While I like driving. I hate all the shit modern car manufacturers put in modern cars. Sure they’re more efficient on fuel than older ones. But we should be able to have that without needing the car to be tracked and data collected, we have in the past.
I feel like all these driver aids are also making people worse at driving. They need to do less, so they pay attention less.
On top of that, can we ban touchscreens in cars? Physical buttons give physical feed back, you can feel for the button you want and press it without taking your eyes off the road. A touchscreen gives you none of that, and means you have to look away. It’s somewhat mitigated when they put buttons on the steering wheel, but not all buttons can fit in that spot.
Sure some cars have google assistant, Siri or Alexa. But I actually get so frustrated when trying to tell my phone to navigate somewhere or just simply change the song. And that’s just the phone! The amount of times I have to pull over because it glitches out, or just fails to interpret some or all of what I’ve just said (sure it’s better than voice assistants used to be, but it still breaks regularly) is still too high. The amount of times I regularly tell it to do something, only to find it was still processing the activation voice command, and therefore was initialising the VA screen, and not listening to a word I said after the initial activation is infuriating.
I love technology, but the technology has no place in cars if it detracts or distracts from the act and safety of actually driving the car.
On top of that, can we ban touchscreens in cars? Physical buttons give physical feed back, you can feel for the button you want and press it without taking your eyes off the road. A touchscreen gives you none of that, and means you have to look away. It’s somewhat mitigated when they put buttons on the steering wheel, but not all buttons can fit in that spot.
Android Auto has a good interface for integrating its functions into a car touchscreen, but it’s not controlling anything “important”.
I agree that all the traditional car controls should be actual knobs and buttons. I rented a car once and they gave me a Tesla, and I couldn’t stand how all the controls were behind its touchscreen. I never felt the need to buy a Tesla, but that one experience turned me off from them entirely.
Nah, I don’t have the budget for that, and here in Australia even an NB MX5 is over 10K- I’m actually currently looking at a 08’ fiesta XR4 (in other parts of the world that’s the 2L fiesta ST)
I know what you’re saying. My '23 Audi a3 has all the things you would want to buttons instead of touch screen only.
I have huge gripes with bad infotainment systems, only reason I bought this new car was because I have no issues with it. I’m coming from old American cars. All the benefits of physical buttons with tactile feedback while being way more fun to drive.
I agree. Let’s cut the middle man and force 100% automated driving. People can fuck in the back then with less likely to die than with humans with stupid cars without assistance driver aids. Driving is extremely dangerous and honestly I trust ai over other people (in USA).
Nah, I don’t know if AI will ever be 100% perfect, and I don’t want to trust it fully. Ai is human built, and it’s my personal belief that humans aren’t perfect, so AI will therefore never be perfect.
Also, you will always want a qualified driver to be able to take over should some part of the car sensor systems fail.
Sensors, unlike humans have a tendency to fail quickly, sometimes instantly, and even AI and autopilot can behave erratically if it gets bad or false inputs from bad sensors.
It’s like in a airliner, autopilot even though at this point is pretty much practically capable of flying a plane completely from takeoff to landing, there will always be at least pilots on duty in the cockpit in order to account for unforseen circumstances and failures, even if they never actually fly the plane normally.
Even if we somehow manage to create a sentient AI, it will still have to rely on the information it receives from various sensors in the car. If those sensors fail, and it doesn’t have the information it needs to do the job, it could still make a mistake due to a lack of, or completely incorrect data, or if it manages to realise the data is erroneous it still could flatly refuse to work. I’d rather keep people in the loop as a final failsafe just in case that should ever happen.
I see your point on this but when should an sentient AI be able to decide for itself? What makes it different from a human by this point? Human, us rely on sensors too to react to the world. We make mistakes also, even dangerous one. I guess we just want to make sure this sentient AI is not working against us?
That’s why it’s layers of security. Humans have a natural instinct - usually we can tell if our eyesight is getting worse. And any mistake we make is most likely due to us not noticing something or reacting in time, something that the AI should be able to compensate for.
