Surprised no one's mentioned it so far, but CarPlay / Android Auto aren't just features, they're consistency. Across makes, models, years. I know what I'm getting when I connect my phone - and if anyone uses my car with their own device, they get their own dashboard, as well. One interesting use case I saw was a couple where one used a left-to-right interface and the other a right-to-left UI. CarPlay makes this easy, because the interface is linked to your own personal device.
This is huge for me - I'm in rental cars every other week or so 'cause I fly a lot for work and getting to factories in the boonies isn't really doable on public transport. I used to spend 20 minutes in the europcar car park every single time and then have to log out of everything when I dropped the car off. Now I just hook up Android Auto and I'm back into the same podcast I had on the flight, my itinerary is planned in already and I can head straight to my hotel. Still have the old problem with smart TV's though. Can't usually be fucked to login for two nights so I just watch TV on my laptop.
> Can't usually be fucked to login for two nights so I just watch TV on my laptop
I recently had the idea of taking the FireStick 4K Max that I bought ~1year ago for the living room smart OLED TV which is getting a little older, I had gotten ready to take it on a few trips I'm doing this year, thought I was being clever, unfortunately it died a literal week after the warranty, boot looping constantly.
I won't buy another Firestick again, it was atrociously add-riddled and often showing things inappropriate for the kids in the middle of the day, but if generic Android TV stick like that was available with good performance and all the necessary DRM levels, I'd probably use that.
For now, I will just carry an HDMI cable and use my laptop.
My wife swears by using a FireStick. It was miserable due to hotel captive wifi portals often failing to work properly with the browser of the FS, and even when it does work, typing your name/room number is miserable on a TV.. Adding a travel router to the mix allows you to auth via phone/laptop, which makes things a whole lot nicer.
Unlike the sibling, I've never encountered a hotel with all ports blocked. But I have encountered hotels where there is no way to choose other ports. In that case, I've just unplugged their STB and plugged my FS in.
I haven't tried this on iPhone yet, but on android you can share Wi-Fi connection. Many times I've connected phone to hotel Wi-Fi and then chromecast to my phone.
Sadly, we're both on iPhone and you cannot share Wi-Fi like that on iPhone :(
This was a bummer just the other day where my iPhone somehow (and I still don't know how) auto-signed into an amazingly fast wifi AP managed by my cell provider, but I was stuck working on crappy guest wifi on my laptop and could not get the laptop onto the better wifi.
Exactly! I can't stop wondering: are these executives just not thinking, or are they blindly repeating what they were told to? If I get into a rental car, do they seriously think I want to spend the next 30 minutes logging into Spotify, mapping apps, Overcast and anything else that I want to use but that needs to know me? And then worry about logging out of all that stuff once I return the rental?
The power here is on the rental car companies. They buy the most cars by far. And so when they say that customers won't accept a rental car without a CarPlay, the car makers will listen.
Car makers make money selling cars. Which buyers happily pay five figure suns for. An executive can add to the bottom line by raising sales prices/volumes with a more competitive product, or lowering component costs.
This isn’t some weird social media business with non-paying users and a reliance on ad money.
> Surprised no one's mentioned it so far, but CarPlay / Android Auto aren't just features, they're consistency.
No, they are not. When you press "Home" button on your car where does it go? In some cars it goes to CarPlay main screen, in others it goes to car's built-in system main screen. When you press back what happens? When you press Nav/Maps button where does it go? Again, some cars will launch built-in navigation while others will go in whatever last nav app you used in car play. Mazda disables touch screen when car play is enabled (which is good and I like it)
> One interesting use case I saw was a couple where one used a left-to-right interface and the other a right-to-left UI.
That depends on if car was originally made for left-hand or right-hand traffic, some cars allow you to change that (in my BMW it required messing with obd port)
What vehicle did Mazda screw this up so badly in? Neither of my Mazdas with CarPlay disable the touchscreen in CarPlay. The ‘21 Miata disables it while in motion (which sucks badly, and I just learned there’s a hack to fix). The ‘24 CX-5 doesn’t ever disable the touchscreen.
2018, 2020, and 2021 MX-5 (so all of NDs?) disabled touch screen in CarPlay unless you're in Park. I'm okay with it because using touch screen in ND Miata is uncomfortable for me to use any way, and Mazda really nailed hardware buttons navigation there.
That's in fact one of the pros of carplay/android auto as opposed to just putting your phone in one of those windscreen attached holders; you get to use the volume buttons on the steering wheel. Annoyingly my car doesn't have play/pause buttons on there, but if it had, they would work.
The wheel in an Enyaq before the facelift is the same haptic one-button shitshow. They have some buttons that act like shortcuts below the infotainment. But it the screen is still essentialistisk for managing crucial functions.
My 2025 Audi A3 is pretty good with buttons and knobs. The only time I need to touch the screen (other than for CarPlay) is to tell it, "no, you still cannot steal my data" every time I turn the car on.
Lots of modern cars cater for this. It’s actually a marketing point with manufacturers like the VW group publicising how they’re bringing back tactile interfaces. And some ranges of cars never took that away (for example Jaguar).
