That description made me think of the four-slider Vanagon setup, which basically requires a short college course to operate. Flexible but not what I’d call simplicity.
That description made me think of the four-slider Vanagon setup, which basically requires a short college course to operate. Flexible but not what I’d call simplicity.
ProDarwin said:Interesting to see support for Android Auto here. I've used it in several rentals and my DD has it. It blows.
I would like it 10x more if I didn't have to plug my phone in. I don't want to plug in my phone. From what I understand it doesn't even transmit data via the cable anyway, its still a Bluetooth connection. WTF.
Car companies and even dedicated car audio companies can't make USB connections work with all phones and media players. They tried and for a few years there it worked (Early Teens?) It's just a mountain too tall. Thumb drives are USA A-OK though. But for some reason Bluetooth audio and voice aren't much of a problem. Perhaps since Bluetooth is a "standard" for audio whereas USB is still two computers trying to talk to each other whereas other USB devices are things like mice, memory cards, keyboards and thumb drives talking to computers.
USB is an interface, Bluetooth is a protocol.
Keith Tanner said:STM317 said:Do most people not just use their phones for Nav? I think I've put an address into a car once in my life.
Some people were alive when phones were dumb. My 2002 BMW doesn't care for your phone, it came with one attached to the center console. So if you want to use the nav, you're entering it into the car.
I use the on-board nav on our ND Miatas fairly regularly. It's a better display than a phone and it's better integrated into the car. Besides, when Apple Auto 2.0 comes out and 1.0 stops working with all the new phones, you're going to wish your car was a little smarter. You think I'm a luddite for thinking this, but I have a current-generation Dodge truck that has a 30-pin iPod connector built in.
I do not think you're a luddite. I'm a 33 year old that looks up directions before I leave my house. I use an iphone 4 for goodness sake. My music is on CDs, not my phone. I dont' care about syncing anything to anything. I want my phone to do phone stuff and my car to do car stuff.
Your point about obsolescence doesn't make me want cars to be smarter, it makes me want them to be dumber. Tech goes obsolete quickly. If I'm going to have to deal with obsolete tech, I'd rather it be in the form of a phone that cost a few hundred bucks and can be easily replaced in an hour vs an integral part of my vehicle that cost several thousand (or tens of thousands) of dollars. Otherwise you're stuck inputting an address into a Nav system that's from 2002, and hasn't seen an update in about 15 years.
*I know that I'm not the target customer for new vehicles, so my opinion is just curmudgeoning. But considering the rate of tech change, and how long companies support a product with updates, etc why does it make any sense to make this stuff such an integral part of a very expensive vehicle? It's the second largest purchase that most people make behind a house, and it's going to work for a couple of years and then basically be junk. Would you buy a house with Amazon's Alexa, or a current iphone dock built in somehow? That doesn't seem like it's going to age very well at all. Don't invest in putting that hardware into an expensive asset when you can simply add/update cheaper external devices at any time and get the same usefulness.
I like the infotainment screen for vehicle stats, nav or what song is on, but when i rent a nicer newer vehicle, or a higher end model i end up HATING the touchscreen if it makes you use it for the climate controls. Music is easy, bluetooth to my phone, done. Google maps from phone, done. Then i want to turn on the ac, adjust the fan, the temp, adjust heated seats that required me using the touch screen, switching to a different page for it, finding the stuff i need. I have cursed it many times and wondered how the berk they thought it was a good idea to do that. It obviously requires you to take your eyes off the road and look away.
My “nice” vehicle is a 2012 loaded nissan frontier crew cab pro-4x. It has a little 7 segment display for the radio that tells me pretty much nothing. And i dont mind it.
And im 37. So yeah, good move Mazda.
Forgive my ignorance, but I thought most manufacturers regularly came out with patches and updates for their infotainment systems. Not true?
In reply to GCrites80s :
Yeah, I get that. So why make me plug the phone in if none of the data is transmitted over the cable?
Well, enough is translated to verify that A) its plugged in and B) it is plugged into a particular port on the car - NOT the charging port, it has to be the USB port that otherwise holds the thumb drive with a lot of my music on it.
STM317 said:Keith Tanner said:STM317 said:Do most people not just use their phones for Nav? I think I've put an address into a car once in my life.
Some people were alive when phones were dumb. My 2002 BMW doesn't care for your phone, it came with one attached to the center console. So if you want to use the nav, you're entering it into the car.
I use the on-board nav on our ND Miatas fairly regularly. It's a better display than a phone and it's better integrated into the car. Besides, when Apple Auto 2.0 comes out and 1.0 stops working with all the new phones, you're going to wish your car was a little smarter. You think I'm a luddite for thinking this, but I have a current-generation Dodge truck that has a 30-pin iPod connector built in.I do not think you're a luddite. I'm a 33 year old that looks up directions before I leave my house. I use an iphone 4 for goodness sake. My music is on CDs, not my phone. I dont' care about syncing anything to anything. I want my phone to do phone stuff and my car to do car stuff.
