> I have to call MINI at some point and demand they fix this garbage
That would never occur to me. Whenever something produced by a large company breaks, I pretty much assume there's no signal possible back to whomever is responsible for the breakage, and that whatever is broken now is broken forever.
To the author's point, they're A-gile, but forgot that the first step in the process was customer feedback
Tell that to Volvo. They even state on their feedback form that they don't respond to feedbacks, which IMHO is a polite way of saying that they don't read the feedback but still need a form, because no form would be bad publicity.
Kia just did this with their EV9 update - it broke CarPlay with a blank screen a few minutes into driving, which then reverted itself a minute later. Another OTA mostly resolved it. Neither of these updates explained what happened or what the fix was.
Let me be a devil's advocate here: you have essentially two options.
1. You write release notes thet contain technical details. Less than 1% of your customers understand them. More than 90% probably won't even care, let alone understand the document. And then there are the folks who get confused or scared and reach out to customer support with weird questions. This generates extra workload.
2. You explain nothing. The release simply is. The technically minded people are mildly annoyed. A few customers affected by open issues wonder if it's fixed now. The rest of them doesn't even care that there is an uodate and carries on with their lives. Customer service continues to complain about the usual bunch of random and weird customer issues.
It's quite natural to start doing (2) in a consumer facing business, isn't it?
What you really mean is that there is very low value to the company in appeasing this minor vocal audience. What you forget is that you are posting on a message board to an overlapping audience.
It's the nerds that the non-nerds/normies go to for advice on tech-y things. If you can generally make the nerds happy, and earn a good reputation among them, you'll have a customer base from which to expand from.
Or as Tim O'Reilly recommended back in the day, "Watching the Alpha Geeks":
We used to just do things because it was the right thing to do, or out of pride for what we were making, or sometimes just to be better than the other guy.
That everything has to be about profit is a lot of what's wrong these days. And yes, bitching about this on a YC-owned forum is just as silly as bitching about nerds here, I'm aware.
You mean a few customers? Yes, I think that’s perfectly reasonable to expect that changes made to a very expensive product are well-documented for those customers to whom that matters.
It is genuinely lost on me why tech nerds specifically have a hard time grasping the idea that they are not the only people that matter. That sometimes, someone will know that something will upset computer nerds, and will still do the thing, because they see it as worth it overall.
Like spoilt children. I genuinely don’t know if it’s the decades of SV pandering or what.
MOST OF THE TIME, NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOU. And they’re probably right not to.
Instead of picturing spoiled children, who are mad about something that doesn't matter, like spilled ice cream, instead consider civil rights movements, for the modern era. The point is to make people care about something that will affect them, sooner or later. Like the right to repair. Nerdy at, until farmers got involved, and there are specific monetary issues involved. Most of the time, people don't care, but people are going to care if farmers don't do their job and there's no food.
This is a pretty dumb response, not only because the idea that knowledgeable people matter ≠ knowledgeable people are the "only people that matter," but also because the alternative that you're crowing about is that nobody matters (other than you, the person selling the thing.) You're accusing people of being narcissistic for wanting any information, and bragging about only being guided by your own desires. It's really a moral toilet.
The "tech nerds" is a bullshit term for "people with the background to understand the explanation." If you're not explaining it to them, you're not explaining it to anyone. You're just subjecting everyone to your whims, and really should be regulated into the unemployment line.
Those are reasonable. A business must take account of its stock - a useful thing is happening. A TV station shuts down in the evening as paying for electricity to broadcast and humans to schedule programming that goes unwatched is unproductive. It is not reasonable that a piece of working software in a product I paid a substantial sum of money for, which has no good reason to not work, should not work randomly.
I know people who aren't nerds and actually like to know what's in the update.
Just ask a LLM to write a high level human-friendly description of the changes. That's it. Just be good to your customers or in general to others. Ignorance, whataboutism & Idontcareism spreads like plague. Don't make it worse.
Once upon a time, physically shipping faulty software had real costs borne by the organization - production, redistribution and transportation of a physical disc.
Today there’s no disc, no recall - that cost to shipping broken software is gone. We the users pay the price.
I would prefer to know what the product will do when I purchase it, and it should continue to do the same things in the same way for its entire lifespan. I would also prefer that vendors be unable to retroactively add ads, tracking, or other user hostile "features".
Also, as an embedded engineer, I know things get tested better the more "final" they are. Faster release cadences always have poor testing as one of the tradeoffs.
I remember my parents needing to buy very expensive map DVD disks in order to update the car’s navigation system to update their car’s navigation computer.
The disks were very expensive and if you didn’t update them it wouldn’t know about new roads (slower trip, missed turns, etc).
That's why we have Android Auto: move the updates to a thing that already has frequent Internet connection, and if the update goes wrong it's clearly the fault of this other company, plus the car itself still works fine.
Jeep already had an OTA the broke the ability for the car to be driven.
> plenty of software gets better because of updates
This was true for old Microsoft Windows releases. This is not true anymore. Everything is a rolling release. Angry users ? F*k them. They will get an update.
The article is a lovely cathartic rant against agile software development methodologies applied in the wrong place in the wrong way, whether or not the software(s) in question used such methods. On of the worst assumptions, I believe, is that the end-user is willing and able to function as testing/QA without detriment to the product and company.
This is a general belief of our current version of capitalism. As much work as possible is outsourced to the user, the gains are captured by the company.
It's Android Auto and Apple Carplay. Not sure how that's an "isolated HW function". That would be an issue if they put the turn signals or AC controls on the screen only.
And my point was that this isn't merely a "poor SW testing" problem, but something broken from the get go. Disparate systems shouldn't be connected together such that one thing breaking can cause others to break.
It does not follow from the article. You're just complaining about a different annoying thing that uses the same screen on some cars. A lot of controls are quite far away from simple on/off switches nowadays, so there's probably software behind that too (hopefully simpler and with better testing).
Pretty much this. The less software on the car, the fewer problems.
It's practically impossible to test every permutation of code against every system. Maybe AI can help, but practically it'll just mean the software gets more complicated, with more features. And to top it all off, more and more features get regulated, so they have to be there. The rear-view camera requirement in particular, since you need a screen to see the output. And if you have a screen... well it's an already paid cost, so, might as well display other things too.
It all comes down to cost. At scale, testing hardware is appreciably more expensive than testing software. The former requires specialized machinery that costs the soul of your firstborn, and the logistics overhead for each do-over means long iteration times. The latter can be done with a CI pipeline for pennies worth of compute in a fraction of a working day.
At scale, testing software is appreciably more expensive than using hardware. That's why at most people test a tiny slice of it, and ships out broken software in the hopes of fixing it later. Testing hardware is expensive because nobody thinks it can be fixed cheaply afterwards.
Stuff like climate control and radio/Bluetooth were included in many/most cars in the last decade. Expensive as they were, the cars were a lot cheaper than today's cars. And they just worked, which means they were either so simple that sophisticated testing wasn't necessary, or they tested it thoroughly.
I don't think they're saving that much by ditching them and going to SW.
They also didn't need updates (well, the Bluetooth module may have, but nothing else).
It definitely was nice not to have to worry whether the climate control may stop working because the radio was modified. Or because of any update.
As a driver, dumping everything into one SW system has significantly degraded my experience. What I gain ("Ooh, I can now use Waze on a bigger screen!") is minimal.
> The latter can be done with a CI pipeline for pennies worth of compute in a fraction of a working day.
I'd appreciate the point if they were successful at it. As it is, they're not. It's rare to find a non-buggy car.
bluetooth audio is probably all one needs for phone <-> car integration. but carplay/android auto are sadly really popular.
So already, your phone can connect in two different ways, just over bluetooth, with cars today. And car companies have to support both.
Plus the car must show something on the screen when a phone isn't there, and the rear-view camera isn't on, at the very least on test drives/ showroom displays.
I don't know. On balance, the reality is cars are better overall nowadays, but every aspect of our life has gotten more complicated, including cars.
If you had the option of no screen at all, no rear-view camera, and with physical switches, would you? If this Slate truck gets released, that's the closest, but it's still required to have a rear-view camera/screen sadly.
It’s an indictment of business attitudes towards customers. It’s not the software’s fault, the software is doing what it was supposed to. The fault lies with the organisation that decided that’s what it should do.
wouldn't that be impossible in this case? since android auto needs to draw to the screen, control infotainment, etc. even a dedicated USB + rocker switch for android auto would still need a software path to do those things
Putting things like climate control, car settings, etc on the same screen as Android Auto is not at all necessary.
Older cars (that still had touch sensitive displays), simply had separate HW modules and HW interfaces (buttons/switches) for the rest. You never had to worry that modifying/repairing/updating one would impact the other.
Auto manufacturers need to realize that one bad software experience means lost sales of entire cars. Fail to provide a good experience at the cost of your brand for years to come.
We just sold our 2025 Subaru Outback specifically because the software experience was bad.
To exit a climate control modal on the screen you have to find and tap a tiny red "X" box in the furthest corner of the screen from the steering wheel.
God... Subaru's whole interface is a horrific looking clusterfuck. That big-ass screen and it's just a huge waste.
I've driven the 2025 and the 2024. The 2024 not only had all the crappy UI, but the driver assistance features were also alerting you constantly, and they were terrible. I was amazed how much they toned it back and improved it with the 2025.
Still wouldn't buy either of them personally. The constant nags and alerts are so fucking annoying and distracting. The seat belt chimes that don't shut off and get louder and louder make me want to rage so hard. I am religious about wearing my seatbelt, so there's absolutely no reason for it to piss me off so bad.
Cathartic to read this! Just had a very similar experience with a Subaru from the same generation as yours.
While that particular issue isn't solvable, I am open to any advice on coding tools that might allow one to unlock other settings or make changes like "ensure auto-stop is fully disabled across restarts and drivers".
I have a lot of trouble understanding how Subaru dashes turned into the modern monstrosity they are. They were very functional and well laid out for years. Now, geez, I’d need to be an octopus to drive a Subaru.
I despise our Outback's climate settings. It seems every time I start the car it picks a random temperature to set each side to. It'll be 30 deg outside and you look down wondering why its getting hotter and the car is set to 30 deg inside.
Last year I was trying out cars for a new purchase and was excited to try out the Subaru Outback. After one drive I decided I would never buy a Subaru because of their software. Lots of annoying noises, ugly, and no physical buttons. It was terrible.
Auto manufacturers just don't know how to do software. They don't understand it. They treat it like just another line item on the BOM: Like a bolt or a gasket. Source it from the cheapest provider, give them checkbox requirements, and then spoon it into the car on the assembly line somewhere. They don't think of it as an ecosystem to build off of, or as something to make beautiful to compete with other car makers. It's just another costly assembly that they bolt onto the car and forget about.
When I bought my car, it had no Car Play or Android Auto. Upon some investigation I found out that both of them were installed on all the current models. It’s just disabled on the cars sold without the option. Some open source software for the car entertainment system flashed on the car was able to turn on the flags to enable various features including Car Play and Android Auto. So a happy story.
Even hardware features (heated steering wheel, rain sensing wipers, etc...) are now behind software switches which the car maker can control based upon subscription or trim-level purchase.
All the hardware pieces are installed at build time
As a licensed driver who resides in the Sonoran Desert, can you even imagine the horrific visions that just flashed before my eyes?
We often joke around here that wearing oven mitts is a good way to get our cars started in the late afternoons. It's not really a joke.
I personally have several pairs of gloves, and I never fail to don those gloves when I go out, whether I am walking, riding an e-Scooter, or driving, because even as a pedestrian we must touch so many metal objects that bask all day in the direct sunlight.
Heated steering wheels. What a world we live in today!
I put heated grips on my motorcycle. I thought it seemed dumb, your hands are out in the wind, and the back of your hands will still get cold. Nah, it warms up your whole body and it's a total game changer.
When it's minus -20°C outside, you'll be very happy for that heated steering wheel! For someone living in the desert, I wish there were cooled steering wheels, on the same level as heated/cooled seats, but maybe that's asking a but much.
It's probably a complexity and cost thing: heating the wheel just requires heating wires in the wheel connected to a switch. Cooling requires a some cooling medium getting pumped into the wheel and back out into a heat exchanger or vented outside. You need pipes of some sort inside the wheel and wheel hub.
You're way overthinking this. Making the steering wheel an AC vent is a Mercedes Benz patent. It's just hollow on the inside.
