People are getting fed up with all the useless tech in their cars — For the first time in 28 years of JD Power’s car owner survey, there is a consecutive year-over-year decline in satisfaction, wit…::People are dissatisfied with the technology in their cars, according to a new survey from JD Power. They especially don’t like the native infotainment systems.
CarPlay is the truth. All that built in shit is utter trash.
Android Auto for me
I don’t see the hype with CarPlay/Android Auto. I’d rather just not have a screen in my car.
CarPlay and Android Auto actually work well, and you can use the apps that you already have on your phone. The screens are generally more convenient and restrict view less than a phone holder stuck to the window. But without those, I agree that I’d rather have no screen than one with crappy media controls and the car’s own navigation.
This is the correct answer. Give me more buttons and knobs and switches
I can control Waze and Apple Music/Podcasts from my steering wheel, or the rotary knob. Or the touchpad if I was a weirdo. It’s amazing.
Yes, you could achieve the same for music/podcasts via bluetooth, but you couldn’t switch between which app is playing, and you didn’t get Waze/Maps/Whatever GPS app you prefer, they’re all better than the built in shit on most cars.
I suppose you could also get by with a paper map for your road trips and stuff, but personally I’m too lazy for that. It’s fun, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want to stop my car to figure out where I’m going.
I gotta have it. Although my car is designed properly with knobs and buttons for ac, seat heat, and radio controls. Was a major factor when deciding what I bought. I absolutely love how seamless CarPlay works with my music and GPS. Nice not to have to have a phone mount on my dash.
Try having an infotainment system that will just randomly disconnect and crash Android Auto every ~10 minutes. I don’t own a car myself, but instead use a non-profit car rental service, so I’ve tried my fair share of different manufacturers and models. The worst of them all is the one in Skoda Superb (VW group company), if you put it back from reverse into drive, it would normally just freeze the entire screen while still on rear camera, and the front sensors wouldn’t work. Then it would reboot the whole infotainment system after some minutes.
The worst physical interface can also be found in VW group cars, both VW ID3 and Cupra Born have a completely horrible capacitive touch button setup, which makes you unintendedly touch them when just holding the steering wheel, doing things like disabling lane control, changing cruise control etc. They said they chose them because they wanted to give a “premium feel”, which indicates they basically did zero user testing. At least they are changing to physical buttons for new models. The software is pretty bad as well, laggy and unintuitive menus. Their CEO recently resigned, and they’ve put $9 billion into increasing their developer team past 10k people, so I assume it has been acknowledged and will get better in newer models.
It’s gotten to the point where I will just avoid VW group brands alltogether when booking a car.
I have an ID3 and agree with you to some degree. It’s not quite unusable, but the touch buttons are high on the list of things I’d like to change.
I’m not that bothered with the layout of the infotainment system, but it’d be great if it didn’t slow down and crash as often.
If they had gotten those things right is the ID3 would have been such a perfect little car for me. I love it otherwise. Quick, decent ACC, range is fine for its intended use.
Yeah it’s a great car apart from the infotainment and related buttons, really firm handling and build quality like most other VW models.
I’ve got a Kia K5 rental at the moment and I kind of wish I could have brought my ID3. Although charging infrastructure does seem a bit lacking here in the US compared to home in the Netherlands.
No need to add anything to this, I got a Golf 8 🤣
Tbh the infotainment is kinda glitchy when reversing, but never to the point of completely crashing.
That pain with capacitive buttons is real tho.