The car industry A/B tested selling a car with and without CarPlay(a.wholelottanothing.org) |
The car industry A/B tested selling a car with and without CarPlay(a.wholelottanothing.org) |
They could have had me trading it in this or next year for the newer model (that does have some nicer things i'd like to have, like the larger infotainment screen) but the lack of carplay and the shitty native google maps and spotify products that come installed on it are are not acceptable for a car that sells for 90K USD.
GM decided it had all the cards, looks like they don't.
They can't do that if you're just looking at CarPlay/Android Auto.
Which don't exist. BMW famously tried to blame Apple for trying to charge buyers an annual fee for Carplay and Apple _publicly_ called their shit out. They confirmed they don't charge anything - neither one-off nor recurring. Manufacturers may incur certification costs, there's nothing after that.
Just did a couple quick searches and nothing's changed since then AFAIK
I. Want. CarPlay.
I still absolutely don't want CarPlay or Android Auto to become the default. Should they become the arbiters of what I can and cannot do in my car? Should I be beholden them for features, or which apps they allow in their walled garden?
Today I can vote with my money, choosing a car that fits me. If they all become the same, it's a monopoly.
You can choose now, but what when you must use one of those, because no one cares about the built in system anymore, so it's neglected or even just covering the basics?
As a consumer in the market for cars (we've got four at home), I'm basically interested in how pleasant/agreeable the car is to drive and how secure it is.
I give exactly jack fucking zero shit if it's got Android Auto or Apple Car Play or both or neither.
I drive way, way, way more than most on this forum. For example I've been both to Stockholm and Ibiza by car [involving a part with the on a boat in both cases]). And I regularly do long distances (longest was 8am to 10pm non-stop except bio-break and gasoline). I'll cross Germany (I don't live in Germany) in one-go to go to Poland. Stuff like that. Also I spent months a year in a rural area, so car is the only option (closest village to find croissants and baguettes is a 10 minutes drive).
And yet I don't care a yota about "phone connectivity" in my car.
The rare cases where I really need my phone I can... just use my phone?
Like what the heck is hard about that?
BTW my main car run QNX for its infotainment/phone system and phonecalls and reading message over Bluetooth works just fine. And it wouldn't be working, it'd be totally fine too.
TFA and people agreeing with it says more about people's incestuous relation with their phones than about what the "best option" (mentioned in TFA) is.
CarPlay is sort of like Apple Pay / Tap to Pay, even Home Depot, Kroger, and now Walmart capitulated. I hope there's fire to the smoke that Tesla will add Carplay, and I suspect if they do, Rivian won't be far behind.
"What is the royalty associated with MFi accessories? This information is only available under NDA. You will be able to review this information once your application for the MFi License has been approved."
Even “good” infotainment (tesla) is inferior to CarPlay in many ways, because it’s not your phone. You don’t get your maps app with everything magically synced and working.
Meanwhile my friends kids are turning 16 and inheriting the honda accord with 250,000 miles I remember getting shuttled to and from soccer practice when I was 12 in the 90s
When comedians are making fun of this brand, I dont think its out of any love for the brand.
We got Mustang, Camaro(Lutz had a hand in that), Jeep etc. They all don't compete with Toyota for quality partially because the culture drives the companies and that eventually drives car design and manufacturing. Tourists often rent these cars when visiting the US because they are one representation of the country's soul.
I'm sure there is some impact to not including it, tbh, but as is this article is a giant nothing burger to me.
The best selling car in most of the 90s was a Taurus and the Impala and friends made a great showing in the late 90s.
But those cars got chewed up and spit out comparatively so nobody thinks they were any good.
I literally have all the entire spectrum of these vehicles in my driveway right now. I feel very confident saying that anyone peddling such a nuance-free take on things doesn't know shit from fuck. If there was a way I could phrase this to be even more existentially offensive to such people I would.
If you went back in time to 2008 and changed Toyota and Nissan's priorities so that they each picked up the other's buyers everyone with pure air between their ears would be sharing memes about beat to crap Camrys and reliable Altimas (i.e the reverse of today).
However far apart you think any two OEMs are divide that by a big number. Any two competing brands are way more neck and neck than the fanboys comment section mmakes it out to be.
https://electrek.co/2025/09/23/honda-offering-over-20000-off...
Basically every 90s brand has had this happen. Typically involves PE.
So the numbers check out and there's no need for you to find the blame elsewhere.
There is not a single vehicle produced by Ford, GMC, or Chevy that I'm interested in owning.
I know a number of people who’d buy a Honda without a second thought but wouldn’t be caught dead in a Chevy.
They always seem ten years behind with uninspiring designs and horrible MPG.
It seems that every time I submit an update or new app, it gets rejected, because Apple just tightened the bolts a bit further.
The classic "oh but Apple's whitepapers say this" shtick is a non-contribution to the discussion.
Although I could imagine the car manufacturers wanting to get revenue from refueling ads.
It’s literally not an A/B test. It’s a well known story that this vehicle sold wayyyy better under a Honda badge and it has nothing to do with CarPlay.
Would I buy a car without android auto as an android user? No, end of story. GM can die like other stupid heavy-handed vendors, but sadly they are too big to fail, and will drag down the nation with them.
Secondly, EV purchasers have different criteria, like range. After all, the best selling EV brand and model in America has never had CarPlay but has the trust of buyers (and would probably have more if the founder wasn't so polarizing).
I wanted to nitpick on calling Elon Musk a founder, as Tesla was originally founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in July 2003.
But as I did my research, I learnt, that he has now legally the status of a co-founder after a settlement. It is up to the reader to think about that.
So to keep my nitpick, I can only say the quoted sentence is missing a "co-" prefix. :p
Everything else equal, I can believe having CarPlay adds value for some people. Things weren't equal so possibly not as much as the other variables in the room.