We also used to have crotch vents beneath the steering column! This was arguably the best idea since it could cool the entire driver area including the wheel.
My 1994 Toyota Celica had a vent beneath the steering column. It didn't have airbags, ABS braking, cruise control, electric seats, a 5th gear - it was missing all kinds of features that more luxurious cars had then, and even basic cars have now. But it had that vent! It was such an amazing feature, and I can't believe that it's not in more cars, especially ones a lot more upmarket.
I'm always a little frustrated by all the little features that are scattered across car models, that would be so easy to add, but are only available in some cars. I suppose putting absolutely everything in would be expensive and overwhelming, but some of them seem pretty easy. Off the top of my head:
- The button to dim all the dials except the essential ones (in Subarus and Saabs)
- The little flap to block sun above the sun-visor (in Audis and probably others)
- Being able to turn the radio on again after the key has been taken out
- Being able to use the residual heat for a short time after the engine has been turned off (Usually in VW/Audi cars - becoming more common?)
- Being able to hold a button on the remote to shut or open all windows (for a coupe with frameless doors, this could make getting in and out of the car in a tight supermarket parking space massively easier)
- Fuel cap holders inside the fuel flap (have these become universal yet?)
Those all feel like they would cost very little extra to implement. There are a few more that I feel were complicated or expensive, but I still was surprised weren't universal
- Having the remote/key recharge while driving (less useful now you rarely need to take the keys out of your pocket, but strangely missing from many luxury cars even when you did need to insert the key).
- HUD
I don't feel this is a very good list, but most of the things I only remember when I see them. Most of the items above have gradually become more common. I remember noticing cheap but fantastic features more often with cars like old Peugeots and Volvos (and obviously Saabs), and also somewhat in 90s Japanese cars. Sure Mercedes and BMWs had nice features that other cars didn't, but it's the ones where they've thought of something really useful without it costing a lot that really felt impressive. And then disappointing when you never saw that feature again.
Living in Australia where it gets hot and also kinda cold, having seats that are both heated and vented is awesome. Cold? Seat gives you a warm hug. Hot? Seat blows cool air to cool itself down after being parked, and to stop you getting sweaty.
As a licensed driver also living in the Sonoran Desert, I absolutely love my heated steering wheel. I live just South of Anthem, and we get a couple of hard freezes per year, and it gets cold enough that people wear gloves certain parts of the year.
The real cost is manufacturing with all the different options at different trim levels (combined with different paint jobs etc). Automakers have always made bank on options and trim. It is in fact cheaper for them to build all vehicles with the relatively cheap options and sell it as a subscription or add-on enabled by software. Engineering is in fact a large part of the option cost to begin with. The big task of the automakers is overcoming customer resistant to the “you will own nothing and be happy” model without feeling swindled being charged to use something they already own—or at least putting up with it and still paying. See Matt Walsh’s most recent monologue on this very topic.
>It’s just disabled on the cars sold without the option.
So exactly like software licensing? Most apps nowadays don't even require a purchase to download. The download is free but you need to pay $4.99/month subscription to use, or $99.99 for a "lifetime subscription". The code's are all there. The author just doesn't want you to use it.
That’s not exactly the same. You don’t get to have a car for free with basic driving functionality and then pay for additional features once you realize the car is useful and the people do made it deserve to be paid for their work, which they were willing to meet you have for free in its basic form.
This is something far more heinous, you bought a thing for a lot of money and just in order to extort even more money from you, they simply disable/lock away a feature that you technically already possess.
A better analogy in software might be that you bought a video game for $60,000 and the only way to beat a lower level boss without spending 2,000 hours trying to, is to pay the developers another $5,000 for a super weapon.
this reminds me of the old IBM tabulation machines that were sold in 2 different models at different prices, the cheaper one just had a metal tab inserted to limit the processing speed - you could remove the tab to unlock full speed
The vendor of a piece of software decides how best they'd like to be paid.
A subscriptions approach allows them to avoid demanding a big payment upfront, and allows them to continue improving the software without you having to pay substantial sums to get new licensed versions. It has pros and cons vs licensing, but is a legitimate monetization strategy.
That the bits already exist on your machine is irrelevant. Your entitlement to use the bits is what is at issue here. Being already in possession of stolen goods does not entitle you to use them.
It's a car. There's already a big payment upfront. You're already shelling out $40,000+ on average in the US these days. Is that not already a big upfront payment?
Volkswagen Group for example. Most of their brands are like this, Volkswagen, Seat, Skoda. Carplay/Android Auto is in the head unit but you have to
pay 200-300€ to unlock unless it’s part of the trim
level you choose.
That's interesting, thanks. For me this feature is mandatory, and I won't risk buying a car (second hand usually) unless I see it working with my phone first. I drove 200 miles to buy a car once and walked* away because of this. The seller acted surprised.
Author blames the two week sprint. But that isn't this issue. It's testing gates. Plenty of teams can ship high quality software with two weak sprints. They just have great testing gates.
Assuming your car has all the functions you care about, and the OTA updates aren't bringing you any bugfixes or feature updates you care about, is there any good reason to update? Or even have it online to begin with? I'm not expecting someone to hack my car; on the contrary, I'd rather have it be impossible for the automaker to reach my car in any way without it being obvious to me (i.e. me flipping a switch to get it online for whatever reason).
The most expensive appliances (particularly stoves) are the ones with no LCD screens. "Smart" TVs are often cheaper then dumb ones. People have learned that software does not always make things better. Anything that has code in it I assume will last for about three years. In practice that's a little less then the average but a safe assumption.
If we had a software building code, it could mandate the testing procedures for consumer devices, like a car's headunit firmware. This building code could be backed by an industry body that could revoke its certification from manufacturers if they don't comply with the code. Super-advanced-testing-procedure #1: plug a phone into a test car and check it works before release.
(This software building code is more necessary for software used in critical infrastructure. But it should also be applied to consumer devices as basic protection for consumers against manufacturers breaking functionality the consumer paid for)
Plug one of every combination of vendor, model, OS, and config into the car and check if everything works. That’s what would be required to actually ensure functionality.
Don't let perfection be the enemy of the good. In industrial testing automation, you often don't test every feature completely. You calculate the cost-benefit of the complexity, time and cost it takes to test features, and target the most valuable ones. (I used to write automation test suites for industrial appliances with hundreds of thousands of permutations)
At the very least, you can test one single feature end to end, just to get a baseline that nothing is massively, obviously broken (like it was in this case!). This lack of fundamental testing is what caused the CrowdStrike bug that brought down Delta Airlines. This kind of test is extremely easy, quick, cheap, and simple, and catches the worst bugs. In other words, it's the most valuable test.
Companies will continue to let these bugs happen until we mandate a minimum amount of fundamental testing before release.
I've stopped installing software updates to my car. They never seem to do anything useful and often will cause things to break or get reset. I no longer see the upside.
The practical solution here would be closing the feedback loop with customers. The business does want happy customers, it's important they return to purchase in 5 years. The problem with car companies is that they don't get immediate feedback (telemetry, tickets, etc) when they do push an issue. And they obviously don't have gradual roll outs the way tesla does.
Rather than hamstring all software by requiring DOT testing before firmware updates are published, follow Tesla's model which has been very reliable within the industry
Rather than hamstring all software by requiring DOT testing before firmware updates are published...
I don't know how the rules work in the UK or Ireland where the author is, but the US has no such mandatory testing. Also, all manufacturers have telemetry these days and the ones I'm familiar with all do gradual rollouts (to varying levels of competence). You basically can't do immediate rollout given the scales involved.
Please don't take this as suggesting any of them are good at software, mind you.
You're right the facilities may be there for telemetry & feedback, but none of the Tesla competitors are structured to manage that telemetry and feedback. Often the brands are repackaging software from vendors (e.g. Bosch) that are terrible at fixing things.
Let's face it, this really is about Tesla, vs the rest of the major players (ford, kia, VW etc)
Obviously I'm under NDA, but the data I've seen at $(OEM) was down to the level of variant tracking and real time geolocation. The commercial fleet management programs can do things like scheduled updates and know what hardware/software is in each component of each vehicle, which the manufacturer has to keep track of anyway for recall purposes.
I've been lately into mobile apps and i am finding that there is no system which combines these 3
1. AOT
2. JIT (for hot paths)
3. Interpreter for non JIT paths or where you explicitly do not want jit.
Imagine, a system which compiles your app to AOT but when you push OTA update, part of the app are selectively replaced to JIT or Interpreted mode.
it's theoretically possible but nobody seems to be doing it. I found react native / expo eas update but i don't think it's like this, it has a Hermes VM which runs bytecode but it has no JIT so you'll write native code for hot path then you'll need to upload a full update to Android. So, only toy level code performance can be can actually be written in JS?
Much better, patch the parts where AOT calls into JIT or interpreter.
Currently i am using react native and flutter. Flutter's UI framework code is in Dart if you load this whole code into JIT, it will consume a lot of resources on mobile device as the framework is big and does lot of work. If all framework code was AOT and your custom patchable code also comes with AOT but upon OTA replaced by JIT or Interpreted code, crazy performance!
But what if we could run the most of the code in AOT and only run changed code in JIT or interpreted mode? arguably it would perform as good as it does not being complete AOT while also providing react native like fast updates.
AOT will be in base app and it will include JIT or Interpreted OTA updates.
For Apple, JIT can simply be disabled and OTA update can run patched part in interpreter.
But JIT works on Android (well), so this Hybrid system is capable of being much faster than React Native where your JS code only runs in Hermes VM which isn't JIT.
In this system, all your crazy math and algorithms (on hot path) stay easily updatable as this small part can be run on JIT with snapshot saved for next load if it has not changed!
JIT on average is 100x faster than dumb interpreter for language like Dart.
Does it already exist? otherwise i am seriously thinking about building something like this.
>That said shipping JIT / interpreter with your program to recompile updates / parts of it sounds silly to me.
why is it silly? modern phones can easily do this (they are running local llm, what issue is with jit?), if it's done one time per update what's the problem?
what's the problem with jitting couple of hot paths which have been updated and were not part of base app?
>Apple does not allow running code from internet either (even if interpreted iirc)
And how is React native expo/eas updates are working then? Isn't it downloading a bytecode bundle?
There's 2 different parts of their terms about this. One seems to forbid it. The other basically says that you can do it as long as you aren't shipping some kind of update to the app that changes its nature significantly. Basically the generally accepted viewpoint in the industry is that you can OTA bugfixes and small changes but you if you ship whole features without going through app store review first you are definitely on thin ice.
You still did not learn the lesson? Once you take possession of a fixed-function appliance, NEVER EVER EVER take any updates, and do not connect it to the internet (CarPlay does not require internet connectivity in the car). Do not buy fixed-function appliances that require internet, that is what computers are for.
Both Android Auto and Chromecast are great ideas, but so incredibly flakey.
The number of times I've heard someone say 'oh it's disconnected again' is extreme.
To be honest, some court ought to simply demand Google makes it reliable or refunds all money people paid for the phones as the product is not fit for purpose.
Most people with experience in the tech industry would say that LLMs will make it worse. They make more mistakes than a human, faster than a human, but get treated (by management) as preferred to a human. The end result was never going to be more reliable software.
Does MINI make their own software? I thought it was the same as BMWs with another skin. My BMW gets quarterly updates. Only once in the past year I've had it did I notice anything new (new voice assistant), otherwise it just resets my driver screen and sets my interior lighting on full blast every time it updates.
If Android Auto stopped working I'd also be livid because I don't use the built in crap.
> Everything you create should be an artistic endeavour aiming for perfection.
Amen. If you go to a bakery, you expect them to care. If you hire a photographer, you expect them to care. Software isn’t (usually) a factory line; CRUD may be similar concepts throughout, but everyone is making it themselves.
Someone in auto industry decided that plugging device, and dependency on core functionality of the car to 3rd party device, that might be lost, have battery died, used for something else, etc is a good way to save money and not do proper software. It's even more bizare now, mid 2026, when software is solved with AI.
It's good that there are some companies, that ban android/apple car since that's an ugly experience for the user.
> Someone in auto industry decided that plugging device, and dependency on core functionality of the car to 3rd party device, that might be lost, have battery died, used for something else, etc is a good way to save money and not do proper software.
On the contrary, having cars stop trying to provide a bespoke more-proprietary outdated piece of software you have less control over, probably have surreptitious telemetry reporting back from, and might have to pay a subscription fee for, and instead just delegate to the smartphone you already have, is a huge and surprising win.
