FWIW Ford was hiring around this area (southern Ontario) for software engineers to work on their in-car systems like this. Not sure if this specific one. From what I've heard they were woefully underpaying. A friend of mine talked to them -- very qualified; like me he worked on similar touchscreen, interactive display type systems at Google/Nest, and had a general background on similar systems, and on QNX, etc. They tried to lowball him badly. Like 1/2 the rate he asked for (contract) and probably 1/3rd or 1/4 what we made at Google. I saw a posting from them recently, again, and they were crowing about how they wanted to see candidate's GPA's etc. etc. I don't have a degree, so even if I hadn't heard about their low pay, I wouldn't even consider applying despite being probably very qualified for what they were doing. We had a whole team at Google that worked on getting rid of "jank" and improving FPS and performance on a really low-spec SoC. I wasn't any kind of expert on that team, but I learned a little. But they clearly weren't willing to pay reasonable for talent (like most local Canadian employers, frankly)
I see this sentiment everywhere outside the tech first ecosystem. In the generalization of 'workers'/'engineers' v/s 'supervisors'/'managers', programmers are often seen as just workers. For whatever reason, an MBA or even a BBA is seen as an officer/supervisor.
Even product teams at tech first companies tend to represent this dogma. There are exceptions but the programmers are workers dogma is prevalent in this world. This is the main reason for suppressed pay for programmers and software engineers in all other industries except tech. Because of this, these other industries will never be able to catch up on the areas of hardware/software interfaces, let alone pure software craftsmanship. On the contrary, the software craftsmen are now learning the tropes of the non-software world and turning craftsmen in those areas as well.
So yeah, Ford might make a fast car, they will almost never be able to build a software driven car, which is the car of the future.
> ... they will almost never be able to build a software driven car, which is the car of the future.
Software can make a lot of things better, but for whatever reason most cars end up with closed software solutions with a limited amount of updates, problems with how responsive/inefficient they are and a plethora of other complications. At that point, slapping an Android tablet on the dash for navigation might be a better idea, since at least that can be changed out or customized with relatively few issues, versus being stuck with a flawed built in system that's a black box as far as you're concerned.
Alas, why even pay for that? Why not have a car with a simple dash, less electronics and simply mounts for you to bring your own. Of course, that's not the direction in which the industry seems to be headed.
Now, this might be a silly comparison, but I can't help but to think of comparing a simple soviet tractor (say, a T-25 https://de-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/T-25?_x_tr_sl... ) which is simple to use and repair, to something like a modern John Deere. Perhaps that's one of the better examples, where the more complex design ends up rather expensive, even if you don't need all of the features. But the former, simpler design? Well, somehow ones like that aren't manufactured much nowadays.
Surely in regards to cars it should also be possible to pick the essentials (e.g. in regards to safety and security) and then offer plenty of different models, with varying different levels of technology embedded. Then again, it's easier to pump up the price if you cram more features in even in the basic models. Of course, it's not like that would be okay if those closed systems were to be replaced with open source either - since that might be a serious safety liability.
The principles behind the auto industry are primarily driven by the last motive. To pump up the price for some shitty upgrade that not many really want. It's the same core, with a few upgrades that are super cheap to manufacture. Like a dashboard change or change a knob to a button etc.
It's like selling a new iPhone with just a few changes to some superficial apps such as I donno, Numbers.
Agree with you on a modular car where you just let people customise and build whatever the heck they want. I even think you should be able to customize a 2 seater v/s a 4/5 seater with plenty of options.
I visited my friend while he was plowing his fields, and one of his tractors was out of commission due to a broken sensor. The first thing that came out of his mouth was: I don’t hate the sensors, they saved one of my tractors from an oil leak one time.
For tractors, the reason they gain features is to improve uptime, thus driving costs down. And they do.
> So yeah, Ford might make a fast car, they will almost never be able to build a software driven car, which is the car of the future.
I would kill for a "low-tech" EV - think Toyota Corolla[1], but with an electric power train. No touch screen, no "self driving" beyond lane assistance & adaptive cruise. Unfortunately, manufacturers are unwilling to start off with a low-margin products, but I believe that is the car of the future, and will sell like hot cakes.