The only time where this is not true when we have a medical episode, like a grand Mal or something. But everyone knows safety is always relative. And we mitigate that by redundancies. Sensors will have redundancies, and we ourselves are also an additional redundancy. Heck we could also put in sensors for the occupants to monitor their vitals. There is once again a question of privacy, but really that’s all we should need to protect against that.
A sentient AI, not counting any potential issues with its own sentience, would have issues with sudden failed or poorly maintained sensors. Usually when a sensor fails, it either zeros out, maxes out, or starts outputting completely erratic results.
If any of these results look the same as normal results, they can be hard for the AI to tell. We can reconcile those sensors with our own human senses and tell if they failed. A car only has its sensors to know what it needs to know, so if it fails, will it be able to know? Sure sensor redundancy helps, but there is still that minor chance that all the redundant sensors fail in a way that the AI cannot tell, and in that case the driver should be there to take over.
Again I will refer to the system of an aircraft, as even if it’s a 1 in a billion chance there have been a few instances where this has happened and the autpilot nearly pitched the plane into the ground or ocean, and the plane was only saved due to the pilots takeover - in one of those cases it was due to a faulty sensor reporting that the angle of attack was too steeply pitched up, so the stick pusher mechanism tried to pitch the nose down, to save the plane, when infact it already was down. An autopilot, even an AI one will have no choice to trust its sensors as that’s the only mechanism it has.
When it come to a faulty redundant sensor, the AI also has to work out which sensor to trust, and if it picks the wrong one, well you’re fucked. It might not be able to work out which sensor is more trustworthy…
We keep ourselves safe with layered safety mechanisms and redundancy, including ourselves. So if anyone fails, the other can hopefully catch the failure.
AI doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than your average human driver. Which, you know isn’t a very high bar…
Comparing to an airplane pilot isn’t the same, a pilot goes through years of training to be able to fly passengers (Well beyond a dinky Cessna or whatever anyways) and you need years of experience on top before you are even considered by the big airlines
A human driver can get a license in as little as a few days
A touchscreen gives you none of that, and means you have to look away
That’s the reason why I don’t like listening to music on smart phones. Want to skip a track? Fish the phone out of your pocket, turn the screen back on, find the skip button, tap it, wait a second until the garbage app acknowledges that you’ve pressed it, turn off screen, put it back.
While on my 2000’s phone it’s just pressing one of the physical buttons.
Want to skip a track? Fish the phone out of your pocket, turn the screen back on, find the skip button, tap it, wait a second until the garbage app acknowledges that you’ve pressed it, turn off screen, put it back.
I had a HTC Touch Pro smartphone 15 years ago, and it had an optional headphone cable with buttons on it. You could use the buttons for pause/play, next track, and previous track, without having to get the phone out of your pocket.
I never really saw something like that again for wired headphones. I did sometimes see headphones with buttons on the headphones themselves, but often they just have play/pause.
Toyota said my prius needed an update so I installed the app for it. All the update did was remove fucking features that were usable in the car. Used to have the option to use Pandora from the console but it got removed randomly by an update.
Then they installed an Alexa search page that glitches my console if I every select it.
Sounds like getting the 2016 model of Prius was a good call on my part. Of course, it was 2019 when I did it and that model wasn’t substantially different, but that sounds awful.
I haven’t had that problem, but it does do this weird thing where it sometimes messes up pairing with the bluetooth on my phone and plays everything super fast.
My 2015 Subaru Impreza has a shitty entertainment system. At least it still connects via BT, but they removed the screen mirroring really early on and the app had ~1 star on Google Play for a long time (probably still does). Thankfully it’s not integrated with the features of the car in any meaningful way. I could swap it for any other head unit. No sure how that will work with modern cars where the AC, lane departure, and everything else goes to the stereo.
The real issue, as you point out, is there is nothing to force them to continue supporting it or maintain its features once us poor suckers have bought it.
If it’s anything like my MIL’s 17’ Forester, you flat can’t replace the headunit without disabling a lot of car features. I believe the land departure/EyeSight still works, though.