> It's good that there are some companies, that ban android/apple car since that's an ugly experience for the user.
It's a terrible user-hostile loss when cars do that, typically because they want to maintain more control or try to extract more revenue from the user.
If you don't want to use it, don't use it; there's nothing forcing you to do so.
you settle with one failure story for another failure story.
there are companies with amazing software experience, Rivian, Tesla, Nio, Lucid, even gm is start moving into that direction, and WV is buying software from rivian.
> there are companies with amazing software experience
I don't want an amazing software experience. I want an unsurprising experience, ideally the one I already have.
The only thing better than Android Auto would be to just provide a standardized port (and perhaps a wireless standard) for a combination of video output, audio output, touchscreen input, and charging, with optional standardized sensor inputs. Then you wouldn't need two different standards (Android Auto and Apple Carplay), just one, which would also work with any new device that came along to break that duopoly.
> standardized port (and perhaps a wireless standard) for a combination of video output, audio output, touchscreen input, and charging, with optional standardized sensor inputs
Emphatically not. I want the head unit to act as a dumb terminal for the phone. My first instinct would be a USB-C docking station supporting DisplayPort video, various interesting USB devices, and a descriptor that makes it clear it's a car's head unit so the device can intelligently offer a car-specific experience.
Oh, right, more like a car-flavoured docking station? That does sound better, it relies on the car for less in terms of functionality so it should be more consistent and futureproof.
Yes, exactly. And USB enumeration has the advantage of being extremely standard and making it easy to extend by adding additional devices rather than changing the data stream to the existing devices.
you just stuck in this paradigm, this apple/auto surprised me so many times :
- when you need to re-pair Bluetooth
- when you forget the cable to charge and you need to drive
- when you want to share your car to someone and they need to spend 5 minutes to accept every single ToS possible to simply put a GPS
- several people with phones paired before, now you dealing with complete random
you name it.
- you listen music and you need to go out to buy something while others in the car
None of these problems exist if you have a decent, dedicated computer in the car that just works, it knows profiles, it does need you to be always on wire, or on the line.
for rental it honestly probably make sense, since this is not your car.
Why on earth everytime i sit in the car i have to neurotically plug the cable. I had situations i forgot and in the middle of the ride i started to look for cable or try to wire car play, simply because i figure out i don't know where to go .
This type of crap is not convenient and simply dangerous.
what proper car should offer: keyless enter; keyless profile adjustment including seats, heat, music profiles, etc wheel etc; keyless start and go;
one of the best tiny features i have. In the morning i drive to work; i can go several ways there depends on traffic, My car knows that in the morning i go to work; GPS is on, traffic is calculated.
I open the door , my music started to play, I press gas and drive; zero cables, zero pairing ; open the door and drive.
Sorry, but you're getting confused. First you want to give car to somebody else, and somehow having built-in shitty navigation (that they don't know how to use) makes it better.
Now you're offended by Android Auto making it easy for people to just plug in the phone and start driving?
It's clear that you have not used AA/CarPlay, but they _also_ offer wireless pairing. If you're using the car constantly, you can just pair it with your phone. There are even retrofit adapters available, so even a 10-year-old car can be wirelessly connected.
> what proper car should offer: keyless enter; keyless profile adjustment including seats, heat, music profiles, etc wheel etc; keyless start and go;
Nope. Cars should offer one thing only: Android Auto/CarPlay. That's it. Nothing else is needed.
Can your car play audiobooks and pause them when the navigator makes a voice announcement? Can it play a Youtube podcast that you started listening on your computer?
> there are companies with amazing software experience, Rivian, Tesla, Nio, Lucid
I own a Tesla, and a Ford. Amazing is not how I would describe the Tesla software experience. It lacks features like iMessage for group and for non-phone recipients that I am able to use in my Ford. Even though many people would say the Ford software is otherwise inferior. And if history is anything to go by, there are features in CarPlay today that Tesla will never add to their infotainment system.
i can create an entire list of features, that will never ever be in CarPlay, because it's not made of this is just a dongle on steroids, not a proper way to make your car smart.
Joe mode ( silent your car when baby sleeps)
automatic profiles that are connected all the way to what music played and in what device, headphones seamlessly stop playing after i go into the car from the gym
send navigation to car from any device , while I'm driving my gf or friend can send it, so i do not distract myself
proper navigation , order management etc as part of the vertical integration, including re-routing to less busy charger etc.
In any case, thank you for contributing evidence to my assertion that CarPlay is additive, not subtractive, and since you can choose to use it or not, adding it to Tesla's infotainment is strictly a win.
Meanwhile my car - Vauxhall Zafira Tourer - from 2018 has a broken Android Auto, they stopped offering the map updates for sat nav in, like, 2019 and that update system is locked. AFAICT you need an encrypted thumb drive.
It's my first car with built in satnav, so it was not something I thought to test. A working Android Auto would be great compared to 10+ years out of date maps.
> there are companies with amazing software experience, Rivian, Tesla, Nio, Lucid
Are you fucking serious? Tesla's head unit software is barely passable. It's shit.
Nearly half of the screen is taken by useless toy car depictions, and navigation can't even render the full street names because the width of the input field is fixed.
huh? it's not half, and it has speed, speed limit and other items in the same area.
Car is usable, i use it to open trunk frunk and check the status the door/trunk. I'll tell you more , that type of visualisation exists in almost every single modern car.
their navigation is just the best not sure what problem are you talking, it's FSD knows better where to turn vs myself in unfamiliar area. I do have less miss exists on fsd with myself. Yesterday i 0 touch 1h 30 min drive from long island all the way to a very busy manhattan street. tons of exits, complicated connections etc.
It's not even comparable. Everything else feels like a horse carriage vs space ship.
you can swipe left to show full map if you in the navigation and open it almost in full screen. even in default mode that screen is bigger than 95% of the navigation screens of other brands. Really fake concern.
you can pin your Bluetooth app with drag-n drop , never used car link so not sure if that's an app or an icon.
glovebox is the real annoying item i can confirm is a 100% weird design choice. I still love pin in valet mode so that my items are not stolen.
> you can swipe left to show full map if you in the navigation and open it almost in full screen. even in default mode that screen is bigger than 95% of the navigation screens of other brands. Really fake concern.
Would you mind uploading a picture of this "almost full screen"?
> even in default mode that screen is bigger than 95% of the navigation screens of other brands.
Yeah, sure. "We removed about 40% of the screen, but don't worry, you still have a lot of screen left!"
> huh? it's not half, and it has speed, speed limit and other items in the same area.
I think it's 40%? Most of this screen is utterly useless for me. I don't care about "other items". I want more map, and next several turns in that spot.
The speed limit can stay in a nice carved-out area at the top left.
> Car is usable, i use it to open trunk frunk and check the status the door/trunk.
Oh wow. Being able to opening the trunk is now the pinnacle of usability. How about a glovebox?
How about making the Homelink button always visible, because GPS is not always reliable. How about making Bluetooth icon always available? Ditto for compass.
> I'll tell you more , that type of visualisation exists in almost every single modern car.
> On the contrary, having cars stop trying to provide a bespoke more-proprietary outdated piece of software you have less control over, probably have surreptitious telemetry reporting back from, and might have to pay a subscription fee for, and instead just delegate to the smartphone you already have, is a huge and surprising win.
I'd agree if it worked.
Android Auto sucks. And I don't like that my auto manufacturer can wash their hands off it by pointing at Google.
> If you don't want to use it, don't use it; there's nothing forcing you to do so.
As long as the car manufacturer gives me basic functionality (radio, stereo, Bluetooth, etc). Nominally they do, but it sucks in a different way from Android Auto. So I have to ping pong between these two.
My prior car's aftermarket Bluetooth receiver was fantastic. The fact that I can't install something like that on modern cars is a huge regression.
No, it doesn't. It's a very simple streaming protocol.
It's literally a gRPC-encapsulated stream of h264 frames over a USB connection. With touch events and some car-related telemetry streamed back. You can implement it in a weekend: https://github.com/mrmees/open-android-auto
You can create whatever you want, including just streaming videos onto the head unit or making it play Doom while driving (with steering wheel for input).
Not sure if you're asking relative to other options, or just in the absolute. I'll respond to the latter.
Some of my complaints below may have remedies - please feel free to inform me!
When Android Auto loads up, it shows me a tile with the current weather. In Fahrenheit. I want it in Celsius. Everywhere on my phone I've set it to Celsius. In the Settings (I think multiple ones). In the actual weather app. But AA will show it in Fahrenheit.
And why show me that tile at all? I don't want to see it. I can't disable it. In my Android Auto settings, I removed it from the list of apps. It still shows up. Why can't I control what apps launch?
Why is there always a navigation app loaded? I don't want it on by default if I'm just going to listen to stuff. Nothing should be loaded by default except the launcher menu. I should be able to configure on my phone what I want autolaunched.
It eats up too much battery. Why does it need to eat so much battery if all I'm using it for is to listen to podcasts? With regular Bluetooth, it barely consumes battery.
Waze sucks on AA compared to just plain Android. I can't, for example, send an ETA via AA. I can't even do it on my phone while connected to AA.
Why does the air vent fan speed drop dramatically when I get a call? Why does the climate system even know I'm getting a call?
If I connect my phone via USB cable, why does it insist I connect via Bluetooth? I can go to Android settings, have Bluetooth forget my car, and when I plug in the USB and launch Android Auto, Android will connect to Bluetooth. I Googled and apparently this is intentional. I find it very hostile.
That's all from the top of my head. I'm sure I can come up with plenty more.
> When Android Auto loads up, it shows me a tile with the current weather. In Fahrenheit. I want it in Celsius. Everywhere on my phone I've set it to Celsius. In the Settings (I think multiple ones). In the actual weather app. But AA will show it in Fahrenheit.
I don't think I ever saw this behavior?
> Why is there always a navigation app loaded?
I think this is the default? I have OsmAnd+ instead of Google Maps by default.
> It eats up too much battery. Why does it need to eat so much battery if all I'm using it for is to listen to podcasts? With regular Bluetooth, it barely consumes battery.
This is because your phone needs to encode the contents of its display as h264 stream.
> Why does the air vent fan speed drop dramatically when I get a call? Why does the climate system even know I'm getting a call?
AndroidAuto can notify the car that it wants reduced noise.
> That's all from the top of my head. I'm sure I can come up with plenty more.
This is all fixable in software on Android. Nothing from your list is a problem on the _car_ side.
Given that the protocol is now documented and available, it doesn't even need to be implemented in Android. You can have a KDE desktop running on your car!
> Ok. How do I make it not load any of them?
> How do I get it not to notify the car?
Get the Android Auto app and patch away the notification. It's just an app, after all. Running on your own hardware.
> Which is why my original comment said Android Auto sucks.
> My complaint about the car manufacturer is that they allow the driving experience to be degraded with it.
So your default car navigator can do everything in your list, including launching a non-default app from your phone? That's some mighty car navigation system.
> Get the Android Auto app and patch away the notification. It's just an app, after all. Running on your own hardware.
So we're in agreement that the official app sucks, right? If the solution is "Well you can just patch it," then there is a problem.
And BTW, how do I patch it and run it on an unrooted phone? Is there a community version I can install and use that sucks less?
> So your default car navigator can do everything in your list, including launching a non-default app from your phone? That's some mighty car navigation system.
Why is the alternative my default car navigation system? [1]
What did people do before they had Android Auto? Not use the phone at all?
One alternative is what I had in my old car: An aftermarket Bluetooth receiver, and a phone holder to hold the phone. The Bluetooth receiver was better for all things audio, and the phone on a phone holder didn't consume so much battery even when not plugged in. And the Waze experience was better. I would have thought a larger screen would make for easier navigation, but I now know it doesn't - the phone screen was large enough. I'll grant that stuff like Pocketcasts on AA is a bit more ergonomic than the bare phone, but when AA comes with so much painful baggage, it's not worth it.
And that's why some people I know actually go this route - disable AA, and use a vanilla phone holder with the in-built car's Bluetooth. Sadly, they cannot (easily) install that Bluetooth receiver - that's an indictment of the car manufacturer.
This isn't a great solution, but it's saying much when it's superior to AA.
[1] Incidentally, the car navigation system is actually quite good!
why on earth you need an aftermarket receiver of Bluetooth? The cost of the module is few dollars. My cheap ac has bluethooth, just to connect it wifi, i used it once in it's lifetime.