1. An electric Ford Maverick would fit the bill too, if they don't ape Tesla's cockpit design. The Nissan Leaf is close to my ideal, but the lack of active cooling on the battery is a non-starter.
The main impediment for this approach is still the battery pack. Unless you can reduce the cost/kwh of batteries the corolla of the ev world won't happen. Battery costs per Kwh are on a downward trend. Tesla is probably around 100-110$ per KWh translating to about 7-8K for it's flagship 70 KWh battery pack.
So am not sure a low margin approach would fly right now, simply because of supply constraints for volume production. Probably at a 10M/year run rate, the economies of scale would tip in the low margin high volume favour.
How would you solve this conundrum. Can you just stick to a low margin approach from day 1 ? Focus relentlessly on cost reduction in all parts of the cars except the powertrain and the battery since those are the key reliability aspects.
OR
May be a conventional 5 seater car is an overkill for most usage and can you instead build a version with a 35KWh battery pack but a 2 seater like a Miata. No frills, fast and safe car at nearly half the cost but am not sure if you can maintain the same range.
> I would kill for a "low-tech" EV - think Toyota Corolla[1], but with an electric power train. No touch screen, no "self driving" beyond lane assistance & adaptive cruise.
A Nissan leaf would be perfect if it had active battery cooling. Replacement batteries prices eye watering (relative to purchase price), and Nissan Leaf batteries lose capacity rapidly (based on older models), especially in hot climes
I completely agree with your conclusion, this is why I feel that European tech companies can't compete with US ones at all. They just refuse to pay enough to attract the best engineers.
Well here's a North American company clearly not willing to pay competitive software engineering rates even within the continent, and trying to take advantage of sub-regional low rates. Like, they're not in Toronto, but just west of it, and companies there are paying less, so, hey, they should pay less, too, right?
You get what you pay for.
This is what happens when HR drones are allowed to do naive "compensation range surveys" for regions. They do not understand the subtleties of the market and try to lump people with specialized skills, lots of experience, etc. in with people fresh off the boat from overseas, pumping out bug fixes for boring internal legacy J2EE systems at ancient insurance companies.
Companies like this will be in real trouble if remote work continues to be a thing. They better hope it doesn't.
If recent US policy is any indication, it's far more likely that we'll give them billions of dollars of direct subsidy in a misguided attempt "protect American interests."
Reminds me of a back and forth I had with an NYT staff writer who claimed it was "inhumane" to expect people to totally relearn a set of skills every ten years.
People seem to forget that how they "feeeeeeeel" doesn't matter. The job market dictates what you do and don't have to do, and we live in a time when you must consistently learn new skills to be competitive.
> Reminds me of a back and forth I had with an NYT staff writer who claimed it was "inhumane" to expect people to totally relearn a set of skills every ten years.
It is inhumane to expect people to relearn their skillset every decade on their own dime and time.
It's rare enough that companies pay for small-scale training - a full retraining is pretty much unheard of.
I fully agree. Businesses can adapt or die. They shouldn't receive handouts because they're "job creators", and they certainly shouldn't be rewarded for having inefficient labour practices.
Maybe not. A lot of the lobbying from Ford/GM around electric car subsidies is based around the companies actually selling electric cars.
The board & management may have that plan but until they can sell electric cars that a) exist and b) dont spontaneously combust they wont get significant subsidies.
Also until that time, their competitors (foreign like Toyota, Hyundai, etc and specialized eg Tesla, Rivian, etc) will get more subsidies and continue to undercut them.
IMO what will really light a fire under their ass at this point, even if you forget about saving the planet, is that an EV is a lot more fun to drive than an equivalently price ICE (post rebates). Whenever I go back to an ICE vehicle for a rental situation, I tend to curse often at how sluggish it feels. Feels like an iPhone/Android vs Nokia situation, manufacturers will get with the program or they will get pounced out of the game by competitors.
I've found that paying companies a big pile of cash to do a thing is much more acceptable than paying an individual a big pile of cash to do the same thing. I don't know why. Risk management maybe.
Many of these traditional manufacturing OEMs have software outfits in the bay that clutter up my LinkedIn inbox. They're usually offering 130-170k with limited to no additional compensation in the same cities where FAANG is paying 100k+ over their rates in base alone. It's not just that they're doing silly regional surveys, they have fundamental misunderstandings of market rates.