Granted not a software update but my dad’s Cadillac got recalled once and all they did was make the ceiling buttons harder to read that was the one time he ever obayed a recall
How they made the buttons so recessed that you need to move your head directly under them to see what button is what. Why it’s a Cadillac ATS this car is the physical incarnation of mildly infuriating and I have no idea why my dad loves it so much when both me and my mom find everything about that car mildly infuriating I guess they just found another way to make the car mildly infuriating
Yup. Unfortunately, since most people seem to prefer the dystopian futuretech, all auto manufacturers are going to employ it. Just like with cell phones. The last phone I know of with 16:9 aspect ratio and no blighted hole punch or notch was in 2018. There’s a market full of us luddites who prefer the old ways, but we’re invisible to manufacturers because it’s more profitable to make something that more people want to buy, and we’re forced to buy that garbage as well anyway.
There are some positives and negatives to the desire for old form factors. Secondhand phones from 2018 cost much less than new ones but lack some of the new features like… I can’t think of any.
All contactless payments use it. All your cards have it. All phones that you. Can pay from (which I don’t know any new brand that doesn’t offer this feature) uses it.
I guess that covid was the resurgence, with all the banks and businesses setting up nfc cards and payment machines for zero touch payments.
Don’t worry. You know those car nuts who put 20 spoilers on their cars and mod the engine etc… There will be a point where most of them do it with the futuretech cars and it will be in their way, which means they will circumvent it and ordinary people will be able to hire them to do it to their cars too. It was the same wis “chip tuning”.
Yeah, it goes further than just designing the hardware to only last a few years, all of these electronics ensure that the car is fucked as soon as the necessary online services go down. Meanwhile a well-maintained '93 Geo Metro, driven in the south where they don’t salt the roads every year, can last decades.
I dont know the details, but Ive heard of companies that do this, or kits that can be used for it, existing, though I can only imagine that changing a car that one’s business has not manufactured and was never designed for such a conversion must take a lot of manual work, which would be expensive before even considering things like the cost of batteries.
Swapping an engine is relatively easy if you know what you’re doing… If these kits can connect the electric motor to the existing drive train it wouldn’t be too bad. Messing around with batteries big enough for an electric vehicle can be really dangerous though.
Power train conversion is reasonably simple. Just throw combustion engine and transmission box away, make brackets for electric motors and attach them directly to the wheels (with axles if necessary). Conversion of controls is (I assume) is also somewhat simple since existing brake system and power steering is quite straightforward to run with electric motors since you just need something which can run a belt drive and gas pedal is most likely already electric. For all the electronics you have plenty of space in where the engine used to be.
But. And there’s a pretty big but. Batteries are pretty big and pretty heavy. On any given combustion engine car there’s just no room for them (at least if you’re after a conversion with similar range/power than a readily built electric car). And even if you cut the floor panel off and modify it to accomodate battery pack (or whatever the route you choose might be) it’ll heavily affect weight distribution, frame stability and many other things, suspension included. Model S battery is apparently 540kg, so if you’ll do a conversion to your corolla you might save around 150kg of weight by removing old engine+transmission but you’d still have additional 300kg of mass to deal with.
For a van which is designed to haul heavy loads from the start it might be pretty simple to just raise floor of the cargo space a bit but for a common sedan that’s a whole another thing.
I looked into this for my car. The conversion has a 50 mile range, essentially replaces the engine with an electric motor, locks the car in 3rd gear, and replaces the fuel tank with batteries.
It cost about £3500, which was a bit much for me considering the car only cost £3k, and I could just sell my car to buy a 100mile+ leaf for the same outlay.
In our local craigslist for cars website someone has been selling a -84(or so) Nissan Sunny for ages with electric conversion. The seller did just that, took combustion engine out, attached a electric motor into transmission and the result is that you have 80’s car, with manual transmission and batteries so small that once you’re out of the driveway you’ve depleted 10% of the batteries (give or take, but that’s pretty much what you’ll get). And it had something like 15kW minus losses of the drive train.