The entire idea that everytime you sit in the car you need to pair your devices, what if you have several devices in the car etc ? it's such a horrible, broken, neurotic idea.
Given that the (user-facing) software that comes with the car is always broken (modulo Tesla and a few other modern exceptions), it's no wonder people want to replace that software with literally anything else that actually works.
This isn't the auto industry deciding that you need to use your phone. On the contrary, GM and others tried hard to push back on Carplay and AA. This is the buyers telling the auto makers that they want Carplay and AA since they know that that actually works, and they know that the software the car actually comes with will be garbage, or at the very least unfamiliar and not really worth dealing with when you can hook up your phone and let that actually solve the problems the user wants to be solved.
It's insane to me that anyone could be of the opinion that it's good that some automakers ban/don't implement Carplay and AA. It's just taking away user choice. It's hard to believe anyone could have this opinion without either never having driven a modern car, or just being an industry plan.
I can name you tons of things they fix over 5 years i own over the air. The ratio there is very very net positive towards a very good , well polished system, not an other way around.
They even fixed once a semi broken hardware for me. Camera power started acting up. I called tesla they said you can come to service to replace or wait a bit we will release OTA that will decrease a power consumption, in 3-4 weeks they fix my custom problem without going to serive
Uh? I can literally count the times my Model 3 2019 software broke something on one hand:
- when they redesigned the AC controls to make them more visually appealing but less functional (no button borders and no fill)
- when they decided to put air recirculation under auto-control and ignore the user's settings
- when they optimized the cellular connectivity and it took them a while to get back proper reconnect on loss of signal (garages etc)
- when they tuned sentry's sensitivity and there was some back-and-forth for a couple cycles between "record everything" and "record nothing"
None of this made the car undrivable or totally useless. I did hear of reports of early HW4 cars bricking their FSD computer, and Tesla replaced it.
In my opinion it's still a much better experience than the absolute guesswork of "what will my screen display today when I connect the phone? and where will I find Maps again?", based on software updates on the car AND the phone.
EDIT: also agreeing with the sibling comments: my 7 year old car got a lot of extra features since release, and most of them working very well at the first try.
> It's good that there are some companies, that ban android/apple car since that's an ugly experience for the user.
Absolutely nonsensical. Both Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are better experiences than any first party car interface I’ve experienced.
In many ways the auto industry stumbled when they allowed this connectivity, just like phone networks stumbled when they let Apple dictate the iPhone from top to bottom. Good news is those stumbles worked out great for users. We get iPhones without bundled crapware apps and we get cars that don’t require monthly subscriptions for basic functionality your phone provides.
Presumably every car manufacturer can use AI. Yet there are still bugs. If all bugs are solved with AI, and therefore every car manufacturer with access to AI writes bug-free software, the only remaining conclusion is that some car manufacturers don’t have AI yet.
> It's good that there are some companies, that ban android/apple car since that's an ugly experience for the user
Hello, Elon
Seriously this is so wrong. I love being able to carry all my preferences from my phone directly to the car without any additional configuration. Before this, we had to do stupid stuff like entering individual contacts in the cars system.
Please don't act like a jerk on HN. We can disagree without belittling and jeering, and this style of comment doesn't make your position seem strong, at all. You've been here long enough to know that this is not what HN is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
His good points here are undermined by the profane, emotional high-cortisol crashout. There’s a place for well-written, witty diatribes and polemics, but throwing F-bombs and F-yous into complaints is not that.
When the blog post is under discussion, I think comments critical of it are just as fair game as ones which appreciate it. If the parent poster was emailing the author to make the same complaint then I think the "you don't have to read it" criticism applies, but not so much in a discussion forum. The point is to discuss what we think, even if that is a critical opinion.
Lewis Black once said that swearing has a point--it is how we express a sufficient level of rage and anger against something extremely dysfunctional. What should we say, he asked: Oh, pussyfeathers?
Lewis Black’s shtick is tired and old and yet he manages to put a lot more humor and wit into his rants than anything in this article.
It’s essentially “My car’s infotainment system fucking sucks! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fucking fuck! Fuck my life and fuck all this shit! Did you notice I used the word fuck? FUCK!” Such great writing, so original, so millennial.
Not even 13 days ago another article on here was glazing the infotainment system. I even have the article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48769397 People were attacking the critique I levied towards shallow praise flippantly gravitating to the word consistency, but now I feel vindicated.
Users are complicit. Why did this user install the update? Were they suffering from an issue it supposedly solves? My six-year-old Honda has never had a software update, and in any case "OTA" updates can only be initiated by the user.
They described their car as having "auto-installed" the update.
An update which advertised, amongst other features, that it "rectifies errors and prevents security gaps" and stated "This update is recommended for everyone."
Borderline insane to refer to the user as "complicit" in that case.
Of course, we largely only need to worry about the security vulnerabilities because manufacturers increasingly hook our hardware up to the internet so they can exfiltrate data about us.
To be honest, with how poor quality some software has gotten, I refuse to update it, security issues or no. Most products aren't that bad, thankfully, but there does reach a point where the theoretical risk of a security vulnerability is outweighed by the immediate issue of "this crap doesn't work any more".
Security vulnerabilities get too much credit. It's "think of the children" of the software world. Most updates don't fix any, most vulnerabilities won't get used in the real world against you either, and in many cases the security is for the corporation against the customer instead.
'Security and bug fixes' is what companies say when they want you to update. They might be correct. You see that on Google Play store a lot ... Really they should mandate availability of descriptive and accurate update notes. But then Google are one of the worst offenders, often their updates don't even include details at all. One has to go spelunking through comments and forums trying to find if the update actually fixes anything or if it's just to include a few more ads or tracking mechanics.
While the users are not at fault, this culture has certainly turned me way more careful and deliberate about applying updates - if it's not broke, I usually don't; big corporations are more suspicious of breaking things and open source are usually good about them; and if there's no changelog or it's very generic, I'll stay away as well.
That’s true, however a properly engineered safety-critical system provides separation between assurance levels, so you don’t need to have the same level of assurance for the infotainment system software that you do for safety-critical displays and controls.
The FAA has historically done a good job on this front with aviation (notwithstanding the 747 MAX debacle, which was a failure implicating flight control software but not a failure of separation of assurance levels). Automotive software and standards and NHTSA is far behind on this front. Cost is certainly a factor; it is not economical to apply aviation safety and engineering standards and processes directly to automobiles. But in the meantime, it is an absolute Wild West for any contemporary drive-by-wire car.
don't know where you sourced your perspective but yea based on the reports ive heard from automotive engineers, coding in autosar is the direct opposite of wild
I have first-hand experience unlike your third-hand anecdotes. AUTOSAR is a private industry consortium that develops specifications. They are voluntary and self-attested and don’t have anything like the verification and documentation processes that are mandated by DO-178 in the aviation world by regulators with both independent engineering certification and regulatory oversight. Tesla and Rivian don’t participate at all. There is no comparable regulatory framework for automotive software—at all. It is purely reactive.
And lest you take issue with my characterization or claim Tesla is a rogue outlier, let me remind you that Volkswagen shipped deliberate software emissions defeat code in 11 million diesel passenger vehicles over eight model years including half a million in the USA, and was only caught by academic researchers.
ISO 26262 does have serious lifecycle standards but again it’s a voluntary industry standard that has no government oversight or regulatory authority. Oversight is typically largely internal and is strongest in the auto parts/components market. It’s largely toothless to automakers/integrators and again the likes of Tesla simply don’t use it and have no obligation to.
The infotainment system itself may be QM but there has to be assurance that it is in fact separated from higher safety level system.
> it’s a voluntary industry standard that has no government oversight or regulatory authority.
Yes, hence why I said I'm not sure about enforcement mechanisms how they stack up against the aviation standard. Still, in my limited experience, projects that are ASIL x take the thing pretty seriously and they do get certifications from external bodies. Actually, I am supporting an SEooC external certification right now.
> The infotainment system itself may be QM but there has to be assurance that it is in fact separated from higher safety level system.
The separation most likely happens _outside_ the infotainment itself, through a gateway.
> I have to call MINI at some point and demand they fix this garbage
That would never occur to me. Whenever something produced by a large company breaks, I pretty much assume there's no signal possible back to whomever is responsible for the breakage, and that whatever is broken now is broken forever.
To the author's point, they're A-gile, but forgot that the first step in the process was customer feedback
Tell that to Volvo. They even state on their feedback form that they don't respond to feedbacks, which IMHO is a polite way of saying that they don't read the feedback but still need a form, because no form would be bad publicity.
Kia just did this with their EV9 update - it broke CarPlay with a blank screen a few minutes into driving, which then reverted itself a minute later. Another OTA mostly resolved it. Neither of these updates explained what happened or what the fix was.
Let me be a devil's advocate here: you have essentially two options.
1. You write release notes thet contain technical details. Less than 1% of your customers understand them. More than 90% probably won't even care, let alone understand the document. And then there are the folks who get confused or scared and reach out to customer support with weird questions. This generates extra workload.
2. You explain nothing. The release simply is. The technically minded people are mildly annoyed. A few customers affected by open issues wonder if it's fixed now. The rest of them doesn't even care that there is an uodate and carries on with their lives. Customer service continues to complain about the usual bunch of random and weird customer issues.
It's quite natural to start doing (2) in a consumer facing business, isn't it?
It would be very simple to write out details but make them harder to access. Motivated users will find them.
To what end? Pleasing a few nerds? Nerds that are just as likely to have ripped out the OTA modem or not be using a car like that.
What you really mean is that there is very low value to the company in appeasing this minor vocal audience. What you forget is that you are posting on a message board to an overlapping audience.
> To what end? Pleasing a few nerds?
It's the nerds that the non-nerds/normies go to for advice on tech-y things. If you can generally make the nerds happy, and earn a good reputation among them, you'll have a customer base from which to expand from.
Or as Tim O'Reilly recommended back in the day, "Watching the Alpha Geeks":
* https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/081119-stanfo...
* https://web.archive.org/web/20130000000000*/http://origin.co...
* https://www.oreilly.com/tim/archives/apple_wwdc2002.pdf
We used to just do things because it was the right thing to do, or out of pride for what we were making, or sometimes just to be better than the other guy.
That everything has to be about profit is a lot of what's wrong these days. And yes, bitching about this on a YC-owned forum is just as silly as bitching about nerds here, I'm aware.
To the end that they exist at all.
One of the biggest organizational anti-patterns of the modern SaaS world is the move away from release notes.
It's a question of whether a company has a competent enough change control process to be able to generate a list of changes for a given release.
If a tech product company can't meet the low bar of documenting its changes, then it probably shouldn't be trusted?
Release notes aren't for end users in the same way that the wiring diagram taped to the back of your appliances isn't for end users.
They're for experts to either directly use... or to communicate in simpler language to end users.
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You mean a few customers? Yes, I think that’s perfectly reasonable to expect that changes made to a very expensive product are well-documented for those customers to whom that matters.
Post them by the coffee machine in the dealership waiting room.
Why would they read the updates then?
It is genuinely lost on me why tech nerds specifically have a hard time grasping the idea that they are not the only people that matter. That sometimes, someone will know that something will upset computer nerds, and will still do the thing, because they see it as worth it overall.
Like spoilt children. I genuinely don’t know if it’s the decades of SV pandering or what.
MOST OF THE TIME, NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOU. And they’re probably right not to.
You seem to be missing the underlying reason(s) why tech nerds are, well, tech nerds. 0dd to be angry about tech nerds being tech nerdy about things.
In a forum for tech nerds, of all places.
Instead of picturing spoiled children, who are mad about something that doesn't matter, like spilled ice cream, instead consider civil rights movements, for the modern era. The point is to make people care about something that will affect them, sooner or later. Like the right to repair. Nerdy at, until farmers got involved, and there are specific monetary issues involved. Most of the time, people don't care, but people are going to care if farmers don't do their job and there's no food.
This is a pretty dumb response, not only because the idea that knowledgeable people matter ≠ knowledgeable people are the "only people that matter," but also because the alternative that you're crowing about is that nobody matters (other than you, the person selling the thing.) You're accusing people of being narcissistic for wanting any information, and bragging about only being guided by your own desires. It's really a moral toilet.
The "tech nerds" is a bullshit term for "people with the background to understand the explanation." If you're not explaining it to them, you're not explaining it to anyone. You're just subjecting everyone to your whims, and really should be regulated into the unemployment line.