My brother-in-law is pretty high up at a traditional manufacturing OEM. To be clear, they don't manufacture anything that has electronics or software in it (but there is a pretty decent chance your car has something they made). They have a Bay Area software office that does general tech stuff - manufacturing software, business software, etc. Internal things plus some B2C stuff for people buying/installing replacement equipment.
I asked how they liked the software and how the office was working out. The response: "Oh, we don't do it for the software. We can hire 100 people out of Ohio State or Michigan and pay them midwest wages and get the same quality. The SV office is for the connections and investors we get."
It's entirely possible that they know exactly what they are doing ;)
I know they're not stupid, but it's still very frustrating when you have to go and use anything such offices produce. So many unnecessarily cut corners and penny wise, pound foolish decisions.
Yeah, I know someone who works at GE (in more traditional engineering). They have masters degrees and when I compare my salary or even someone starting out at a FAANG or Web 2.0/3.0 SWE with theirs, I'm genuinely surprised.
They also tend to not be aware of the salary ranges out there and I think these traditional companies are exploiting them because most of the engineers really respect the companies and what they stand (or at least stood) for.
Or they understand it perfectly and have made a conscious choice to target a lower tier of talent.
In a way I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the boardroom when this is discussed.
Because really, it's sad. I would have taken a significant salary drop to go work on something like this because the Ford office was local to me and the work sounded interesting and potentially more impactful than what I was doing at the time.
Except it's so far below a reasonable rate... and you pretty much know the place would be a crappy workplace producing a substandard product...
The issue is that firmware engineering is strongly adjacent to EE which is sorely underpaid in the US considering the skillset the jobs require. Hiring managers are looking for EE refugees used to being underpaid.
20 years ago I worked in the US branch of a Canadian company - we weren’t paid richly but they were paid much less. As a new grad I made 20% more than a 5 year SWE as a Unix SA.
This is very true. I now work for a massive global company with offices here in Vancouver. They bought the company I was contracting for, and lowballed me on salary saying it was competitive with the region, but in the same month, I was I interviewing across the street at Amazon for a hell of a lot more. If I had got the job it wouldn't have been even remotely worth considering. I tried negotiating, but no budge, so we'll see how long that lasts I guess. Not even competitive with other smaller companies in the city.
Companies don't seem to get that even though software devs tend to make more than most, the reality is that in the GTA or GVA it literally costs between $600k and $2m for a modest home. Even a renter would be stupid to not factor in the likelihood their rent will dramatically increase during the time they'll be employed.
Ya, great that I can afford a tiny studio basement suite while splitting rent, but I can't yet whether any significant emergencies or really think about eventually renting a place with a bedroom in it.
Everyone in lower income brackets is just really scraping by more than they'd care to admit.
> Like, they're not in Toronto, but just west of it, and companies there are paying less, so, hey, they should pay less, too, right?
Hiring managers should really read [1], posted previously here in HN. TL;DR: It is not where you or the candidate are located. It is whom you're competing against for hiring talent.
Having worked in both US and Europe I think this is very much less about average engineer and much more about engineering management and product management. There are many excellent software engineers in Europe already, and they are generally OK being paid much less than in the US. But the strategy, ambition, and execution discipline imparted by management are not there, so folks end up being underutilized there. The average engineer - even at a FAANG - often gets lionized but really isn't that amazing IMO.
Yes, in the industry Euro engineers are considered to be generally high quality and underpaid. A good value. The danger being there are awful ones too that are hard to fire. In my experience Euro devs are really good though if you interview well. Individual contributors from Europe are generally a great value.
Euro managers however are generally thought to be of extremely low quality and unreliable as well as 20-30 years dated in terms of running an org. Except at the top, never rely on senior or middle management in Euro to be much more than followers. Never let them run an org unless you really know them as their management techniques do not apply to modern software companies. Managers from Europe are generally of poor quality.
You see it everywhere but in general I see a lot of superficiality in Euro managers. They love to have direct reports, but because they need them but because it makes them feel more official. This is more frequent in Euro in my experience.
You don't see outside the box thinking as much. Very vanilla approaches to things that are generally dated approaches. A culture that lacks innovation.
You see a bit of gaming the system to meet KPI goals. Things that are probably not useful to the company but help them hit a defined goal.