But the parts are so expensive (at least for now) that listed price is almost 10k€. I can understand that seller wants their money back and it isn’t the most serious conversion out there, but the reality is that you’ll get a shitty 80’s car with a even shittier EV conversion (since the frame has it’s limits and high quality components are expensive) while you can sell a similar car with a combustion engine for 350€ on a good day and a tank full.
I don’t even use BT in mine and don’t use the music system either. I stick to my phone. I just hope by the time I need to switch cars, I’ll be able to jailbreak it without bricking.
Battery tech will need to improve greatly and be minimalized. EV batteries are currently massive, heavy, and generally engineered as long, wide, flat modules to be installed beneath the floor so they keep the center of gravity low and the vehicle balanced. That’s not really possible in an ICE vehicle with all the frame molding around existing exhaust and drivetrain components, and you most likely can’t just have some sort of modular battery and motor unit that you just drop into the engine bay, as that would put a ton (literally) of additional weight on one end and mess with the balance.
The draintrain components may need to be replaced or the motor outputs modulated to prevent the torque from ripping it apart.
Power steering and brakes will need to converted to electric assist. AC and heat would need to converted to electric.
Older cars (early 00’s and older) with cable throttles will need to be retrofitted with drive-by-wire, or use some sort of adapter module that connects the cable and converts it to digital inputs. Same with brakes.
All of the electronics (lights, wipers, windows, locks, radio, etc.) will need to be rewired since there’s no longer an alternator.
Probably will need upgraded suspension and brakes to handle the extra weight.
There’s probably a lot more I’m not thinking about or not even aware of. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to happen outside of rich enthusiast circles, which is terribly sad, because I completely agree with you. Basically everything made after around 2010 is total dogshit.
I LOVE HAVING CAR DEPENDENCY. I LOVE PAYING FOR LESS EFFICIENT TRANSPORT AND ALL OF MY OWN MAINTENANCE AND FOR THE PRIVILEGE OF HAVING MY DATA SOLD. I SPEND EVERY MOMENT NOT DRIVING WISHING I COULD BE BEHIND THE WHEEL AND DOING NOTHING ELSE BUT FOCUSING ON DRIVING WHILE ON MY WAY TO [CONSUME] AND MAKE DATA FOR [BRAND]. PLEASE, NO PUBLIC TRANSIT, I LIKE MY FREEDOM THANKS.
Personally, as a non-car owning person, I love how I have to stick to the narrow patch of walkway next to roads where I get to inhale exhaust fumes whether I like it or not, have to stop and yield to oncoming traffic when looking to cross the road, and leave my life and personal safety in the hands of people I don’t know and pray they pay attention and don’t hit me.
I hate it as a driver. I would love to walk or bike more, but I’m far enough from anywhere I want to go that it doesn’t make any practical sense to. I strongly dislike driving everywhere, and I wish our pedestrian and bike infrastructure (and public transit) didn’t suck so bad. I wouldn’t mind using the bicycle gutter, if I had one, but I’d be very nervous to let my kids use it because I don’t trust the magic paint strip.
Suburbs really suck in this regard. I get a choice between a 15 minute bus that comes every 2-3 hours to get to my local train station or walk 1:30 minutes along the same road with zero footpath for the majority of the journey on a 70kmh road.
I drive a hybrid in rural areas, and I try to always flip the car into electric only mode when I see a cyclist coming up so they don’t have to inhale my tailpipe. I’m sure it isn’t much in the grand scheme, but I hope they at least breathe a little better.
I get the sentiment but have you ever driven a fun car on a beautiful night? Driving a topless Jeep through the twisty highway in the redwoods of Northern California or a Camaro through the wide open Nevada desert? High schoolers driving their bro dozer around town in circles, yeah, I get that.
This but motorcycles for me. Cars with the windows down are a limp substitute for hitting the bottom of a hill in a fall or spring morning on a motorbike.
I (maybe naively) believe a healthy society could find a way to build a robust public transport network and still accommodate the minority of enthusiasts who drive and work on cars for fun.
Engineers aren’t just dry husks of people, robotically creating solutions to meet needs. The drive to create cars, planes, and motorbikes, which have significant technical overlap with trains, buses, and mobility aids, is at least partially borne from the thrill of piloting machines that extend human capabilities.