Driving up costs to the company.
The costs will be recouped by sacking more developers...
Looks like some regulation is in order to prevent companies releasing dubious software updates with no release notes.
> It's quite natural to start doing (2) in a consumer facing business, isn't it?
Absolutely.
But also don't break my stuff.
i remember when the TV station would shut down in the middle of the night.
Or businesses would close to do inventory.
We made do.
Those are reasonable. A business must take account of its stock - a useful thing is happening. A TV station shuts down in the evening as paying for electricity to broadcast and humans to schedule programming that goes unwatched is unproductive. It is not reasonable that a piece of working software in a product I paid a substantial sum of money for, which has no good reason to not work, should not work randomly.
That is an external service needing to do maintenance.
Not my own device on my own machine.
I don't remember a time my CD player on my car would stop working due to an update.
I know people who aren't nerds and actually like to know what's in the update. Just ask a LLM to write a high level human-friendly description of the changes. That's it. Just be good to your customers or in general to others. Ignorance, whataboutism & Idontcareism spreads like plague. Don't make it worse.
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> Neither of these updates explained what happened or what the fix was.
"Bug fixes and performance improvements "
Even worse than the "reformat" commit message that your bisect landed on.
Once upon a time, physically shipping faulty software had real costs borne by the organization - production, redistribution and transportation of a physical disc.
Today there’s no disc, no recall - that cost to shipping broken software is gone. We the users pay the price.
You act like there's no benefit to the user either, plenty of software gets better because of updates shipped after the fact.
I would prefer to know what the product will do when I purchase it, and it should continue to do the same things in the same way for its entire lifespan. I would also prefer that vendors be unable to retroactively add ads, tracking, or other user hostile "features".
Also, as an embedded engineer, I know things get tested better the more "final" they are. Faster release cadences always have poor testing as one of the tradeoffs.
> You act like there's no benefit to the user either, plenty of software gets better because of updates shipped after the fact.
There is a "release early, release often" line of thinking.
But I also think there is a risk of "fixing it in post(-production)" thinking: that lack of preparation and care can be patched over after-the-fact.
The averaged-over-usage-lifetime software quality for things like cars or video games is worse today than it was before OTA updates
Arguably the peak quality after a few months/years of fixes is better, but that doesn't really matter because usage is front-loaded
I remember my parents needing to buy very expensive map DVD disks in order to update the car’s navigation system to update their car’s navigation computer.
The disks were very expensive and if you didn’t update them it wouldn’t know about new roads (slower trip, missed turns, etc).
That's why we have Android Auto: move the updates to a thing that already has frequent Internet connection, and if the update goes wrong it's clearly the fault of this other company, plus the car itself still works fine.
Jeep already had an OTA the broke the ability for the car to be driven.
Did those updates ever break the navigation software?
I've had map update packages brick head units before, yes. Largely because they also shipped some software updates in that map update package.
You act like all the updates benefit the user.
Fair
> plenty of software gets better because of updates
This was true for old Microsoft Windows releases. This is not true anymore. Everything is a rolling release. Angry users ? F*k them. They will get an update.
s/better/less bad/
> I am not your QA department
The article is a lovely cathartic rant against agile software development methodologies applied in the wrong place in the wrong way, whether or not the software(s) in question used such methods. On of the worst assumptions, I believe, is that the end-user is willing and able to function as testing/QA without detriment to the product and company.
This is a general belief of our current version of capitalism. As much work as possible is outsourced to the user, the gains are captured by the company.
See also self-checkout etc.
It's not an indictment of modern software. It's an indictment of using SW where not needed.
Don't put discrete, isolated HW functions behind a SW powered screen. It's that simple.
It's Android Auto and Apple Carplay. Not sure how that's an "isolated HW function". That would be an issue if they put the turn signals or AC controls on the screen only.
My car has AC controls that are only accessible via touch screen. Most new cars do.
> That would be an issue if they put the turn signals or AC controls on the screen only.
Many cars have AC controls on the screen only.
I know, and that is a separate issue from what the post is complaining about being broken.
And my point was that this isn't merely a "poor SW testing" problem, but something broken from the get go. Disparate systems shouldn't be connected together such that one thing breaking can cause others to break.
It does not follow from the article. You're just complaining about a different annoying thing that uses the same screen on some cars. A lot of controls are quite far away from simple on/off switches nowadays, so there's probably software behind that too (hopefully simpler and with better testing).
Pretty much this. The less software on the car, the fewer problems.
It's practically impossible to test every permutation of code against every system. Maybe AI can help, but practically it'll just mean the software gets more complicated, with more features. And to top it all off, more and more features get regulated, so they have to be there. The rear-view camera requirement in particular, since you need a screen to see the output. And if you have a screen... well it's an already paid cost, so, might as well display other things too.
We should kill the reg.
It all comes down to cost. At scale, testing hardware is appreciably more expensive than testing software. The former requires specialized machinery that costs the soul of your firstborn, and the logistics overhead for each do-over means long iteration times. The latter can be done with a CI pipeline for pennies worth of compute in a fraction of a working day.
At scale, testing software is appreciably more expensive than using hardware. That's why at most people test a tiny slice of it, and ships out broken software in the hopes of fixing it later. Testing hardware is expensive because nobody thinks it can be fixed cheaply afterwards.
See also: the article linked to this thread.
Stuff like climate control and radio/Bluetooth were included in many/most cars in the last decade. Expensive as they were, the cars were a lot cheaper than today's cars. And they just worked, which means they were either so simple that sophisticated testing wasn't necessary, or they tested it thoroughly.
I don't think they're saving that much by ditching them and going to SW.
They also didn't need updates (well, the Bluetooth module may have, but nothing else).
It definitely was nice not to have to worry whether the climate control may stop working because the radio was modified. Or because of any update.
As a driver, dumping everything into one SW system has significantly degraded my experience. What I gain ("Ooh, I can now use Waze on a bigger screen!") is minimal.
> The latter can be done with a CI pipeline for pennies worth of compute in a fraction of a working day.
I'd appreciate the point if they were successful at it. As it is, they're not. It's rare to find a non-buggy car.
bluetooth audio is probably all one needs for phone <-> car integration. but carplay/android auto are sadly really popular. So already, your phone can connect in two different ways, just over bluetooth, with cars today. And car companies have to support both. Plus the car must show something on the screen when a phone isn't there, and the rear-view camera isn't on, at the very least on test drives/ showroom displays.
I don't know. On balance, the reality is cars are better overall nowadays, but every aspect of our life has gotten more complicated, including cars.
If you had the option of no screen at all, no rear-view camera, and with physical switches, would you? If this Slate truck gets released, that's the closest, but it's still required to have a rear-view camera/screen sadly.
It’s an indictment of business attitudes towards customers. It’s not the software’s fault, the software is doing what it was supposed to. The fault lies with the organisation that decided that’s what it should do.
wouldn't that be impossible in this case? since android auto needs to draw to the screen, control infotainment, etc. even a dedicated USB + rocker switch for android auto would still need a software path to do those things
Putting things like climate control, car settings, etc on the same screen as Android Auto is not at all necessary.
Older cars (that still had touch sensitive displays), simply had separate HW modules and HW interfaces (buttons/switches) for the rest. You never had to worry that modifying/repairing/updating one would impact the other.
I see what you mean. Sort of what slate is going for . Let’s see how that goes.
Auto manufacturers need to realize that one bad software experience means lost sales of entire cars. Fail to provide a good experience at the cost of your brand for years to come.
We just sold our 2025 Subaru Outback specifically because the software experience was bad.
To exit a climate control modal on the screen you have to find and tap a tiny red "X" box in the furthest corner of the screen from the steering wheel.
God... Subaru's whole interface is a horrific looking clusterfuck. That big-ass screen and it's just a huge waste.
I've driven the 2025 and the 2024. The 2024 not only had all the crappy UI, but the driver assistance features were also alerting you constantly, and they were terrible. I was amazed how much they toned it back and improved it with the 2025.
Still wouldn't buy either of them personally. The constant nags and alerts are so fucking annoying and distracting. The seat belt chimes that don't shut off and get louder and louder make me want to rage so hard. I am religious about wearing my seatbelt, so there's absolutely no reason for it to piss me off so bad.
Cathartic to read this! Just had a very similar experience with a Subaru from the same generation as yours.
While that particular issue isn't solvable, I am open to any advice on coding tools that might allow one to unlock other settings or make changes like "ensure auto-stop is fully disabled across restarts and drivers".
I have a lot of trouble understanding how Subaru dashes turned into the modern monstrosity they are. They were very functional and well laid out for years. Now, geez, I’d need to be an octopus to drive a Subaru.
That's an absolutely disastrous UI choice!
I despise our Outback's climate settings. It seems every time I start the car it picks a random temperature to set each side to. It'll be 30 deg outside and you look down wondering why its getting hotter and the car is set to 30 deg inside.
Last year I was trying out cars for a new purchase and was excited to try out the Subaru Outback. After one drive I decided I would never buy a Subaru because of their software. Lots of annoying noises, ugly, and no physical buttons. It was terrible.
Auto manufacturers just don't know how to do software. They don't understand it. They treat it like just another line item on the BOM: Like a bolt or a gasket. Source it from the cheapest provider, give them checkbox requirements, and then spoon it into the car on the assembly line somewhere. They don't think of it as an ecosystem to build off of, or as something to make beautiful to compete with other car makers. It's just another costly assembly that they bolt onto the car and forget about.
Buy Chinese cars instead.
They are far better.
BYD reliability and support leaves European cars for dead.
When I bought my car, it had no Car Play or Android Auto. Upon some investigation I found out that both of them were installed on all the current models. It’s just disabled on the cars sold without the option. Some open source software for the car entertainment system flashed on the car was able to turn on the flags to enable various features including Car Play and Android Auto. So a happy story.
Even hardware features (heated steering wheel, rain sensing wipers, etc...) are now behind software switches which the car maker can control based upon subscription or trim-level purchase.
All the hardware pieces are installed at build time
> heated steering wheel
As a licensed driver who resides in the Sonoran Desert, can you even imagine the horrific visions that just flashed before my eyes?
We often joke around here that wearing oven mitts is a good way to get our cars started in the late afternoons. It's not really a joke.
I personally have several pairs of gloves, and I never fail to don those gloves when I go out, whether I am walking, riding an e-Scooter, or driving, because even as a pedestrian we must touch so many metal objects that bask all day in the direct sunlight.
Heated steering wheels. What a world we live in today!
I scoffed at it, as someone that grew up in California and never lived anywhere cold.
Man, when it's freezing outside, it's awesome. I wouldn't buy a car without it now.
I put heated grips on my motorcycle. I thought it seemed dumb, your hands are out in the wind, and the back of your hands will still get cold. Nah, it warms up your whole body and it's a total game changer.
When it's minus -20°C outside, you'll be very happy for that heated steering wheel! For someone living in the desert, I wish there were cooled steering wheels, on the same level as heated/cooled seats, but maybe that's asking a but much.
It's probably a complexity and cost thing: heating the wheel just requires heating wires in the wheel connected to a switch. Cooling requires a some cooling medium getting pumped into the wheel and back out into a heat exchanger or vented outside. You need pipes of some sort inside the wheel and wheel hub.
You're way overthinking this. Making the steering wheel an AC vent is a Mercedes Benz patent. It's just hollow on the inside.
We also used to have crotch vents beneath the steering column! This was arguably the best idea since it could cool the entire driver area including the wheel.
This is artificial scarcity like the McRib.
My 1994 Toyota Celica had a vent beneath the steering column. It didn't have airbags, ABS braking, cruise control, electric seats, a 5th gear - it was missing all kinds of features that more luxurious cars had then, and even basic cars have now. But it had that vent! It was such an amazing feature, and I can't believe that it's not in more cars, especially ones a lot more upmarket.
I'm always a little frustrated by all the little features that are scattered across car models, that would be so easy to add, but are only available in some cars. I suppose putting absolutely everything in would be expensive and overwhelming, but some of them seem pretty easy. Off the top of my head:
- The button to dim all the dials except the essential ones (in Subarus and Saabs)
- The little flap to block sun above the sun-visor (in Audis and probably others)
- Being able to turn the radio on again after the key has been taken out
- Being able to use the residual heat for a short time after the engine has been turned off (Usually in VW/Audi cars - becoming more common?)
