How car manufacturers are getting it wrong

"BaconSandwich is tasty." (baconsandwich) 11/07/2015 at 13:39 • Filed to: None

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This is something that keeps popping into my brain: it seems like very few car manufacturers are doing things right with one thing in particular - especially almost everyone making electric cars, including Tesla.

(Image source: hashslush.com)

My beef is this: obsolescence. An electric car - and especially an electric car - is inherently a very simple thing: it’s got a battery, an electric motor... and a few other electrical bits like a charge controller and a DC to DC converter. Really, there’s not a lot of moving parts there, and each part is really responsible for doing one thing (e.g.: maintaining the proper voltage/amperage when charging the battery). So why is it that manufacturers insist on trying to stuff latest gadgets into their cars, and by doing so, are basically putting a ‘best before’ date on them?

I suppose it could be summed up in one word: sales. The tech-savvy generation wants it - or at least that’s what the marketing departments are saying. But is a short-term sale worth the cost of losing long-term brand loyalty, or having products that look decrepit in ten years?

(Image source: cnet.com)

Take, for example, the 2016 Chevy Volt. One of the features on the higher-trim model is a Qi wireless charger. I happen to own a Qi capable phone, yet I wouldn’t want this feature in my car, because I know that standards like that are quickly outdated. Yes, some standards like USB have been around for quite a while - but even that is starting to change. USB 3.1 type C connectors are already different than USB 3.1.

It’s the same deal with any sort of in-car navigation system and any sort of in-car entertainment system. How much does the option cost for an in-car navigation system that is likely to stop getting updates after just a few years? I’d hazard to say such a system is going to cost $1,500 or more. That’s basically $1,500 hosed down the drain after just a few years - especially when you try to find an address in a newer development. It’s the same deal with any sort of in-car entertainment system. It makes more sense to buy a new phone or a new tablet every few years and leave the car the way it is. This reminds me of an old Audi that a friend of mine had. It had an in-car phone that looked something like this:

(Image source: thetruthaboutcars.com)

It looks pretty ridiculous by today’s standards. But will the in-car navigation of today be the 8-track player of yesteryear?

As a software developer, I can see why the companies do this: no one likes supporting old stuff, even me. Believe me, 10 years in the software industry is a long time. (As in, if it were a horse, it would have been sent to the glue factory a long time ago). So what are the chances that some of these cars are going to receive updates more than 3 years after they are sold? Not too likely. I can’t picture Tesla supporting the Model S with the same rigor they do now when it hits its 10th birthday. By then they will be on doing other things. Even the software guys at Tesla won’t want to work on ‘that old thing’. They’ll want to be working on the latest-hotness of whatever it is they are making.

(Image source: bmwblog.com)

What will Apple’s or Google’s in-car offerings look like in 10 years? I don’t know - but I don’t want them in my car now, and I won’t likely want it in my car 10 years from now.

So what’s the solution? I think there’s a few things that could be done better:

Keeping systems as simple as possible.

Keeping systems as isolated as possible. Keep the gadget features in the gadgets, and leave car features in the car. We’ve seen this with the recent Jeep hacking. Systems such as the braking was accessible from other parts of the car, via wireless communication. Basically everything seemed to be running through a single in-car computer. Properly isolated systems like this help both with security and simplicity. A system that is simple will almost always outlive a system that is complex.

Open-sourcing car software after a set time period. So what if Tesla (or GM, or whoever else) doesn’t want to support their software after a certain period of time? By dumping the source code out to the public, let the end-users maintain it. Doing something like this could both win some brand loyalty and it’d save support costs in the long run.

Anyone else have thoughts on this, or am I just getting old and crotchety?

GhostZ > BaconSandwich is tasty. 11/07/2015 at 13:51

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Brand loyalty has nothing to do with having tech that becomes obsolete very quickly, and a used car having outdated terrible navigation/entertainment features has little to no impact on new car sales, if anything they boost new car sales since the only time you can get up-to-date technology is by buying new.

The fact is, cars are built to impress people for the 5-10 minutes that a person test drives them before buying, and then to keep them quiet and happy for the next 2-3 years without obvious complaints or regrets.