Honestly, I figured that they collected data. But I didn’t think the extent of it would be stuff like my sex life and genetic data. How the hell do those work?
My mind went to a completely different approach, collecting your data when you fuck someone in the car. Length of sex, moaning volume and pumps per minutes is what I was thinking of.
They track you and then different kind of tools are trying to profile you based on your data. Similarly how ads work on the internet. Saying your car collect data of your sex life more like means they collect absolutely everything about you and then they run it through different software to profile you then sell all this data for extra profit. If you daily drive to a school they will assume you have a family and kids. If you go to a random apartment complex once a week after your kids went sleep they will assume you have a mistress. Its all based on location data and the stuff you enetered during registration.
They can also track who your devices are near. If your phone sits next to someone else’s in an office building for nearly 8 hours a day and they know that persons job they can infer yours, especially since departments tend to sit together. Ad companies often assume recurring groups of people share overlapping interests (hence why their together multiple times) and will push out ads based on what other people around you are interested in to see if you are too.
Interesting. Makes a lot of sense, though it sucks that it’s all based on assumptions because it sounds like it can easily be mistaken for a lot of things.
That’s how most of them work. I got baby toys for a friend’s baby and the Internet started trying to sell me all kinds of baby things. You listen to a lot of podcasts about craft beer? They assume you’re a 40 year old white dude who needs beard oil.
That’s the most ridiculous part to me. Why isn’t this able to continue off the car battery? It should be do not disconnect car battery if anything. I hope there’s some sort of fail safe to prevent it from bricking that doesn’t involve a factory reset or dealer visit.
Yeah but shouldn’t the power usage for the infotainment system be similar to a cell phone at this point with similar hardware where it really shouldn’t be possible to run a car battery dead during an update?
Ideally. Depends on the update time too. I know flashing ECU tunes requires a battery topper. I’ve also killed a car battery modding my infotainments firmware so it’s totally possible. But most likely Subaru is doing it out of an abundance of caution… Don’t want an angry customer coming saying the update killed their battery
My car pulls about 130W on the 12V line while in “stand-by”. That would flatten a 12V, 40Ah battery in less than four hours, and that’s only if it’s in perfect health.
So that sort of happened to me on the previous gen of this infotainment unit.
I used the app to turn on the car and it keeps the car on for a short time, I started the update but it took way longer than I expected and the car shut off halfway through.
It seems to me that the unit is kept in some low power standby mode, when I turned the car back on, it just continued from where it stopped.
I’m kind of surprised that car technology is so awful. How the fuck am I paying $35k for a car and they’re still like “lets run the UI off a potato via the least responsive touch screen possible”? At some point I’d rather they just gave up on providing a UX themselves and just ran everything through Android Auto.
I don’t mind having a UI for things like navigation or android auto. What gets me is why do things like climate control need to be buried in a UI? If my windscreen starts to steam up mid-jourmey, the last thing I need is to take my attention off the road to change the climate settings in the UI where dials and buttons will do the job much faster without needing to take my attention off the road.
Yes! I hate having everything in the UI. I’d much prefer a physical control set for A/C and even basic volume control at least.
You can’t sense a flat touch screen, but we are really good at sensing knobs and switches. It’s much safer for the driver to feel for a control rather than look at it.
My 09 VW CC has knobs for bass, treble, and mid, in addition to volume. Seat heaters, AC, everything is tactile and I can operate anything without looking.
I know it’s manufacturers wanting to save money, but it’s so annoying that we’re going backwards. Touchscreen is a form of input. Just because it’s higher tech doesn’t mean it should replace tactile inputs in all applications ffs.
If my windscreen starts to steam up mid-jourmey, the last thing I need is to take my attention off the road to change the climate settings in the UI where dials and buttons will do the job much faster without needing to take my attention off the road.
This is why ill never get rid of my 2009 Tacoma. Three knob AC controls are the pinnacle of UI engineering. One knob for fan speed, one for temp and the third for vent/airflow selection. The backlight on one of my knobs has burned out at this point, but i dont need it…Can adjust the AC without taking my eyes off the road.
