the former I need to explicitly say "navigate to X" (or it says that it doesn't have a screen and refuses to do anything???) and for the latter I have to say something like "add a navigation stop at X", the assistant lists our the result (??????) and asks me which one I want to choose. Of course I don't see anything on the map in either case. I can't imagine how bad it is when you
- pzduniak 3y ago
  Oops, accidentally cut off the last few words. Coincidentally it's back to working in the first case I described. Adding stops is still broken:/
antifa 3y ago
My Mazda is so weird. Android Auto has a completely random load time. It could be a few seconds, or it could take over 1 minute. Often I don't know if left or right is the fastest way to get somewhere, so I'd like to check google maps or waze, but it won't finish loading until a while after I've guessed and committed myself. It'll play the radio instead of my phone audio at some starts, then usually switch to phone audio automatically. There are times when the map will "freeze". New frames are only rendered as a response to moving the knob. I have a USB cable and Bluetooth both connected (no idea why both). There is no logical place to put your phone (I bought a holder accessory, it's great). There's no physical music pause button. People who like car accidents and being careless and don't mind pointless death and destruction like to point out you can pause music by fatfingering the knobe through a bunch of menus. This is probably Spotify's fault, but when you're in a song search, the "next song" button goes to the start of the currently playing song, instead of the next song. The "next song" button works correctly for all other Spotify list-ish things AFAIK, just not search. And search is obviously the place you need a skip button the most.
- peeters 3y ago
  I haven't seen most of the issues you describe, but I do know that AA is incredibly finicky with the quality of cable you use. When I first bought my car I would use a random cable from Amazon and Mazda's infotainment would straight up crash (can't blame that part on AA though). Mazda's infotainment is pretty notorious for being terrible; that it takes so long to connect (and get past the safety disclaimers EVERY SINGLE TIME) is truly annoying. I will say that I just bought a wireless AA dongle off Amazon and since I got that it's a lot more reliable because I'm not swapping cables all the time, though my Mazda still will take a while to connect to AA, then start playing my phone music, then switch back to radio for now apparent reason. It feels like the two subsystems are competing.

pzduniak 3y ago

>Google's baffling regression in handling voice input for common tasks while driving Is it just me or is Google Maps voice input in AA completely busted now? I used to be able to press the "Search" bar on the touch screen in the app, say the search term and it would just show the results. Likewise for adding stops along the way. Now for the former I need to explicitly say "navigate to X" (or it says that it doesn't have a screen and refuses to do anything???) and for the latter I have to say something like "add a navigation stop at X", the assistant lists our the result (??????) and asks me which one I want to choose. Of course I don't see anything on the map in either case. I can't imagine how bad it is when you

pzduniak 3y ago
Oops, accidentally cut off the last few words. Coincidentally it's back to working in the first case I described. Adding stops is still broken:/

antifa 3y ago

My Mazda is so weird. Android Auto has a completely random load time. It could be a few seconds, or it could take over 1 minute. Often I don't know if left or right is the fastest way to get somewhere, so I'd like to check google maps or waze, but it won't finish loading until a while after I've guessed and committed myself. It'll play the radio instead of my phone audio at some starts, then usually switch to phone audio automatically. There are times when the map will "freeze". New frames are only rendered as a response to moving the knob. I have a USB cable and Bluetooth both connected (no idea why both). There is no logical place to put your phone (I bought a holder accessory, it's great). There's no physical music pause button. People who like car accidents and being careless and don't mind pointless death and destruction like to point out you can pause music by fatfingering the knobe through a bunch of menus. This is probably Spotify's fault, but when you're in a song search, the "next song" button goes to the start of the currently playing song, instead of the next song. The "next song" button works correctly for all other Spotify list-ish things AFAIK, just not search. And search is obviously the place you need a skip button the most.

peeters 3y ago
I haven't seen most of the issues you describe, but I do know that AA is incredibly finicky with the quality of cable you use. When I first bought my car I would use a random cable from Amazon and Mazda's infotainment would straight up crash (can't blame that part on AA though). Mazda's infotainment is pretty notorious for being terrible; that it takes so long to connect (and get past the safety disclaimers EVERY SINGLE TIME) is truly annoying. I will say that I just bought a wireless AA dongle off Amazon and since I got that it's a lot more reliable because I'm not swapping cables all the time, though my Mazda still will take a while to connect to AA, then start playing my phone music, then switch back to radio for now apparent reason. It feels like the two subsystems are competing.