They do this all the time.
Everyone doesn’t know statistics but, it is obvious when someone really doesn’t know.
and yet I hated the new Subaru so much. I hated the fact that the entire console is now one giant touchscreen, requiring you to look away from the road in order to operate. I hated the huge bulky 'Starlink' hardware hidden in the roof. I hated the fact that the MPG was barely better even with ten years worth of supposed engineering advancement and the Forester was now wider and taller which sucks for being a city car
the last 15 years of 'innovation' in cars was a total mistake. call me a luddite but I really don't want my car to be able to be tracked by any satellite at any time. so it's either used cars for me from now or something like the Slate truck with the barest dashboard config (or a kei truck once it's legal in my state)
I knew they were essentially the same car and that maintenance-wise it probably made more sense to get the Blazer from a GM dealer - but it lacked CarPlay so we didn’t consider it.
I can’t imagine we’re the only ones.
For what it’s worth, the new 2026 Outback has an excellent new infotainment system and tons of physical controls for car settings. But apparently everyone hates it for the external redesign (I think it looks fine). Hopefully that interior will roll out to the rest of the models too.
Still driving my Toyota Avensis 2014 and I hope he‘ll serve me well for the next 10 years.
I like the bluetooth connection it has so I can listen to my podcasts from my iPhone while driving but from a security point of view, I think the touchscreens are horrible. See this link: https://etsc.eu/physical-buttons-outperform-touchscreens-in-...
God I hate our Forrester.
There’s a panel where the preset buttons for seat position profiles would be if I had paid for that feature.
Seat position profiles is a great feature, making it automatic is completely unnecessary.
Telluride/Palisade causing fires because they cheaped out on the current/torque sensors in the drive motors for the seats.
ICCU failures across their current EV platforms. No fix planned last I heard.
It hurts me to point this out because I really, REALLY like where their cars are going. Their new van is EXACTLY what we want, and I'd love an Ioniq 5N.
But those failures are critical and speak to a very deep engineering culture issue.
This video explains why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_epwf-IBgU
After watching this I totally understood why so many dumb issues occured:
Kia Boys issues: cheaped out on adding a immobilizer in the US only, Canada had laws in place.
Engine explosions: Poor manufacturing standards left junk in the engine causing oil starvation which caused spun bearings.
Oil consumption: GDI engine design caused excessive burning of oil and deposit layers of gunk if you keep topping up oil. If you don't(and most Hyundai owners expect their car to work like a normal car and not burn up to a qt/1000 mi) then the engine eventually runs dry and explodes(denied warranty as well).
They apparently even took plans, detailed documentation, endless amounts of information to Hyundai. I'm not sure of the veracity of that information, but it sure explains how Hyundai became incredibly good, literally overnight.
They used to be a joke.
Some of these cars (older Kia Souls, for example) become a great value if you implement the countermeasures, and also because they have a lower cost of repairs than some Hondas and Toyotas.
I learned this because I seemed to find cars that had few problems that had nonetheless been given up for salvage. What I found was that if a stolen car is not recovered quickly enough, insurance will pay the (properly-insured) owner an amount close to the replacement value of the car; they may then recover the car later in the same shape it was stolen in other than a broken window, door handle and steering column cover. They then put it up for auction even though it would be better financially to work with a dealer or fleet network to cherry pick these high value cars that only need some simple fixes.
For example, my $2,220 bid won a 2015 Kia Soul+ (49K miles) at auction that a dealer had sold for ~$12,000 some months previous. Bidding competition was light primarily because of the "easily stolen" and "likely to burn oil" issues. But with fees and a few cheap repairs, I got a $12,000 dealer-prepped car for under $4,500. I added remote start, Android Auto and a backup camera, gave it a little ceramic spray coating and got a nice car for my wife.
I also threw in a fake $12 steering wheel lock bar as a deterrent. (It's a real bar, but I don't lock it because the "unable to unlock the cheap lock" risk is to me a more likely hassle than a broken window). I considered adding an immobilizer, but the car was stolen with one installed, and I could always add a switch to the battery under the hood in case better-prepared thieves than the "hoping for an easy hotwire" type show up.
I love digging into questions and seeing where they lead; this all started with a vague sense that dealers made a lot of money on a high volume of used cars via auction houses, and trying to learn how it worked. This also leads me to argue with AI quite a bit, and until recently, made the idea of AI "thinking" kind of laughable due to its many mistakes once you start following the chain of reasoning.
Ask that 79% of car buyers if they would forego carplay for a $10-20k discount.
If the software is as good as Tesla's, I have no need for CarPlay. Having to buy from a dealership and spend a few hours there, having to pay monthly for software features like maps/remote start/phone key, and having to deal with ICE stuff ended up being far bigger issues.
Driving a Model 3, I disagree - having seats and basically everything else adjust as soon as you open the door is the biggest boon I can imagine. I totally wish the rearview mirror would adjust as well…
Similarly how every former reputable consumer electronic brand from 'The West' that sells consumer stuff today like Philips, GE, Thompson, Blaupunkt, Gigaset, etc is now just a brand label for a Chinese consortium that's fully designed and made in China with zero employees in their original western roots.
I think we might be coloring it as we’d like it to be, though. Only rarely does it end in brand death, more often they just get a bad reputation then keep going, sometimes not even less profitably. I think the intent might be more along the lines of recalibrating to a lower expectation of consumer discernment or rationality.
Messrs. Sears and Roebuck are rolling in their graves.
I think a lot of people realize it's not the same old company, but apparently enough don't such that it's still profitable to sell their stuff at a premium.
Oh wait was I not supposed to say that out loud?