For the first time in 28 years of JD Power’s car owner survey, there is a consecutive year-over-year decline in satisfaction, with most of the ire directed toward in-car infotainment.
My biggest gripe is that they are incredibly distracting to use while driving. The safety implications are huge. I hate on-screen buttons. On top of that most are poorly coded and run slowly.
I enjoy using Apple CarPlay with the exception that they won’t allow their native weather app. For years I wondered why, and I found out Apple didn’t want a driver to use the app because they determined weather maps too distracting.
The nice thing about carplay (and I assume android auto…though I don’t know) is that the software lives on your phone and can be updated easily.
Home-grown infotainment systems in cars are universally ass. It’s nice to see someone in the industry admit it.
I’m with the “Touchscreen for GPS or Phone mirroring”, physical knobs for EVERYTHING else. My Jetta has a physical button for changing the song on the wheel. It’s got physical knobs for temperature control and lights. I mirror the phone for GPS and music and never use the touchscreen otherwise.
I absolutely refuse to buy a car where the only thing in the dash is a single big touchscreen. This is a really cheap and lazy way to design a car. It’s not fancy or futuristic. It’s turning an engineering problem into a cheap software problem. Any feature that controls some aspect of the physical car such as AC, headlights, turn signal, seat placement, side mirrors, etc… should all be physical buttons with some tactile feedback. The only thing that is acceptable as a screen is information display and controlling entertainment.
If electric vehicles 10 years from now don’t re-engineer buttons, dials and knobs into their cars I am just going to walk 30 miles every day.
The touchscreens are cheaper, that’s the main reason they are becoming common. Honda has already realized they are an issue, and has been going back to physical buttons.
The horrifying part is that often physical buttons are mere affectations now anyway, and instead everything is still controlled by the central computer system. Like I was comparing Hondas to Subarus and while the latter had physical buttons where the former had touchscreens, whenever the computer is busy then e.g. the volume knob still gets entirely ignored. I still like it better, but it is not really better, instead it just “looks different”.
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So they actually don’t need a car, just infotainment. A couch without wheels would do.
I guess a lot of cars are putting most of their controls behind infotainment systems. I know a lot of the EVs do this (Tesla, and Chevy for certain), so I think it’s more a backlash against that.
I don’t have any of that in my car, except for Apple CarPlay, and I’m fairly satisfied with it. My previous car had OnStar, and that included built in navigation, satellite radio, and wifi. Quite frankly, with the exception of the emergency services OnStar has, I don’t miss the rest of it, and I’m sure as hell glad I don’t have to access climate control and other options thorugh a touchscreen. Fuck that.
Amen. Give me knobs! I can adjust volume, station, temperature, fan speed, wiper speed, and my headlights without looking away from the road.
Really tempted to swap for a system with phone integration for the maps, but not if I sacrifice safety. I’ll just keep using my dash mount for my phone!
I had a 2019 Jetta GLI. I set the temperature the day I got it and never bothered fiddling with it in the 4 years I had it. The fan speed and airflow looked after itself just fine. Temperatures here swing between -35 to +35, so it’s not like we don’t have variability.
It had rain sensing wipers and automatic headlights which worked perfectly. It did have physical controls for those, but I only used the wash and high-beam switches.
It had built in navigation, but I tended to use Apple Carplay and Google maps and Spotify for music.
Now that version of the Jetta had physical controls for heated/cooled seats, HVAC and audio functions. I just never used them aside from the seat heat/cool.
It also had a pile of redundant controls on the steering wheel. That’s where I controlled volume or selection.