ADabOfOppo; Gone Plaid (Instructables Can Be Confusable) > BaconSandwich is tasty. 11/07/2015 at 13:57

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My full-time job is teaching people how to use all the technology in the new car they just purchased from the luxury brand of a Japanese automaker.

I want very much to just move to having a dumb screen that powers up when you plug in your smart-device. CarPlay and AndroidAuto are a step in that direction, however they have a huge issue with data and privacy.

Apple and Google never do anything out the kindness of their hearts. They want access to all that yummy data people input into the center stack so they can sell it for sweet cash to advertisers.

Unless we can convince the marketing departments to convince the buying public that they don’t need/want any of that gadgetry in their cars, we are always going to have issues with feature obsolescence.

deekster_caddy > BaconSandwich is tasty. 11/07/2015 at 14:02

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You are pretty much spot on. I have been harsh on infotainment systems and with good reason. They are either difficult to use, poorly designed, or designed with inappropriate features out of the box.

Your note about the Qi wireless charging in the Volt surprised me. Why would they put something supported by so few manufacturers? USB is almost as bad, but the ‘old’ USB port is going to be around for a while. It’s not as good as a simple Aux jack, but still...

A simple aux jack leaves the connectivity up to me. If I want a wireless connection, it’s up to me to get a “bluetooth audio to aux output” adapter that works with my audio device. If I want to play from Stitcher, don’t build a friggin app into the dashboard, that’s stupid. Just give me an audio line to my device that uses Stitcher.

Built in cellphone and cellular based wifi have a big problem - cellular technology changes. Look at what happened with the original Onstar modules - basically useless now. Many of those cars are still on the road, but frozen with obselete features.

An aux jack will be useful for a number of years to come, at least. Adapters will be available in some shape or form for quite a while.

I have a ‘13 Chevy Volt. It has USB (okay, but not enough Amperage to charge many USB devices), and with that you can operate the Stitcher and Pandora apps on your phone directly from the radio. That’s stupid. I never plug my phone into the built-in USB port because it doesn’t have enough power to keep my phone charged. Bluetooth audio works much better. Even then, you have to wonder how many generations of smartphone will support Bluetooth before something else comes along, or the bluetooth technology is no longer backwards compatible enough to work with the old bluetooth hardware built into the car.

sm70- why not Duesenberg? > BaconSandwich is tasty. 11/07/2015 at 14:40

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I get what you are saying. Like the one pictured, my ‘01 A8L has an in-car phone that would’ve been the shit for a wealthy businessman just after the turn of the century, but it is so obsolete now that you couldn’t make it function even if you wanted to.

smobgirl > BaconSandwich is tasty. 11/07/2015 at 15:48

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I bought my car (a 2012) 1.5 years ago. Now, I do a lot of travel with my job, and we’re required to rent the cheapest cars available, so I’d done some extensive test-driving of (the rental spec version of) nearly everything within my budget and age/warranty requirements. I can’t tell you how many cars were crossed off my list because I hated the infotainment while renting. My office has a near-unanimous hatred of the Fiesta/Focus setup.

One of my favorite things about my car? No infotainment. It has the aux jack, a USB port (that also can’t charge my phone) and a Bluetooth option that’s so finicky I just ignore it. I might be a luddite but I have everything I need in whatever phone I have.

PS9 > BaconSandwich is tasty. 11/07/2015 at 16:57

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Naaah they’re not gonna do that.

Consumers don’t think that far ahead. They want something that’s guaranteed to work right now. ‘10 years from now all that stuff’s going to be obsolete, but 2 years from now I will have already swapped out whatever I got for the latest model on lease so why should I care?’

PS9 > smobgirl 11/07/2015 at 17:00

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I’m not sure what’s more amazing; that a cat can talk and type whole paragraphs of english, or that it also has a career, a new-ish car, and better grip on technology than some humans I’ve met...

pjhusa > BaconSandwich is tasty. 11/07/2015 at 17:03

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Ah... our ML had a portable car phone. It was state-of-the-art; a $2,000 option. My parents used the phone as their primary for ~3 years, and they even bought a duplicate so they wouldn’t have to share.