Just not very aggressive in their approach to the business. A very conservative business culture that doesn't really understand scale and is obsessed with throwing lots of bodies at a problem rather than finding novel and innovative approaches.
Insistence that "this won't work here" when that's just not generally true. It's that they don't understand why the approach works and are stuck in older approaches to things that are not relevant to todays business world.
From my limited experience, I think in bigger European companies (not 10-20 people tech startups) you will have people with little to no technical background doing the domain research and the managing of engineers.
I've worked in a French company which calls itself a "tech" company, but upper and middle management was purely people with a controlling, legal, or MBA background.
The engineers working there were great, but criminally underused, because you had only MBAs in product owner roles who spent their time dreaming up products or features with absolutely no idea of feasibility. Like the time one of them presented their idea that the company should "create something like Facebook" to make customers stay on the company website longer. Or the constant requests why the engineers wouldn't consider using "AI" in the company's React Native reporting app.
They were probably trying their best, but the problem was the company's culture of engineers being merely tools to execute the ideas of non-tech people. When we asked for POs or managers with an engineering background, the reply was always along the lines of "they don't know the business, so they don't understand our customer's needs".
Accordingly, it always took months even for very small features or changes to make it past the "agreeing on the requirements" phase, because there was no tech person high up enough in the hierarchy to tell the dreamers straight away that they're living in a phantasy world.
I wonder if car makers have similar problems, i.e. old school car industry guys trying to manage software engineers.
There's nothing inherently wrong with adding social media features to your customer portal, as long as you understand people will use it to vent their complaints, and you will have to spend money on moderation to keep it from turning into a cesspool.
I still remember when Netflix turned off all their social integration, especially the ability to leave movie reviews and get kudos via upvotes. I spent a non-trivial amount of time engaging with that feature. But I'm sure someone finally pointed out that this sort of engagement wasn't driving any revenue.
I agree with you, if a company has a big enough name and user base, social-network-like features can add to the UX.
What our managers were seriously pondering was to create an actual competitor to Facebook that would draw their user base to our website, a company with around 10.000 b2b customers (if even) which had nothing to sell in the b2c channel.
Not necessarily a bad idea in itself, Bloomberg is a b2b only service which has some built-in social networking features that have made it quite sticky because it's an exclusive club with relatively little noise and high trust. But I'm guessing that company isn't Bloomberg :-D
Are there any professions in European countries that are paid as well as US tech workers, for similar levels of skill and/or education?
Moreover, if EU tech companies are not willing to pay the best software/hardware engineers what they're worth, where do they all go? Not everyone wants to live in the US or work remotely.
Despite the general online sentiment, it's important to realize that the average American makes an absurd amount of money compared to their global peers. Even adjusting for PPP and other factors, average disposable household income for the US - a nation of 340M people - blows the doors off Luxembourg, Switzerland, Norway, etc. [1].
What's more though, median disposable income per capita ALSO places the US at the very top in the world, which is super impressive.
All of this is to say that the US is actually a very wealthy place for the white collar worker demographic, so companies need to pay high salaries to attract employees.
That “adjustment” is really tricky to do convincingly.
I’ve been trying to compare an offer in the US and one in Montreal. The raw number for the US blows Canada out of the water, obviously, but adding in healthcare and childcare really starts to close the gap. That’s at least sort of calculable, especially if you ignore their option values, but it’s harder to price in other intangibles, like living somewhere walkable or with good public amenities (parks, schools, events). Basically no amount of money will buy you a walkable neighborhood in parts of the US: we looked—-hard—-in Houston!
>I’ve been trying to compare an offer in the US and one in Montreal. The raw number for the US blows Canada out of the water, obviously, but adding in healthcare and childcare really starts to close the gap.
The disposable income figure that boc quoted includes things like healthcare.
You need to look at the adjusted disposable income to include “social transfers in kind”. The US still leads there, but not as dramatically.
Even so, I’m not convinced that these numbers are actually that meaningful. They might tell you how many new Macbooks someone can afford, but do you think the median person’s quality of life is actually 50% worse outside the US? That seems implausible to me!
Kingwood is the closest thing, because you can at least go for a nice nature walk or have your kids safely bike to school, but there is zero 'walk to the corner store' infrastructure. It's a shame becausse my mother grew up in a much more walkable houston but now this was the best neighborhood she could retire in.