- Being able to hold a button on the remote to shut or open all windows (for a coupe with frameless doors, this could make getting in and out of the car in a tight supermarket parking space massively easier)
- Fuel cap holders inside the fuel flap (have these become universal yet?)
Those all feel like they would cost very little extra to implement. There are a few more that I feel were complicated or expensive, but I still was surprised weren't universal - Having the remote/key recharge while driving (less useful now you rarely need to take the keys out of your pocket, but strangely missing from many luxury cars even when you did need to insert the key). - HUD
I don't feel this is a very good list, but most of the things I only remember when I see them. Most of the items above have gradually become more common. I remember noticing cheap but fantastic features more often with cars like old Peugeots and Volvos (and obviously Saabs), and also somewhat in 90s Japanese cars. Sure Mercedes and BMWs had nice features that other cars didn't, but it's the ones where they've thought of something really useful without it costing a lot that really felt impressive. And then disappointing when you never saw that feature again.
Living in Australia where it gets hot and also kinda cold, having seats that are both heated and vented is awesome. Cold? Seat gives you a warm hug. Hot? Seat blows cool air to cool itself down after being parked, and to stop you getting sweaty.
There are also really cold places in the world!
As a licensed driver also living in the Sonoran Desert, I absolutely love my heated steering wheel. I live just South of Anthem, and we get a couple of hard freezes per year, and it gets cold enough that people wear gloves certain parts of the year.
Wow, clearly you've never left the tropics. Some of us start our cars in -30, C or F, take your pick, for at least some months out of the year.
You’re telling me it’s not cheaper for them to bundle the hardware but to disable it than not bundle the hardware?
The real cost is manufacturing with all the different options at different trim levels (combined with different paint jobs etc). Automakers have always made bank on options and trim. It is in fact cheaper for them to build all vehicles with the relatively cheap options and sell it as a subscription or add-on enabled by software. Engineering is in fact a large part of the option cost to begin with. The big task of the automakers is overcoming customer resistant to the “you will own nothing and be happy” model without feeling swindled being charged to use something they already own—or at least putting up with it and still paying. See Matt Walsh’s most recent monologue on this very topic.
>It’s just disabled on the cars sold without the option.
So exactly like software licensing? Most apps nowadays don't even require a purchase to download. The download is free but you need to pay $4.99/month subscription to use, or $99.99 for a "lifetime subscription". The code's are all there. The author just doesn't want you to use it.
That’s not exactly the same. You don’t get to have a car for free with basic driving functionality and then pay for additional features once you realize the car is useful and the people do made it deserve to be paid for their work, which they were willing to meet you have for free in its basic form.
This is something far more heinous, you bought a thing for a lot of money and just in order to extort even more money from you, they simply disable/lock away a feature that you technically already possess.
A better analogy in software might be that you bought a video game for $60,000 and the only way to beat a lower level boss without spending 2,000 hours trying to, is to pay the developers another $5,000 for a super weapon.
So more like enterprise software
Since you mention it, yes, in many more ways than may immediately be apparent to most people
Ahh, DRM-ed cars. I should have seen that one coming, really.
Geohot should focus his attention on jailbreaking cars now
You're gonna love finding out who was behind the founding of Comma.AI, which adds self-driving to cars that shipped without it
They saw the "You wouldn't download a car?" meme one too many times, and panicked.
this reminds me of the old IBM tabulation machines that were sold in 2 different models at different prices, the cheaper one just had a metal tab inserted to limit the processing speed - you could remove the tab to unlock full speed
As it should be.
You'd prefer they get nothing for the effort they put into developing the software?
I’d prefer to pay up front to buy the product, the way everything was sold up until around 2012, and not have a “subscription” scam.
The vendor of a piece of software decides how best they'd like to be paid.
A subscriptions approach allows them to avoid demanding a big payment upfront, and allows them to continue improving the software without you having to pay substantial sums to get new licensed versions. It has pros and cons vs licensing, but is a legitimate monetization strategy.
That the bits already exist on your machine is irrelevant. Your entitlement to use the bits is what is at issue here. Being already in possession of stolen goods does not entitle you to use them.
It's a car. There's already a big payment upfront. You're already shelling out $40,000+ on average in the US these days. Is that not already a big upfront payment?
Happy for the individual, sad for society
Please could you share the name of the manufacturer, so the rest of us know who to be wary of?
Volkswagen Group for example. Most of their brands are like this, Volkswagen, Seat, Skoda. Carplay/Android Auto is in the head unit but you have to pay 200-300€ to unlock unless it’s part of the trim level you choose.
That's interesting, thanks. For me this feature is mandatory, and I won't risk buying a car (second hand usually) unless I see it working with my phone first. I drove 200 miles to buy a car once and walked* away because of this. The seller acted surprised.
* drove
Glad to own a car that will only update via USB and even then only when I want it to.
Which is never, unless something is broken.
Having rolling releases for a CAR is absolutely stupid.
Author blames the two week sprint. But that isn't this issue. It's testing gates. Plenty of teams can ship high quality software with two weak sprints. They just have great testing gates.
Agree with the sentiment but the author's brain rotten rant is projection for being part of the problem
Assuming your car has all the functions you care about, and the OTA updates aren't bringing you any bugfixes or feature updates you care about, is there any good reason to update? Or even have it online to begin with? I'm not expecting someone to hack my car; on the contrary, I'd rather have it be impossible for the automaker to reach my car in any way without it being obvious to me (i.e. me flipping a switch to get it online for whatever reason).
The most expensive appliances (particularly stoves) are the ones with no LCD screens. "Smart" TVs are often cheaper then dumb ones. People have learned that software does not always make things better. Anything that has code in it I assume will last for about three years. In practice that's a little less then the average but a safe assumption.
If we had a software building code, it could mandate the testing procedures for consumer devices, like a car's headunit firmware. This building code could be backed by an industry body that could revoke its certification from manufacturers if they don't comply with the code. Super-advanced-testing-procedure #1: plug a phone into a test car and check it works before release.
(This software building code is more necessary for software used in critical infrastructure. But it should also be applied to consumer devices as basic protection for consumers against manufacturers breaking functionality the consumer paid for)
Plug one of every combination of vendor, model, OS, and config into the car and check if everything works. That’s what would be required to actually ensure functionality.
Don't let perfection be the enemy of the good. In industrial testing automation, you often don't test every feature completely. You calculate the cost-benefit of the complexity, time and cost it takes to test features, and target the most valuable ones. (I used to write automation test suites for industrial appliances with hundreds of thousands of permutations)
At the very least, you can test one single feature end to end, just to get a baseline that nothing is massively, obviously broken (like it was in this case!). This lack of fundamental testing is what caused the CrowdStrike bug that brought down Delta Airlines. This kind of test is extremely easy, quick, cheap, and simple, and catches the worst bugs. In other words, it's the most valuable test.
Companies will continue to let these bugs happen until we mandate a minimum amount of fundamental testing before release.
I've stopped installing software updates to my car. They never seem to do anything useful and often will cause things to break or get reset. I no longer see the upside.
The practical solution here would be closing the feedback loop with customers. The business does want happy customers, it's important they return to purchase in 5 years. The problem with car companies is that they don't get immediate feedback (telemetry, tickets, etc) when they do push an issue. And they obviously don't have gradual roll outs the way tesla does.
Rather than hamstring all software by requiring DOT testing before firmware updates are published, follow Tesla's model which has been very reliable within the industry
Please don't take this as suggesting any of them are good at software, mind you.
You're right the facilities may be there for telemetry & feedback, but none of the Tesla competitors are structured to manage that telemetry and feedback. Often the brands are repackaging software from vendors (e.g. Bosch) that are terrible at fixing things.
Let's face it, this really is about Tesla, vs the rest of the major players (ford, kia, VW etc)
Obviously I'm under NDA, but the data I've seen at $(OEM) was down to the level of variant tracking and real time geolocation. The commercial fleet management programs can do things like scheduled updates and know what hardware/software is in each component of each vehicle, which the manufacturer has to keep track of anyway for recall purposes.
The capability may be there, sure
why OTA update OS that frequently?
I've been lately into mobile apps and i am finding that there is no system which combines these 3
1. AOT 2. JIT (for hot paths) 3. Interpreter for non JIT paths or where you explicitly do not want jit.
Imagine, a system which compiles your app to AOT but when you push OTA update, part of the app are selectively replaced to JIT or Interpreted mode.
it's theoretically possible but nobody seems to be doing it. I found react native / expo eas update but i don't think it's like this, it has a Hermes VM which runs bytecode but it has no JIT so you'll write native code for hot path then you'll need to upload a full update to Android. So, only toy level code performance can be can actually be written in JS?
Much better, patch the parts where AOT calls into JIT or interpreter.
Currently i am using react native and flutter. Flutter's UI framework code is in Dart if you load this whole code into JIT, it will consume a lot of resources on mobile device as the framework is big and does lot of work. If all framework code was AOT and your custom patchable code also comes with AOT but upon OTA replaced by JIT or Interpreted code, crazy performance!
But what if we could run the most of the code in AOT and only run changed code in JIT or interpreted mode? arguably it would perform as good as it does not being complete AOT while also providing react native like fast updates.
You can't update any AOT code due to how code signing works in these OS. And Apple completely bans JIT on iOS and iPadOS.
no, i am not asking for AOT OTA update.
AOT will be in base app and it will include JIT or Interpreted OTA updates.
For Apple, JIT can simply be disabled and OTA update can run patched part in interpreter.
But JIT works on Android (well), so this Hybrid system is capable of being much faster than React Native where your JS code only runs in Hermes VM which isn't JIT.
In this system, all your crazy math and algorithms (on hot path) stay easily updatable as this small part can be run on JIT with snapshot saved for next load if it has not changed!
JIT on average is 100x faster than dumb interpreter for language like Dart.
Does it already exist? otherwise i am seriously thinking about building something like this.
Apple does not allow running code from internet either (even if interpreted iirc)
That said shipping JIT / interpreter with your program to recompile updates / parts of it sounds silly to me.
>That said shipping JIT / interpreter with your program to recompile updates / parts of it sounds silly to me.
why is it silly? modern phones can easily do this (they are running local llm, what issue is with jit?), if it's done one time per update what's the problem?
what's the problem with jitting couple of hot paths which have been updated and were not part of base app?
>Apple does not allow running code from internet either (even if interpreted iirc)
And how is React native expo/eas updates are working then? Isn't it downloading a bytecode bundle?
Afaik, interpreter is allowed. JIT isn't?
There's 2 different parts of their terms about this. One seems to forbid it. The other basically says that you can do it as long as you aren't shipping some kind of update to the app that changes its nature significantly. Basically the generally accepted viewpoint in the industry is that you can OTA bugfixes and small changes but you if you ship whole features without going through app store review first you are definitely on thin ice.
Sounds like someone isn’t doing their load-bearing smoke tests.
You still did not learn the lesson? Once you take possession of a fixed-function appliance, NEVER EVER EVER take any updates, and do not connect it to the internet (CarPlay does not require internet connectivity in the car). Do not buy fixed-function appliances that require internet, that is what computers are for.
At this point I'm just annoyed that Google discontinued the Android Auto app. Just give me a mount for my phone and gtfo.
If you have a big touchscreen put a video usb port on it.
To be fair, Android Auto breaks when you look at it funny.
Both Android Auto and Chromecast are great ideas, but so incredibly flakey.
The number of times I've heard someone say 'oh it's disconnected again' is extreme.
To be honest, some court ought to simply demand Google makes it reliable or refunds all money people paid for the phones as the product is not fit for purpose.
Wasn't LLM tech supposed to fix this?
Most people with experience in the tech industry would say that LLMs will make it worse. They make more mistakes than a human, faster than a human, but get treated (by management) as preferred to a human. The end result was never going to be more reliable software.
My car has an engine and tires. There’s literally 0 reason why it needs a cell phone. Stop buying these stupid cars
Does MINI make their own software? I thought it was the same as BMWs with another skin. My BMW gets quarterly updates. Only once in the past year I've had it did I notice anything new (new voice assistant), otherwise it just resets my driver screen and sets my interior lighting on full blast every time it updates.
If Android Auto stopped working I'd also be livid because I don't use the built in crap.
> Everything you create should be an artistic endeavour aiming for perfection.
Amen. If you go to a bakery, you expect them to care. If you hire a photographer, you expect them to care. Software isn’t (usually) a factory line; CRUD may be similar concepts throughout, but everyone is making it themselves.