When it was ubiquitous, this meant i could do this in any car. Borrowed my inlaws FORD F-150 once, had to pull over to figure out how to turn off the goddam heat. It had BOTH a touchscreen and series of dash buttons but there were so many it was hard to figure out what did each thing while driving. I also had to update their dang infotainment, it wouldnt work on some random USB device, i had to go get a USB-A 3.0 device to get it to work at all and even then it was idling in my driveway for an hour and a half. Even tried just doing it via WiFi…nope
Just FYI, it might be pretty easy to replace the back lights. You can even get LED ones. Word of warning though, if the bulbs are built such that the polarity can be reversed, they’ll only work in one orientation. This is due to the nature of how LEDs work. I had to redo mine because I didn’t win all 3 coin flips when I installed them
Yeah it’s not too bad. Just the dash kit is fairly old and held together by those plastic clip. I always break those things. It’s a juice isn’t worth the squeeze honestly. I actually upgraded my radio a while back to a wireless CarPlay/android auto and mean to ask them to swap em. But forgot.
Yeah, my 2017 KIA has a touch screen for controlling navigation, radio, android auto etc. but climate control is controlled with buttons and dials like you described. It’s modern enough to the point it feels safer than an older vehicle might, but I don’t think I want a vehicle more modern than this.
the issue stems from the requirements of automotive parts to be based around longevity vs precision. I would like to believe they are stunting performance parts for more robust and lasting hardware but we all know that isn’t true and any money that should be spent on automotive grade electronics is likely lining someones stock portfolio
Apple Iphone? last about 2 years if its used EVERYDAY , usually. Car Touch Screen needs to live for 5-10years so you don’t drive the car through the dealership windows killing the salesman that tricked you. they hope.
While the need for cars is cancerous I wouldnt blame it on the tech, cars are fun. The problem is lots of companies realized they could make lots of money and fucked us over starting about a hundred years ago, atleast here in the US.
Android auto is your phone projecting to your cars infotainment system. This can work independent of what the cars operating system is. Android automotive is Android “optimized” as an operating system for a cars infotainment system.
Android auto runs on your phone. Android automotive runs in your car.
Android auto runs on your phone. Android automotive runs in your car.
Yes, but Android Auto does need some work on the car OS side to operate, i.e. within Android Automotive in this example (although Blackberry QNX is probably more common these days, automakers are moving away from it)
It’s not Linux, but there’s an open source project available where you can build your own engine ECU with an Arduino hackaday.io/project/4413-speeduino
I get it, but I don’t feel comfortable putting my car in the hands of an Arduino.
Nothing against the open source software at all. It’s the fact that the Arduino is a consumer experimentation board, not an automotive rated component. I’m concerned for the reliability of the Arduino under the operating conditions of an automobile.
Got a 2023 Outback in February. The processing power is nowhere near what it needs to run smoothly. Once the car is started it is best to just not touch any buttons for the first several seconds to let it catch up. It is like dropping back two phone generators and watching it struggle to keep up with a newer OS. The transmission must run off a processor two generations further back because the time difference between my big ape foot stomping on the loud pedal and anything meaningful happening is measured in countable seconds.
My Buick had the same delay with the transmission. It took a lot of getting used to, and was one reason I went with a high performance car afterwards. I’m super happy with her Kia K5 now.
The transmission must run off a processor two generations further back because the time difference between my big ape foot stomping on the loud pedal and anything meaningful happening is measured in countable seconds.
Does your Subaru have a CVT? It’s a belt drive transmission and when I had an (older) Subaru it was one of the first CVT units, and felt a bit laggy when you asked it to do anything with alacrity.
Yep, my first. I was expecting the lag of the CVT and can feel it engage. There is a noticeable lag between the pedal being moved to one spot and the CVT beginning to work. So it is GoFaster = (TransmissioncComputeTime + CVTEngage) when each is about one full second. Two seconds sounds and feels unsafe when coming from a 2004 WRX.