Yeah I guess so but we (americans) also have to worry about healthcare and having (basically) no parental leave etc so always kind of figured it wasn’t as good as it sounds. Open to interpretation maybe.
Was under the impression Australians are paid very well in comparison? Like pretty good minimum wages and holidays - in addition to lucrative trades work. Just have personal experience to vouch for his though.
Their companies figured out a way to make Ford pay millions to be the first result for "Ford" when a user searches for "Ford" instead of users getting a result for "Chevy" (tiny ad disclaimer and recent court cases overseas notwithstanding). https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/why-businesses-have-...
Other successful ones (often the same companies actually) charge (even after their expenses) a higher fee than federal taxes to be part of their store, compelled by a series of hidden ecosystem costs to the consumers, monopolization tactics, and network effects. That company in Europe with the low profit per employee is potentially paying out 30% of their gross (taxes are at least only on net) to one of these.
Basically many of these jobs are "bullshit jobs," working on problems the companies themselves create to rip people off.
Mmm, but housing is usually more expensive around here, except for SV and some other hot spots in the US.
US listings have plenty of houses for about 150k, which is unheard of in my low income area. And any blue collar american is making way more than me or my peers.
Services in most EU good, groceries are cheaper and better average quality for what everyone who's done shopping in both places, and some other stuff too. But in general I'd say that unless you go to Switzerland most euroa have lower disposable income and harder access to housing.
Even flats for 150k are old and in bad shape. You'd have to get very far from the city to get something nice for 150k and good luck with Internet and having services around.
Top of the developed world in infant mortality and school shootings too! Us outside the US, who had the option to come and joining a FAANG; call it danger money.
School shootings kill dozens of people per year in the US, it’s a similar magnitude risk as lightning strikes or train crashes.
Infant mortality in the US is more common and indicative of problems that affect a lot of people. Namely, inequality in access to high-quality prenatal health care, and obesity. If you’re coming to work as a software engineer in the US, you are going to get good health insurance for yourself in your family. Obesity is potentially more relevant - lots of wealthy professionals in the US are obese. Not sure how much this tends to affect people who immigrate from healthier countries.
School shooting is bad example, it gets a lot of headlines but means nothing when averaged for whole US population.
There are other, more serious topics which somebody from ie Europe who isn't desperate for money should consider. Overall workoholic culture and much less free paid days and vacations (no, 20 days per year isn't that great rather bare minimum, 30 begins to be interesting if you actually want to have great life before retirement, on top of plenty of public holidays). Overall crime rates are important though, and thats very high in US for an european. Your taxes are (well repeatedly were, and definitely will be again) used to kill some poor civilians half around the globe for no moral reason whatsoever, bravo for making the world a better place. Low food/produce quality, the amount of NOK chemistry and procedures for growing and raising cattle that is banned in EU is staggering. Most of the country apart from big cities is remarkably full of backwardish fanatical christians, I mean isn't teaching evolution still banned in most schools? Abortions topic?
Healthcare is a topic on its own. There were many posts here before that even with good insurance, you pay hefty sums and very well earning folks were desperate to save enough for high quality healthcare for retirement, especially once you know you have some long term issue for the rest of your life (which we all end up having unless dying way too early). What about when you are between jobs? Or if you retire, since obviously this is when you need good medical system the most? If you had big accident/serious long term illness and employer fires you?
Raising kids - TCO is ridiculously huge, mainly due to University fees that in Europe you often simply just don't have, or they are rather token sums. Public schools are often crap with heavily underpaid teachers (the salary part is probably true everywhere though).
So you end up with higher income but you can lose it very easily if you have bad luck / ignore your health, or simply have few smart kids. Not even going into the topic of being treated as sub-human by US government, since you are not US citizen and somehow doesn't deserve basic human rights when it suits them.
Of course there are many positives but that's another topic.
I think even their doctors are paid lower than US counterparts. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
There’s two ways to look at this. The first way is the shallow way, the raw numbers. The other way is that Europeans have a better social ethics and don’t need the gaudy numbers. Americans do. We don’t have a real culture of social welfare. We value capitalism unlike any other country in the world.
Medical licenses are controlled by cartels in the US. They lobby the government to limit the number of residencies so we end up in a situation where only 40% of people who apply to medical school get in since they can't expand until the number of residency slots increases.