Your point about obsolescence doesn't make me want cars to be smarter, it makes me want them to be dumber. Tech goes obsolete quickly. If I'm going to have to deal with obsolete tech, I'd rather it be in the form of a phone that cost a few hundred bucks and can be easily replaced in an hour vs an integral part of my vehicle that cost several thousand (or tens of thousands) of dollars. Otherwise you're stuck inputting an address into a Nav system that's from 2002, and hasn't seen an update in about 15 years.
It's a valid viewpoint for sure, but there's a lot to be said for integration the particular case of a car. It's an environment where user interface is critical or someone could die. I've got cars with obsolete nav systems, cars where I have to use my phone for nav, and access to cars with a current modern nav system. Using the phone is the least effective, as I'm dealing with a small screen that may or may not be well placed in the vehicle for legibility, interaction that can only happen with precise taps on a small touchscreen, no integration with anything else in the car and reliant on a network connection that may or may not be present. The obsolete nav system works as well as it ever did and the maps can be updated. The current Mazda implementation is my favorite - easy to input information via a touchscreen while stopped, a quick and easy zoom in/out while using a big friendly knob while driving. The 2019 VW nav system is not as friendly, as it relies on a touchscreen for any inputs but it's still fairly useable.
I don't have a problem with a car being smart, but it should be self contained. It should not rely on a disposable phone for anything beyond an actual telephone. Nav should be on-board so that when we're on Bluetooth 27 and AirPlay 2.0 it still works. That's why my 2002 BMW setup is still functional - had it been built to rely on a phone for anything, it would be an old analog phone that IIRC doesn't even have a network anymore. But because it's self-contained, it still works just fine even if the interface is dated. It's not really obsolete, just old. There's an important distinction there.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Only problem with that BMW nav is no more map updates. I've got that issue in my E38. It's got the upgraded MK4 nav module, but the newest maps available are from 2015 and they'll never be updated again. Which means they slowly become useless in a lot of places.
On the other hand, if that E38 had been built to rely on turn-of-the-century cellphone tech, it would have become completely unusable years ago. It's always possible that BMW (or a third party) could come up with a map update for your system but nobody's going to turn the AMPS network back on. That's a very different failure mode than becoming the equivalent of an old map.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Very true. Fortunately, the phone module was easy to swap for one out of a newer BMW, so the built in phone features that relied on the old-tech phone setup was easy to make useful again. Newer phone module supports bluetooth, so now all of the built-in phone features are back to working with a modern cell phone.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Nav should not be integrated with the vehicle, if for no other reason that you can't rip the infotainment system out and put it in your other car. Or your rental after you have to take your car in for service. Or any other reason why you'd want to take it with you.
It should also be separate from the phone. Nothing more annoying that something phone-casted getting interrupted because of a phone call that you were going to ignore anyway because you are driving.
I'm a bit of a luddite and I approve this message. (Under 30 and not the target audience for new cars)
I've never seen the need for a full on touchscreen mediacenter display in a car. I think there is a lot of merit to the topic of tech obsolescence and how it pertains to car features and I also think that most of the features strewn about by the feature rage of the last few years is just chaff by the wayside. Mazda will certainly catch a lot of ill-informed, reactionary, clickbait flack but if you make a car for the driving experience then there isn't much need for all the touchscreens and their trappings.
penultimeta said:Forgive my ignorance, but I thought most manufacturers regularly came out with patches and updates for their infotainment systems. Not true?
Not necessarily. I remember a customer coming in with his 2017 Buick Enclave (this was in 2017 too) and complaining that his new Samsung Galaxy 8 wouldn't stay paired with the radio and the Bluetooth kept fumbling calls. I see that the module has the newest calibration, so I ring up GM Technical Assistance Center and ask the engineers what the deal his. He told me that the Lambda-chassis (Enclave, Acadia, Outlook, Traverse) radio architecture dated back to 2007 when that vehicle chassis was debuted, but that the radio itself hadn't had a software update since 2015. And with the those vehicles getting a complete overhaul (including a new radio) for 2018, GM had no interest in updating the old radios. So pretty much every phone that was introduced after 2015 wouldn't work properly in the '16 and '17 Enclaves. Same thing recently with a customer who was all pissed off because his 2013 GMC Acadia wouldn't talk to his brand new iPhone X, and his only option was to buy an older phone if he wanted Bluetooth to work.
On the topic of haptics, I *enjoyed* the different feels that different controls had.
For example, you could be sure that you were adjusting the temp control and not the vent slider.
NickD said:penultimeta said:Forgive my ignorance, but I thought most manufacturers regularly came out with patches and updates for their infotainment systems. Not true?