Give a shit about what you make.
So glad my car has the dumbest head unit on offer in 2019, does bluetooth, radio, CD, shows a map (slowly) it just does what I need it to.
that's a symptom of a bigger problem.
Someone in auto industry decided that plugging device, and dependency on core functionality of the car to 3rd party device, that might be lost, have battery died, used for something else, etc is a good way to save money and not do proper software. It's even more bizare now, mid 2026, when software is solved with AI.
It's good that there are some companies, that ban android/apple car since that's an ugly experience for the user.
> Someone in auto industry decided that plugging device, and dependency on core functionality of the car to 3rd party device, that might be lost, have battery died, used for something else, etc is a good way to save money and not do proper software.
On the contrary, having cars stop trying to provide a bespoke more-proprietary outdated piece of software you have less control over, probably have surreptitious telemetry reporting back from, and might have to pay a subscription fee for, and instead just delegate to the smartphone you already have, is a huge and surprising win.
> It's good that there are some companies, that ban android/apple car since that's an ugly experience for the user.
It's a terrible user-hostile loss when cars do that, typically because they want to maintain more control or try to extract more revenue from the user.
If you don't want to use it, don't use it; there's nothing forcing you to do so.
you settle with one failure story for another failure story.
there are companies with amazing software experience, Rivian, Tesla, Nio, Lucid, even gm is start moving into that direction, and WV is buying software from rivian.
> there are companies with amazing software experience
I don't want an amazing software experience. I want an unsurprising experience, ideally the one I already have.
The only thing better than Android Auto would be to just provide a standardized port (and perhaps a wireless standard) for a combination of video output, audio output, touchscreen input, and charging, with optional standardized sensor inputs. Then you wouldn't need two different standards (Android Auto and Apple Carplay), just one, which would also work with any new device that came along to break that duopoly.
> standardized port (and perhaps a wireless standard) for a combination of video output, audio output, touchscreen input, and charging, with optional standardized sensor inputs
So a web browser loading a page off the phone? :)
Emphatically not. I want the head unit to act as a dumb terminal for the phone. My first instinct would be a USB-C docking station supporting DisplayPort video, various interesting USB devices, and a descriptor that makes it clear it's a car's head unit so the device can intelligently offer a car-specific experience.
Oh, right, more like a car-flavoured docking station? That does sound better, it relies on the car for less in terms of functionality so it should be more consistent and futureproof.
Yes, exactly. And USB enumeration has the advantage of being extremely standard and making it easy to extend by adding additional devices rather than changing the data stream to the existing devices.
you just stuck in this paradigm, this apple/auto surprised me so many times :
- when you need to re-pair Bluetooth
- when you forget the cable to charge and you need to drive
- when you want to share your car to someone and they need to spend 5 minutes to accept every single ToS possible to simply put a GPS
- several people with phones paired before, now you dealing with complete random
you name it.
- you listen music and you need to go out to buy something while others in the car
None of these problems exist if you have a decent, dedicated computer in the car that just works, it knows profiles, it does need you to be always on wire, or on the line.
The TLDR; answer to all your problems is: "Just use a freaking USB cable".
I rent tons of cars and my experience with the wired AndroidAuto is:
1. Plug it in.
2. That's it. It just works. No ToS or any other crap.
3. The same cable also supplies power!
Some cars _may_ need me to press something on the screen to switch to AA mode, but it's rare.
And it works perfectly with _everything_ on my phone. A navigator properly pauses my audiobook before announcing a turn, for example.
for rental it honestly probably make sense, since this is not your car.
Why on earth everytime i sit in the car i have to neurotically plug the cable. I had situations i forgot and in the middle of the ride i started to look for cable or try to wire car play, simply because i figure out i don't know where to go .
This type of crap is not convenient and simply dangerous.
what proper car should offer: keyless enter; keyless profile adjustment including seats, heat, music profiles, etc wheel etc; keyless start and go;
one of the best tiny features i have. In the morning i drive to work; i can go several ways there depends on traffic, My car knows that in the morning i go to work; GPS is on, traffic is calculated.
I open the door , my music started to play, I press gas and drive; zero cables, zero pairing ; open the door and drive.
Sorry, but you're getting confused. First you want to give car to somebody else, and somehow having built-in shitty navigation (that they don't know how to use) makes it better.
Now you're offended by Android Auto making it easy for people to just plug in the phone and start driving?
It's clear that you have not used AA/CarPlay, but they _also_ offer wireless pairing. If you're using the car constantly, you can just pair it with your phone. There are even retrofit adapters available, so even a 10-year-old car can be wirelessly connected.
> what proper car should offer: keyless enter; keyless profile adjustment including seats, heat, music profiles, etc wheel etc; keyless start and go;
Nope. Cars should offer one thing only: Android Auto/CarPlay. That's it. Nothing else is needed.
Can your car play audiobooks and pause them when the navigator makes a voice announcement? Can it play a Youtube podcast that you started listening on your computer?
> there are companies with amazing software experience, Rivian, Tesla, Nio, Lucid
I own a Tesla, and a Ford. Amazing is not how I would describe the Tesla software experience. It lacks features like iMessage for group and for non-phone recipients that I am able to use in my Ford. Even though many people would say the Ford software is otherwise inferior. And if history is anything to go by, there are features in CarPlay today that Tesla will never add to their infotainment system.
i can create an entire list of features, that will never ever be in CarPlay, because it's not made of this is just a dongle on steroids, not a proper way to make your car smart.
Joe mode ( silent your car when baby sleeps)
automatic profiles that are connected all the way to what music played and in what device, headphones seamlessly stop playing after i go into the car from the gym
send navigation to car from any device , while I'm driving my gf or friend can send it, so i do not distract myself
proper navigation , order management etc as part of the vertical integration, including re-routing to less busy charger etc.
You might be unaware of CarPlay Ultra.
In any case, thank you for contributing evidence to my assertion that CarPlay is additive, not subtractive, and since you can choose to use it or not, adding it to Tesla's infotainment is strictly a win.
Meanwhile my car - Vauxhall Zafira Tourer - from 2018 has a broken Android Auto, they stopped offering the map updates for sat nav in, like, 2019 and that update system is locked. AFAICT you need an encrypted thumb drive.
It's my first car with built in satnav, so it was not something I thought to test. A working Android Auto would be great compared to 10+ years out of date maps.
> there are companies with amazing software experience, Rivian, Tesla, Nio, Lucid
Are you fucking serious? Tesla's head unit software is barely passable. It's shit.
Nearly half of the screen is taken by useless toy car depictions, and navigation can't even render the full street names because the width of the input field is fixed.
huh? it's not half, and it has speed, speed limit and other items in the same area.
Car is usable, i use it to open trunk frunk and check the status the door/trunk. I'll tell you more , that type of visualisation exists in almost every single modern car.
their navigation is just the best not sure what problem are you talking, it's FSD knows better where to turn vs myself in unfamiliar area. I do have less miss exists on fsd with myself. Yesterday i 0 touch 1h 30 min drive from long island all the way to a very busy manhattan street. tons of exits, complicated connections etc.
It's not even comparable. Everything else feels like a horse carriage vs space ship.
you can swipe left to show full map if you in the navigation and open it almost in full screen. even in default mode that screen is bigger than 95% of the navigation screens of other brands. Really fake concern.
you can pin your Bluetooth app with drag-n drop , never used car link so not sure if that's an app or an icon.
glovebox is the real annoying item i can confirm is a 100% weird design choice. I still love pin in valet mode so that my items are not stolen.
> you can swipe left to show full map if you in the navigation and open it almost in full screen. even in default mode that screen is bigger than 95% of the navigation screens of other brands. Really fake concern.
Would you mind uploading a picture of this "almost full screen"?
> even in default mode that screen is bigger than 95% of the navigation screens of other brands.
Yeah, sure. "We removed about 40% of the screen, but don't worry, you still have a lot of screen left!"
> huh? it's not half, and it has speed, speed limit and other items in the same area.
I think it's 40%? Most of this screen is utterly useless for me. I don't care about "other items". I want more map, and next several turns in that spot.
The speed limit can stay in a nice carved-out area at the top left.
> Car is usable, i use it to open trunk frunk and check the status the door/trunk.
Oh wow. Being able to opening the trunk is now the pinnacle of usability. How about a glovebox?
How about making the Homelink button always visible, because GPS is not always reliable. How about making Bluetooth icon always available? Ditto for compass.
> I'll tell you more , that type of visualisation exists in almost every single modern car.
Nope. It's just copium.
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> On the contrary, having cars stop trying to provide a bespoke more-proprietary outdated piece of software you have less control over, probably have surreptitious telemetry reporting back from, and might have to pay a subscription fee for, and instead just delegate to the smartphone you already have, is a huge and surprising win.
I'd agree if it worked.
Android Auto sucks. And I don't like that my auto manufacturer can wash their hands off it by pointing at Google.
> If you don't want to use it, don't use it; there's nothing forcing you to do so.
As long as the car manufacturer gives me basic functionality (radio, stereo, Bluetooth, etc). Nominally they do, but it sucks in a different way from Android Auto. So I have to ping pong between these two.
My prior car's aftermarket Bluetooth receiver was fantastic. The fact that I can't install something like that on modern cars is a huge regression.
> Android Auto sucks.
No, it doesn't. It's a very simple streaming protocol.
It's literally a gRPC-encapsulated stream of h264 frames over a USB connection. With touch events and some car-related telemetry streamed back. You can implement it in a weekend: https://github.com/mrmees/open-android-auto
You can create whatever you want, including just streaming videos onto the head unit or making it play Doom while driving (with steering wheel for input).
Maybe I'm being imprecise.
What I mean is: When I enable Android Auto on my phone and on my car, and connect the two, I get something that has a poor UI and sucks.
What exactly is poor?
Not sure if you're asking relative to other options, or just in the absolute. I'll respond to the latter.
Some of my complaints below may have remedies - please feel free to inform me!
When Android Auto loads up, it shows me a tile with the current weather. In Fahrenheit. I want it in Celsius. Everywhere on my phone I've set it to Celsius. In the Settings (I think multiple ones). In the actual weather app. But AA will show it in Fahrenheit.
And why show me that tile at all? I don't want to see it. I can't disable it. In my Android Auto settings, I removed it from the list of apps. It still shows up. Why can't I control what apps launch?
Why is there always a navigation app loaded? I don't want it on by default if I'm just going to listen to stuff. Nothing should be loaded by default except the launcher menu. I should be able to configure on my phone what I want autolaunched.
It eats up too much battery. Why does it need to eat so much battery if all I'm using it for is to listen to podcasts? With regular Bluetooth, it barely consumes battery.
Waze sucks on AA compared to just plain Android. I can't, for example, send an ETA via AA. I can't even do it on my phone while connected to AA.
Why does the air vent fan speed drop dramatically when I get a call? Why does the climate system even know I'm getting a call?
If I connect my phone via USB cable, why does it insist I connect via Bluetooth? I can go to Android settings, have Bluetooth forget my car, and when I plug in the USB and launch Android Auto, Android will connect to Bluetooth. I Googled and apparently this is intentional. I find it very hostile.
That's all from the top of my head. I'm sure I can come up with plenty more.
> When Android Auto loads up, it shows me a tile with the current weather. In Fahrenheit. I want it in Celsius. Everywhere on my phone I've set it to Celsius. In the Settings (I think multiple ones). In the actual weather app. But AA will show it in Fahrenheit.
I don't think I ever saw this behavior?
> Why is there always a navigation app loaded?
I think this is the default? I have OsmAnd+ instead of Google Maps by default.
> It eats up too much battery. Why does it need to eat so much battery if all I'm using it for is to listen to podcasts? With regular Bluetooth, it barely consumes battery.
This is because your phone needs to encode the contents of its display as h264 stream.
> Why does the air vent fan speed drop dramatically when I get a call? Why does the climate system even know I'm getting a call?
AndroidAuto can notify the car that it wants reduced noise.
> That's all from the top of my head. I'm sure I can come up with plenty more.
This is all fixable in software on Android. Nothing from your list is a problem on the _car_ side.
Given that the protocol is now documented and available, it doesn't even need to be implemented in Android. You can have a KDE desktop running on your car!
I actually played with that about 10 years ago: https://github.com/Cyberax/aauto/tree/master
> I think this is the default? I have OsmAnd+ instead of Google Maps by default.
Ok. How do I make it not load any of them?