They did away with a lot of physical buttons in the past. Now they are in the process of bringing them back. There are some models still sold with the old design while all new models have physical again.
Also some of their brands had physical buttons all along. I think Skoda never removed them in the Elroq or Enyak.
I use CarPlay all the time and I almost never use the touchscreen - as you shouldn't while driving. The car has buttons and knobs, on the dash and on the wheel, to call up all sorts of options in the UI. The only time I need to touch the screen is if I want a full screen map (instead of the three-panel usual view).
I'm unconvinced. Navigating the UI via knobs seems much more distracting to me. I have to reach farther in my vehicle, but more importantly, I have to watch the screen anyway to make sure the knob ends up on the right control.
It really depends on what you are doing, but yes - if you need to look at the screen to do anything, you still fail safety. A knob is nicer than a touchscreen because you don't have to adjust to a moving vehicle to hit the right spot of the screen (for this same reason recent airplanes have buttons in addition to touchscreens).
Still, if you are very used to the UI, you can say the music app is one item down from the map, and the phone is two, so you can count presses. I was able to SMS people with a Nokia phone with a hand on the steering wheel and one on the phone (back when it was not forbidden).
Even physical controls can be a downgrade if poorly implemented.
R.I.P. Anton Yelchin, who brought us joy with his portrayal of Chekov in the Star Trek films, before losing his life at only 27, from a switch poorly masquerading as a brake lever.
At this point, I feel like automakers should be criminally liable for redesigning the automatic shifter UX. It's probably the 3rd/4th most dangerous control in the vehicle; why do we want people to have to relearn it every time they're in an unfamiliar car?
(I stick with a manual for my vehicles, so fortunately I'm mostly immunized against the madness.)
In my Hyundai pressing the mute button while on Bluetooth/Android Auto pauses playback and mutes. Pressing again resumes playback and volume to previous level.
Well, either I'm very dumb and didn't think to press play on the car I own to solve the problem I've had for years, or you're missing the fact that there is no play button on BYD cars.
Same with Toyota (fun fact—I discovered earlier this year, over three years that I bought my Prius, that there were whole displays in the dashboard I didn’t know existed while trying to adjust the volume from the steering wheel while I was backing out of my garage, but because the wheel was rotated 180°, I hit the wrong button. Turns out the navigation between different info displays is 2-dimensional and the ↑/↓ gives additional views into some of the information that I had no idea existed, as well as revealing some functionality I didn’t know was there for the HVAC).
All the effort put in to stopping drivers distracting themselves with phones while driving, then we get big distracting touchscreens with apps front+centre in many new cars, and apparently that's OK.
I think it's just typical that this is allowed because it maximises profits; let's be real, a big fat touch screen and nothing else, is significantly cheaper than all of those expensive buttons, knobs, dials and switches that have been engineered and tested to perfection.
Did cars get cheaper when they took all of those out? I certainly didn't notice.
Some still have knobs. My mom's caddy has knobs in front of the armrest that control everything, so the touchscreen is optional but works just as well for those that want it.
The things that CarPlay does are not the things that are controlled with buttons. Navigation, music, audiobooks, notifications work best with a screen. The driving and vehicle features like heat, blinkers, etc are where you want dedicated physical buttons.
It will also depreciate by 50% or more in 5 years, so there’s that. Honda and Toyota mostly use knobs and buttons for important controls and retain their value much better than Stellantis trash.
I'm not sure if the parent comment was written by AI or not (you're probably right) but consistency is indeed one of the main things I think about with Android Auto. Not just consistency between cars, but also consistency with the rest of my phone. The principle seems worth considering.
I used a car-sharing service (Communauto) for a while when I was between vehicles, and it was invaluable to just plug in my phone and not have to worry about setting up anything else. No menus to navigate, no signing into spotify or google maps or even pairing bluetooth. Just plug in, yes trust this car, go.
It’s exhausting to read comments like yours where you are clearly triggered by a grammatical construction and reacting far more formulaically than the comment you’re addressing. The reason AI follows these grammatical patterns is because real humans also write that way. I personally identified with the word “consistency” specifically. Yes, that and quality are what I value in CarPlay.
"You are clearly triggered" "comments like yours" "reacting far more formulaically... you're" "you you you". They taught in the dorms first year to minimize "you" statements. Something to think about and profit from.
If all it takes to be a good person is spam low-effort high attention virtue signals that's great I will do more of that.
It‘s so annoying. Please, folks: Write your own words with your own quirks! Yes, you aren't a native speaker. Yes, it will read weird. But I prefer weirdness over AI. There is so much noise in text that is written by AI, it hurts my brain.
I like to disagree here. Despite the downvotes, not many people write or talk like that. It is not that common, at least in english. Contrastive framing is a pretty low-effort, high-attention signal, which makes sense in e.g. summaries, titles or ads. AI uses this as training data, and once you have this data, reinforcment learning will only deepen the usage, e.g. it will appear more often. Because it "sounds" familiar.
I'm sorry, but I do not buy the "people talk like that" argument. It's anecdotal evidence for me, sure, but I'm waiting for facts.
