GM Says It’s Ditching Apple CarPlay and Android Auto for Your Safety::undefined
I’m ditching ever considering them for a vehicle purchase for my own sanity.
Fucking OEM infotainment systems are bullshit and I will never buy a car ever again that doesn’t support CarPlay and Android Auto.
Tbh I was already no longer considering them. My previous car was GM and got junked before 10 years were up. Now I’m driving a Nissan still going strong (edit: on year 10 right now), haven’t even had any major problem yet (knock on wood). By year 7, the GM had a replacement engine, clutch and starter. And I was living with the fuel gauge not resetting to zero properly when it started so having no idea how much fuel was in the tank until the low fuel light came on.
This experience has been so much better that it will take a lot to get me to consider an American brand over a Japanese one.
This feels like something a C-suite came up with to carve out extra profit and had some bean counters crunch the numbers on, fluffed them up a bit and then had the company roll with it on his idea.
I’m usually disappointed by consumer apathy, but from everyone I talk to who has a car with a screen, if they have CarPlay/Android Auto they couldn’t do without it, and if they don’t have it it’s the biggest thing they wish they had.
I’ve ridden with a friend who has it and uses it a lot, and I can understand the attraction for users who like to be connected while driving. The speech to text stuff actually worked pretty well. I don’t feel desire for it myself, but for me its absence is at most a minor inconvenience.
It does seem like it could mostly be replaced by a software app though, plus some kind of dash mount for a phone.
Fwiw there are aftermarket options do add it through USB.
The hardware would have to support video input via USB though. I think if we’re talking about car electronics, more than likely those addons use wired Android Auto and are really meant for cars that don’t support it wirelessly.
Unless, of course, you’re talking about some aftermarket head units as well in which case all bets are off.
This is going to cripple them in the market. Removing features does nothing to make a vehicle more attractive to the average idiot. Maybe GM thinks they can get away with it because the demand for cars exceeds the supply right now, I don’t know.
They are going back to the days of a $100 proprietary hdmi cable and annual maps subscription with ads for your own safety
They see how much money Google and Apple are making selling your data and want a bigger cut so they need to make it so they’re the only source of data extraction then your data is more valuable.
As they mention in the article, tesla and rivian are doing quite well and both have opted not to integrate with phone mirroring options. So it’s a gamble, but they may think they can get away with it. Like you say, the high demand may be giving them the confidence to try.
Tesla and Rivian are both newer electric-only manufacturers, though (unless there’s something I don’t know about Rivian). Their market is quite different from stodgy old GM’s.
They’re probably still marketing to boomers, maybe an ok play in the short term, but that target audience is probably not going to prop them up forever
Yes, let’s trust a corporate that’s doing things for our safety out of the kindness of their heart.
Like Google
Google ~likes to exploit~ you too
it doesnt really matter why they do it as long as it increases security imho
maybe they do it to sell more cars because their cars are deemed safer than competitors? so what? less people dying and getting injured is a good thing
As if I needed another reason to not buy a GM.
Good reason to continue my GM boycott of their garbage vehicles.
I have a GM vehicle I like. I already don’t pay them for OnStar. I’m certainly not going to pay them to replace my phone. And then likely have to pay for cellular access for my car.
There really needs to be a standardised open protocol rather than Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.
There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to use a non-Apple/Google app for my in-car infotainment. Apple and Google just want our data.
Let Android Auto and CarPlay be options in a competing market, rather than zero choice and just having to use whatever your phone provides.
There are aftermarket options to support screen mirroring over usb, so I think it is possible. Is anyone else putting in the work to compete with Google and Apple? I’ve been watching as Google ads integration to various cars - as an example they didn’t show turn by turn directions on the screen behind the steering wheel a while ago, and added it on Honda at some point. These features take investment, and perhaps the OSS options aren’t keeping up?
There needs to be a lot more to it than just screen monitoring, it needs to recognise touch inputs, high-fidelity, low-latency audio (both ways), and importantly the car needs to be able to send information back to the device (is the handbrake on, are the headlights on, etc). That requires integration from the carmaker.
Open source solutions at the moment cannot be used with in-car infotainment, because of that requirement that the car needs to send information to the device. I think there should be an open protocol for this that all cars implement.
Currently, this a dealbreaker for me. As in I won’t buy a vehicle that does this, or charges me a subscription fee for a built in feature like heated seats.
The systems are also far from perfect. The amount of times I got frustrated with voice to text being wrong, repeatedly, or lack of options or voice search or something of the like in Spotify or something is frustrating and not useful. When it works it works and it’s great but there are many times it doesn’t. All systems are far from perfect still.
Well, tech companies keep improving their products, car manufacturers are known to forget about any product they sold unless they are forced into a recall.
Has anyone jailbreaked one of these cars? Can you install your own OS on them? Seems like that should be doable.
Great. Now we have nanny companies?
I’ll spend my money accordingly.
It’s not actually for safety - it’s because they want their own software to be the only option.
It’s the same move Apple uses whenever they block something in the name of “security”.
The security they are referring to is their financial security.
“We are dropping carplay and android auto because mobile phones distract the driver”
But the dashboard looks like this
Hyundai and Kia it is, then.
Their warranty isn’t a sign that their cars are good, it is a ploy to make you think their cars are good.
Kinda middle of the pack overall, but they’re our ahead of every American manufacturer, so there’s that.
They started the 100k warranty to build confidence after their engines were failing do a design flaw they blamed on a manufacturing error found in 1.2m cars. They screwed owners by not replacing the engines due to mileage, then they upped the mile limit after the owners spent thousands replacing the engines with used ones that had the same design flaw. Why used and not new? The new engines, that still had the same design flaw, were backordered for 6 months or more.
They have almost 4m recalled vehicles going from present to 2010 because of random fires on multiple components and have instructed owners not to park indoors.
Their hybrids have an active louvered grill that opens with an electric motor which is not weatherproofed, which can cause the grill to stay closed and cause thousands in damage when water gets in it and the car overheats.
Seeing the problems I have seen with them while working automotive means I could never recommend someone buy one due to their consistent poor design and lying about their engine failure cause.
As if i would buy an American car, anyway.