Yes, people in the medical field (doctors, nurses, administrators) are generally paid far lower than in the U.S. it’s one of the ways that European countries are able to spend so much less on healthcare than the U.S.
Euro doctors are significantly underpaid. Euro knows this and the reason you don’t see doctors coming to the USA is that the medical board would require them to retest. Indian doctors don’t mind so they come over and study again.
My hope is the USA changes the law so doctors from Western Europe countries can freely emigrate to the USA and practice for significantly more money. There’s no reason the USA shouldn’t drain Europe of this talent by offering far more money to these workers.
Licensure of physicians in the U.S. is controlled by medical associations through state licensing agencies. They have an incentive to limit the number of people who receive licenses to practice medicine.
Do they have the margins that allows them to pay equivalent salaries?
From what I recall, Meta and Google have gross revenues on the order of one million in revenue per employee, while SAP AG has revenue per employee around 200k.
> They tried to lowball him badly. Like 1/2 the rate he asked for (contract) and probably 1/3rd or 1/4 what we made at Google
FAANG arrogance never ceases to amaze me. It's like these guys live in a different universe blissfully unaware of the world around them. Did it ever occur to him maybe Ford is paying normal average human salaries and not grossly inflated Google wages?
Remember Ford (and this analogy extends to most companies in traditional industries) still has to be able to sell cars to the average blue collar Joe at a price point he can afford, and still turn a profit. Outside SV most people don't drive $80k Teslas. Somebody's still gotta write software for the $16k econoboxes. I'm sorry but nobody deserves to get paid more than e.g. a specialist doctor to hack JavaScript code I don't care how smart you think you are, when there's a guy in India probably just or nearly as good at it who'll do the job for $40k/year. FAANG is swimming in money and can afford to piss away $$ in talent wars, artificially driving up salaries and the prices of everything else, which is why no average person can afford a house in SF anymore. Those that won the FAANG lottery and managed to cash in? God bless them. But don't let the reality distortion field make you think that's how the rest of the world works.
So for context, I'm in automotive on the FAANG side and work closely with people at traditional companies.
There's some misunderstandings here. For one thing, there are obviously skilled people working at every salary level. What you're missing is that this is largely irrelevant. Relative compensation (in software) is a shockingly good proxy for all the associated support and people investments to support them. Employees that cost less are less supported and thus less enabled to produce high quality work than their better-paid counterparts, as a very rough rule of thumb.
It's my experience that OEMs are significantly less invested in their developers and the quality of the software they produce than any FAANG. They don't consider software to be a core competence and they rarely invest in the technical expertise to understand quality or push it internally.
The scale of dev costs is also pretty minor for vehicles as a whole. Amortized labor costs are typically on the order of 10-20% per vehicle. Devs are a small portion (~100s-1000s) of the tens of thousands of engineers that work at major OEMs and their suppliers. An extreme 2-3x wage increase would end up as a few percent increase, but the truth is there are cheaper ways to do that than salary. "All" they have to do is care about the software components the way many do about the mechanical components. It's a cultural problem rather than a strictly monetary one.
> OEMs are significantly less invested in their developers and the quality of the software they produce than any FAANG.
We must be using different FAANG software because the ones I use on a daily basis are slow and buggy as all hell. The last few versions of macOS/iOS have been atrocious. Every version of CarPlay I've used has bugs. Amazon apps are full of glitches. Compare that to developing engine ECU software which I think is a far more difficult engineering task that the average overpaid UI JavaScript slinger could not handle. You can't just update ECU software every week because you sloppily overlooked something. Unless you're Tesla of course.
I don't deny that there are many outstanding, technically excellent engineers at FAANG that deserve every penny they make. But the sad reality is many of them are just TC-chasing posers who got lucky and have subsequently deluded themselves into believing that whatever narrow expertise they now possess is worth far more than it is on the open market.
Want to know something terrifying?
ECU code is often nearly as sloppily written as that JavaScript. They follow MISRA and usually have a couple "QA" teams to catch the most egregious errors of course, but the overall quality is eerily similar to what you'd get if half the team came straight out of a time machine from 1995. I've had to give informational sessions on why boot systems should have redundancy and what undefined behavior is, for example.