> AndroidAuto can notify the car that it wants reduced noise
How do I get it not to notify the car?
> This is all fixable in software on Android. Nothing from your list is a problem on the _car_ side
Which is why my original comment said Android Auto sucks.
My complaint about the car manufacturer is that they allow the driving experience to be degraded with it.
> Ok. How do I make it not load any of them? > How do I get it not to notify the car?
Get the Android Auto app and patch away the notification. It's just an app, after all. Running on your own hardware.
> Which is why my original comment said Android Auto sucks. > My complaint about the car manufacturer is that they allow the driving experience to be degraded with it.
So your default car navigator can do everything in your list, including launching a non-default app from your phone? That's some mighty car navigation system.
> Get the Android Auto app and patch away the notification. It's just an app, after all. Running on your own hardware.
So we're in agreement that the official app sucks, right? If the solution is "Well you can just patch it," then there is a problem.
And BTW, how do I patch it and run it on an unrooted phone? Is there a community version I can install and use that sucks less?
> So your default car navigator can do everything in your list, including launching a non-default app from your phone? That's some mighty car navigation system.
Why is the alternative my default car navigation system? [1]
What did people do before they had Android Auto? Not use the phone at all?
One alternative is what I had in my old car: An aftermarket Bluetooth receiver, and a phone holder to hold the phone. The Bluetooth receiver was better for all things audio, and the phone on a phone holder didn't consume so much battery even when not plugged in. And the Waze experience was better. I would have thought a larger screen would make for easier navigation, but I now know it doesn't - the phone screen was large enough. I'll grant that stuff like Pocketcasts on AA is a bit more ergonomic than the bare phone, but when AA comes with so much painful baggage, it's not worth it.
And that's why some people I know actually go this route - disable AA, and use a vanilla phone holder with the in-built car's Bluetooth. Sadly, they cannot (easily) install that Bluetooth receiver - that's an indictment of the car manufacturer.
This isn't a great solution, but it's saying much when it's superior to AA.
[1] Incidentally, the car navigation system is actually quite good!
Android Auto sucks but I guarantee that any software that those car companies would have made in house would be many times worse.
Disagree. They mostly suck in a different way, with neither being better than the other. I've often switched back and forth.
But this is a red herring. With older cars, you could install a 3rd party system and it was far superior to Android Auto for the basic things I need.
why on earth you need an aftermarket receiver of Bluetooth? The cost of the module is few dollars. My cheap ac has bluethooth, just to connect it wifi, i used it once in it's lifetime.
The entire idea that everytime you sit in the car you need to pair your devices, what if you have several devices in the car etc ? it's such a horrible, broken, neurotic idea.
> The entire idea that everytime you sit in the car you need to pair your devices,
Why would you get that idea? Do you have to pair your phone every time for all other Bluetooth products?
because that's the only way to use that CarPlay, if you need music, navigation, etc. if you have a standalone computer you don't have to do so.
I still have no idea what you're talking about.
I'm not speaking in the abstract. I've done this before on older cars.
Given that the (user-facing) software that comes with the car is always broken (modulo Tesla and a few other modern exceptions), it's no wonder people want to replace that software with literally anything else that actually works.
This isn't the auto industry deciding that you need to use your phone. On the contrary, GM and others tried hard to push back on Carplay and AA. This is the buyers telling the auto makers that they want Carplay and AA since they know that that actually works, and they know that the software the car actually comes with will be garbage, or at the very least unfamiliar and not really worth dealing with when you can hook up your phone and let that actually solve the problems the user wants to be solved.
It's insane to me that anyone could be of the opinion that it's good that some automakers ban/don't implement Carplay and AA. It's just taking away user choice. It's hard to believe anyone could have this opinion without either never having driven a modern car, or just being an industry plan.
Err, Teslas aren't an outlier - the OTAs break shit all the time and in many ways they're worse than cars not getting OTAs because of that :(
I can name you tons of things they fix over 5 years i own over the air. The ratio there is very very net positive towards a very good , well polished system, not an other way around.
They even fixed once a semi broken hardware for me. Camera power started acting up. I called tesla they said you can come to service to replace or wait a bit we will release OTA that will decrease a power consumption, in 3-4 weeks they fix my custom problem without going to serive
Yet they still manage to be better than the baseline, since that's located somewhere around the Mariana Trench.
I've been driving many cars lately and I strongly disagree.
> the OTAs break shit all the time
Uh? I can literally count the times my Model 3 2019 software broke something on one hand:
- when they redesigned the AC controls to make them more visually appealing but less functional (no button borders and no fill)
- when they decided to put air recirculation under auto-control and ignore the user's settings
- when they optimized the cellular connectivity and it took them a while to get back proper reconnect on loss of signal (garages etc)
- when they tuned sentry's sensitivity and there was some back-and-forth for a couple cycles between "record everything" and "record nothing"
None of this made the car undrivable or totally useless. I did hear of reports of early HW4 cars bricking their FSD computer, and Tesla replaced it.
In my opinion it's still a much better experience than the absolute guesswork of "what will my screen display today when I connect the phone? and where will I find Maps again?", based on software updates on the car AND the phone.
EDIT: also agreeing with the sibling comments: my 7 year old car got a lot of extra features since release, and most of them working very well at the first try.
> It's good that there are some companies, that ban android/apple car since that's an ugly experience for the user.
Absolutely nonsensical. Both Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are better experiences than any first party car interface I’ve experienced.
In many ways the auto industry stumbled when they allowed this connectivity, just like phone networks stumbled when they let Apple dictate the iPhone from top to bottom. Good news is those stumbles worked out great for users. We get iPhones without bundled crapware apps and we get cars that don’t require monthly subscriptions for basic functionality your phone provides.
> software is solved with AI
Presumably every car manufacturer can use AI. Yet there are still bugs. If all bugs are solved with AI, and therefore every car manufacturer with access to AI writes bug-free software, the only remaining conclusion is that some car manufacturers don’t have AI yet.
> ”the only remaining conclusion is that some car manufacturers don’t have AI yet.”
This suggests the supply of AI is too limited, and there isn’t enough AI to go around. Solution: build more AI data centres.
> It's good that there are some companies, that ban android/apple car since that's an ugly experience for the user
Hello, Elon
Seriously this is so wrong. I love being able to carry all my preferences from my phone directly to the car without any additional configuration. Before this, we had to do stupid stuff like entering individual contacts in the cars system.
> It's even more bizare now, mid 2026, when software is solved with AI.
Why doesn't op simply ask AI to write software to fix his problem?
A lot of the time, the head unit only accepts signed updates
Software is solved so you just need to use AI to fix android auto or find a vulnerability in the head unit.
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Please don't act like a jerk on HN. We can disagree without belittling and jeering, and this style of comment doesn't make your position seem strong, at all. You've been here long enough to know that this is not what HN is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
His good points here are undermined by the profane, emotional high-cortisol crashout. There’s a place for well-written, witty diatribes and polemics, but throwing F-bombs and F-yous into complaints is not that.
It's his blog. He can talk however he wants. You, however, don't have to read it.
When the blog post is under discussion, I think comments critical of it are just as fair game as ones which appreciate it. If the parent poster was emailing the author to make the same complaint then I think the "you don't have to read it" criticism applies, but not so much in a discussion forum. The point is to discuss what we think, even if that is a critical opinion.
When did grown adults start getting so fucking bitchy about profane language? I swear it wasn't like this 20 years ago.
Lewis Black once said that swearing has a point--it is how we express a sufficient level of rage and anger against something extremely dysfunctional. What should we say, he asked: Oh, pussyfeathers?
Lewis Black’s shtick is tired and old and yet he manages to put a lot more humor and wit into his rants than anything in this article.
It’s essentially “My car’s infotainment system fucking sucks! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fucking fuck! Fuck my life and fuck all this shit! Did you notice I used the word fuck? FUCK!” Such great writing, so original, so millennial.
Did you just come off the Mayflower?
Not even 13 days ago another article on here was glazing the infotainment system. I even have the article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48769397 People were attacking the critique I levied towards shallow praise flippantly gravitating to the word consistency, but now I feel vindicated.
Users are complicit. Why did this user install the update? Were they suffering from an issue it supposedly solves? My six-year-old Honda has never had a software update, and in any case "OTA" updates can only be initiated by the user.
They described their car as having "auto-installed" the update.
An update which advertised, amongst other features, that it "rectifies errors and prevents security gaps" and stated "This update is recommended for everyone."
Borderline insane to refer to the user as "complicit" in that case.
No win scenario. We need to install updates because of security vulnerabilities. But we shouldn’t install updates because they might introduce bugs.
Of course, we largely only need to worry about the security vulnerabilities because manufacturers increasingly hook our hardware up to the internet so they can exfiltrate data about us.
To be honest, with how poor quality some software has gotten, I refuse to update it, security issues or no. Most products aren't that bad, thankfully, but there does reach a point where the theoretical risk of a security vulnerability is outweighed by the immediate issue of "this crap doesn't work any more".
Security vulnerabilities get too much credit. It's "think of the children" of the software world. Most updates don't fix any, most vulnerabilities won't get used in the real world against you either, and in many cases the security is for the corporation against the customer instead.
'Security and bug fixes' is what companies say when they want you to update. They might be correct. You see that on Google Play store a lot ... Really they should mandate availability of descriptive and accurate update notes. But then Google are one of the worst offenders, often their updates don't even include details at all. One has to go spelunking through comments and forums trying to find if the update actually fixes anything or if it's just to include a few more ads or tracking mechanics.
Hooray for OSS, F-Droid is way better ime.
The user is not at fault for installing an offered update.
While the users are not at fault, this culture has certainly turned me way more careful and deliberate about applying updates - if it's not broke, I usually don't; big corporations are more suspicious of breaking things and open source are usually good about them; and if there's no changelog or it's very generic, I'll stay away as well.
Some cars will force the update on you after dismissing it.
Ai will solve it. Car manufacturers are slow to take on new technology but they’ll be forced to
if the giga rich pushing this latest ai wave manage to convince a single safety critical industry to deregulate, we are all boned
That’s true, however a properly engineered safety-critical system provides separation between assurance levels, so you don’t need to have the same level of assurance for the infotainment system software that you do for safety-critical displays and controls.
The FAA has historically done a good job on this front with aviation (notwithstanding the 747 MAX debacle, which was a failure implicating flight control software but not a failure of separation of assurance levels). Automotive software and standards and NHTSA is far behind on this front. Cost is certainly a factor; it is not economical to apply aviation safety and engineering standards and processes directly to automobiles. But in the meantime, it is an absolute Wild West for any contemporary drive-by-wire car.
don't know where you sourced your perspective but yea based on the reports ive heard from automotive engineers, coding in autosar is the direct opposite of wild
I have first-hand experience unlike your third-hand anecdotes. AUTOSAR is a private industry consortium that develops specifications. They are voluntary and self-attested and don’t have anything like the verification and documentation processes that are mandated by DO-178 in the aviation world by regulators with both independent engineering certification and regulatory oversight. Tesla and Rivian don’t participate at all. There is no comparable regulatory framework for automotive software—at all. It is purely reactive.
And lest you take issue with my characterization or claim Tesla is a rogue outlier, let me remind you that Volkswagen shipped deliberate software emissions defeat code in 11 million diesel passenger vehicles over eight model years including half a million in the USA, and was only caught by academic researchers.
> don’t have anything like the verification and documentation processes that are mandated by DO-178
ISO 26262? Not sure how the enforcement looks, but automotive is pretty serious about ISO 26262.
Still, the infotainment is most likely QM so it wouldn't apply in this specific situation.
ISO 26262 does have serious lifecycle standards but again it’s a voluntary industry standard that has no government oversight or regulatory authority. Oversight is typically largely internal and is strongest in the auto parts/components market. It’s largely toothless to automakers/integrators and again the likes of Tesla simply don’t use it and have no obligation to.
The infotainment system itself may be QM but there has to be assurance that it is in fact separated from higher safety level system.
> it’s a voluntary industry standard that has no government oversight or regulatory authority.
Yes, hence why I said I'm not sure about enforcement mechanisms how they stack up against the aviation standard. Still, in my limited experience, projects that are ASIL x take the thing pretty seriously and they do get certifications from external bodies. Actually, I am supporting an SEooC external certification right now.
> The infotainment system itself may be QM but there has to be assurance that it is in fact separated from higher safety level system.
The separation most likely happens _outside_ the infotainment itself, through a gateway.