Not necessarily. I remember a customer coming in with his 2017 Buick Enclave (this was in 2017 too) and complaining that his new Samsung Galaxy 8 wouldn't stay paired with the radio and the Bluetooth kept fumbling calls. I see that the module has the newest calibration, so I ring up GM Technical Assistance Center and ask the engineers what the deal his. He told me that the Lambda-chassis (Enclave, Acadia, Outlook, Traverse) radio architecture dated back to 2007 when that vehicle chassis was debuted, but that the radio itself hadn't had a software update since 2015. And with the those vehicles getting a complete overhaul (including a new radio) for 2018, GM had no interest in updating the old radios. So pretty much every phone that was introduced after 2015 wouldn't work properly in the '16 and '17 Enclaves. Same thing recently with a customer who was all pissed off because his 2013 GMC Acadia wouldn't talk to his brand new iPhone X, and his only option was to buy an older phone if he wanted Bluetooth to work.
I thought Bluetooth was a single standard.
I should know better than to assume tech retains a standard.
Brett_Murphy said:On the topic of haptics, I *enjoyed* the different feels that different controls had.
For example, you could be sure that you were adjusting the temp control and not the vent slider.
That is because you are a driver, not a designer.
Like TunerStudio. There are some ways in which its its interface is maddening, yet the creator spends most of his time talking about customizable gauges. WGAF. It is a tool, not a fashion accessory.
(megatune-was-better.gif)
I'm happy about the ditching of a touch screen in the car, for 3 reasons: 1, they get dirty and it looks bad easy. 2, they don't berkeleying work. If they all worked like an iPad, sure, great, but they don't. 3: Not easy to use while driving.
Knurled. said:Brett_Murphy said:On the topic of haptics, I *enjoyed* the different feels that different controls had.
For example, you could be sure that you were adjusting the temp control and not the vent slider.That is because you are a driver, not a designer.
Like TunerStudio. There are some ways in which its its interface is maddening, yet the creator spends most of his time talking about customizable gauges. WGAF. It is a tool, not a fashion accessory.
(megatune-was-better.gif)
You can build your own digital dash with TunerStudio, which is why the customizable gauges are important to some people.
If you're tuning, you're not using the fancy gauges, once tuned you can use the fancy gauges to monitor and maybe make a few adjustments if necessary.
On some cars where the gauges are driven by the ECU, being able to toss a cheap tablet or standalong computer of sort into the dash and use the software you've already bought to display what the old ECU used to or more seems like a great frugal solution to me.
Knurled. said:NickD said:penultimeta said:Forgive my ignorance, but I thought most manufacturers regularly came out with patches and updates for their infotainment systems. Not true?
Not necessarily. I remember a customer coming in with his 2017 Buick Enclave (this was in 2017 too) and complaining that his new Samsung Galaxy 8 wouldn't stay paired with the radio and the Bluetooth kept fumbling calls. I see that the module has the newest calibration, so I ring up GM Technical Assistance Center and ask the engineers what the deal his. He told me that the Lambda-chassis (Enclave, Acadia, Outlook, Traverse) radio architecture dated back to 2007 when that vehicle chassis was debuted, but that the radio itself hadn't had a software update since 2015. And with the those vehicles getting a complete overhaul (including a new radio) for 2018, GM had no interest in updating the old radios. So pretty much every phone that was introduced after 2015 wouldn't work properly in the '16 and '17 Enclaves. Same thing recently with a customer who was all pissed off because his 2013 GMC Acadia wouldn't talk to his brand new iPhone X, and his only option was to buy an older phone if he wanted Bluetooth to work.
I thought Bluetooth was a single standard.
I should know better than to assume tech retains a standard.
It may be more universal now. But I know, for example, my '13 135i will only do voice calls over Bluetooth, no music. And at one point a long time ago, not my car, but you could stream music over Bluetooth but it wasn't in stereo.
I miss that feature. In my BRZ, I could get in, it automatically paired with my car, hit play on Spotify and go.
Knurled. said:I thought Bluetooth was a single standard.
The bluetooth standard is a train wreck. It started out as a pretty simple way to hook a low-fidelity headset to a phone over a cheap radio (something it did reasonably well) and got extended in multiple poorly-thought-out, incompatible, and incomplete ways to do all kinds of kitchen sink stuff. You can't write anything that will "just work" just by reading the standard, you need to actively test every device against every other device to be sure it works.
As for touch screens, I'm generally not a fan. That said, I have a touch screen Android Auto head unit (aftermarket) in my truck, and it works plausibly well. That's partly because its role is very limited, and because it's tied in with the steering wheel controls reasonably well thorugh an adapter.
Current auto designers are trying to take every knob and switch off the dashboard and move it into the touch screen to cut down on cost. That's a disaster, IMHO. Touch screens mean you CAN put all that functionality on a single input device, but only at the expense of complexity and difficulty of operation.
I also despise the heavy-handed disabling of various controls when the car decides it's moving. They're selling me a car with a bunch of features that I can't use most of the time because they skimped so much on the user interface cost that they decided I couldn't be trusted not to crash while controlling it.
^That's one reason why you don't see people just get in their cars and go or arrive somewhere without lingering in it for 5 minutes afterward anymore.
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