After they got into the whole Motorola Razr craze, both just left their MB phones in the drawer to wither away.

Now we all have the latest iPhone, and it works fine with our F30. We never spring for the “technology” options, so we have no navigation. The hardware on our iDrive is actually out of date already.

end of rant

TL DR: don’t spring for “technology” options. They’ll become life’s regrets.

Probenja > smobgirl 11/07/2015 at 17:06

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I kinda like the “infotainment system” on my mom’s versa, its easy and fast to use, comes with the basics like fm-am radio, cd player, usb, aux and a reliable bluetooth plus some extras like a colour screen for the back up camera and “apps” that are useless and not available in my country. The 2015 Fit LX also has a very similar head unit.

hike > BaconSandwich is tasty. 11/07/2015 at 17:52

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This pretty much sums up why I wouldn’t really want to buy just about any car on the market right now. Infotainment system all look very dated very quickly, but a nice looking radio can last forever. It’s why for anyone interested in any high end car with one of the fancy systems, I actually think it makes more sense to lease. Yes, it doesn’t make as much financial sense, but it’s the automotive equivalent of getting a phone upgrade every 2 years.

BaconSandwich is tasty. > PS9 11/07/2015 at 18:44

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How long will it take before someone comes along and starts treating consumers like they are actually intelligent (of which, some actually are)? But yeah, most people are too short sighted.

smobgirl > PS9 11/08/2015 at 00:29

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Err, umm, uhh...meow! ;)

dogisbadob > BaconSandwich is tasty. 11/13/2015 at 23:08

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wait for the blue screen of death :)

Gizmo - The Only Good Gremlin, but don't feed me after Midnight > BaconSandwich is tasty. 11/14/2015 at 06:34

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Open Source would be nice, but these companies love to cry proprietary for life. Then you have all the lawyers making demands between the car companies and their vendors, i.e., Chevy tells Delco radio xzy is for their car only and no one else can know whats in it... ever. 10 years down the road Chevy’s moved on and why waste the money to change the contract with Delco to release the obsolete radio to the public domain.

Now if they started with an open source architecture interface and let the vendors fight for the consumers dollars in how to interact with that interface... everybody wins. Car companies don’t have to do the R&D; vendors can make infotainment systems that can work in every car; consumers can pick and choose the options and features they want, the man-machine interface they like, and not have to pay for stuff they don’t want.

These kinds of feelings are what have fueled the CarPC hobby for the last 20 years. Only in the last 3 years have OEM manufacturers begun to come close to what CarPCs have been capable of for years.

I’ve had a CarPC in all my cars since the late ‘80s. I design my own man-machine interface with big touchscreen buttons and quick navigation buttons on my joystick.

With an open source interface, I’ve collected hundreds of screen layouts, colors,backgrounds, button-type, etc. And if I want to tweak someones design to fit my needs, its as easy as opening Adobe Illustrator and moving objects around.

As for features/options, everything is modular. MP3 players are built-in, but nav, fm (basic, rds, or hd), xm, cd, dvd, internet, etc. are all items that can be loaded, but don’t have to. I started out with 3 USB add-in and now have 13 with two open ports in the dash powerful enough to charge most appliances. My internal storage is 1/2 terra in one car and 2 terabytes in the other. Just about whatever can be thought up, has. And probably integrates with the other features better than any car manufacturer could imagine. For example, one button calls up a screen that shows the six cheapest gas stations within a set (usually 30) range... pressing the square for any of the six sends the gps details for that location to the nav program, switches to nav screen and begins turn-by-turn guidance to that station. Another module I have feeds my gps data to my home server so my family can log into my website and find out where I am and where I’ve been in the last 2 weeks.

Android systems are going to be the key to unlocking the OEM infotainment lockdown. The CarPC community has high hopes for Android/cellphone/Canbus open integration. Most Android devices can be eventually jail broke, opening the system to custom applications. Currently, this requires reverse engineering and hacking, but hope reigns eternal that these systems and their architectures will become more and more accessible to the end users.