They are notoriously bad. And they don’t get fixed. Got my Subaru and
The radio defaults to SiriusXM every time I turn on the car, even though I do not pay for it and do not want to.
Android Auto and Apple Car Play would cut out regularly
Eventually the entire system would just randomly crash and reboot frequently throughout a trip.
Found out there was a TSB out on the radio for frequent issues, and had to get it warrantied.
Even with the new radio, I have occasional issues with Apple Car Play freezing
I can’t have both an android and iPhone connected at the same time, because I won’t be able to use Android Auto, I’m forced into Car Play
And on the new cars Subaru made the screen narrow and tall. This effectively reduced the amount of screen space for Android Auto/car play in comparison with prior years.
Add to that the entire display is now needed for HVAC, heated seats, etc and do you really want to depend on a glitchy computer that frequently crashes?
I can’t have both an android and iPhone connected at the same time, because I won’t be able to use Android Auto, I’m forced into Car Play
Just got a new work truck, a Ford, with android auto and car play. This morning was the first time I plugged an iPhone and android in at the same time. I had plugged in the android first and a quick look I wasn’t able to switch to the iPhone without unplugging the android. I never plugged the android back in so idk if it prefers one over the other or just whatever is plugged in first. Could that be the same issue?
Others have already responded to you with many of the same complaints I was going to bring up so I’ll just highlight a few things:
First off, I have a 2019 Subaru Impreza so not the latest generation
There used to be this issue where, upon turning the car on, you couldn’t interact with the infotainment system for a good 10 seconds which includes volume adjustments. Let’s say you had the volume set to 20 (max 35) when you last drove, well it’s going to be blaring as soon as you start up the car again, but you won’t be able to do anything about it for a good 10 seconds. Luckily this issue has gotten better (I believe with a firmware update from the dealership after I complained), but it’s still not fixed completely.
Recently I took my car in for work and they needed to keep it overnight, so they let me borrow a brand new 2024 Outback Touring. This was great cause I got to test a brand new car “for free,” and what I learned is that they now put all HVAC stuff (seat warming, climate control, etc.) on this screen that has poor touch sensitivity. It’s obnoxious. Also the system itself is only marginally better than my 5 year old car, which is to say it’s still incredibly clunky and slow. They’ve made improvements, no doubt, but it’s built from the same trash.
I’m still driving a 2016 Mazda, so sorry if this is a dumb question, but with these new cars are the infotainment systems integral with the car’s functioning?
I’ve always thought of the head units as replaceable but seems like they are more integrated nowadays. Especially with EVs
I’d be curious about what kinds of modifications people have been able to do with these. I imagine most people would want to avoid bricking their $50k car by pulling apart their dashboard and fucking with the internals, but someone somewhere has had to have been unhappy enough with the hardware/software on these things to make an attempt at switching it out, even if in part.
Owning something that expensive and not being able to modify it to the way I like (and cutting out the manufacturer from data harvesting/control over the system) is a personal kind of hell.
Ugh I hate rearview cameras. They’re nice for people who can’t turn due to limited mobility but I prefer to be facing the direction I’m going and do the “turn and put hand on the other head rest” move. It would be fine, but some car manufacturers have decided rear sightlines don’t matter at all now “because you have the camera” so they take that option from me and make reversing more dangerous.
I’ve got a 2013 Mazda 3 and it was very easy to replace the radio, but my understanding is that way more stuff goes through it in modern cars, especially if they have touchscreen controls for some things.
These electric motors, you are winding the coils yourself from a FOSS design? And the batteries to drive them, we going with voltaic piles, or a lithium refinery?
Yep. Have to travel a bit for the lithium, but it’s worth it to be free from the enshittification of daily life. Mining and smelting the copper myself too.
People keep trying to buy my 2002 Tacoma, I get notes on my windshield constantly. Often offers for like 80% of what I originally paid for it. It’s insane for a 20 year old car with 300k miles on it.
I have a Gen ?? Outback. It’s a nice 2002 and I just replaced the stock stereo with a new Bluetooth one so it’s dope. Running this thing until it dies.
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