And yet the ECU shipped with nearly every car for the past few decades almost never fails through millions of cycles.
I think all this "ECU code is bad" stuff is just people who don't like the style of the produced code. Are you sure those edge cases aren't accounted for in other ways? Maybe they decided that everything should be "best case" code, and any error just resets the ECU which boots up before the next spark event needs to be triggered.
I just cannot square how much people complain about the code in ECUs with how utterly reliable they are. Consider the group that investigated VW cars cheating on emissions. The system was complex and obfuscated, but also powerful, reliable, and configurable by the manufacturer.
A similar argument was made by Toyota about their systems during the lead-up to the unintended acceleration debacle. I recommend Koopman's talk [1] on the subject for details, but long story short the Toyota ETC was apparently utterly reliable and installed in some of the most popular vehicles on the market at the time. However, detailed investigation of the systems and code behind the few publicized incidents revealed basic system issues like the watchdog failed to detect task crashes, rampant memory safety issues, and even a failure to follow their own internal code guidelines. All of that was manifesting in people's vehicles, but it was only rarely turning lethal and even those cases went mostly unrecognized.
Things have improved significantly since the Toyota acceleration issue, in large part because all those details came out. Model-based design is now basically standard for most ECUs, which eliminates large amounts of buggy human-written code. Formal methods tools that don't entirely suck exist. However, most of the issues Koopman points out (especially memory safety) still exist in many places on modern vehicles and all of his points about the issues with relying on testing to surface quality problems remain relevant.
I think you’re conflating the UI of Amazon with the more difficult problem of getting a large distributed system to work at scale.
Conversely, if your ECU has minor glitches, will you notice? Unless it results in catastrophic failure, you will not even know if happens to result in the occasional 0.1 mpg increase in consumption.
And I’m sure VW and the other companies put a lot of resources into software engineering the exhaust emissions defeat workaround.
>> They don't consider software to be a core competence
Because it isn't for OEMs, theirbequipment is their core competency and aoftware, especially the entertainment side of things for automotive OEMs, is just part of that.
Would you argue that software isn't a core competency for Apple or Samsung because they sell phones? Same situation.
Modern vehicles are just distributed computers with tires, and self driving vehicles are worse. Virtually every feature is either massively supported or entirely enabled by software.
I think that's besides the point. If a qualified developer can get paid more elsewhere, they'll go elsewhere, and Ford will end up with marginally- or un-qualified developers. That's just how the job market works.
Only if money is the only thing you're optimizing for, which isn't necessarily the case for everyone.
I once went for a job because of the money alone - it was the worst experience of my life and made me realize that money is not worth optimizing for beyond a certain point of comfort.
Sure, but you have to look at total costs, span over lifetime. How long will it take you to pay for that house you probably live in? How much time do you waste commuting? How draining is your job? How much do you spent when going out on some show, restaurant etc? How close to true nature are you?
I've followed money in my job decisions in the past and it has worked out OK for me so far, but of course I have no clue how my life would look like with other choices. But living in cramped place like SF for double the salary (thats max) and double the costs... no thank you.
I agree mostly with your points, other than when you get into how much the cars cost.
The unit price of the cars isn't really relevant to the cost of developing it's software. A low cost model that moves sells a lot of units, can likely afford to spend more on software compared to a high cost model that moves only a few units.
>> The unit price of the cars isn't really relevant to the cost of developing it's software. A low cost model that moves sells a lot of units, can likely afford to spend more on software compared to a high cost model that moves only a few units.
You didn't? Of course software costs are part of the unit costs for each car produced, just how those development costs are actually allocated is up to Finance (accounting and controlling) to decide. And of course those costs are relevant, as all the other costs of a car maker.
Putting your accusations of arrogance aside, the point is ultimately this: unlike the work done by a worker on an assembly line, software work scales out "infinitely." You may pay that team of developers a huge amount but the work they have done is reproduced at "zero" cost hundreds of thousand of times.
It makes sense to invest in quality there.
I have made the point that ad revenue distorts FAANG practices elsewhere. I agree on this. You'll note that myself and my friend had no intention of seeking a FAANG salary elsewhere, it's unrealistic. However. There are limits. And sane practices.
The low compensation band reflects a lack of recognition of a) the importance of software and b) the economics of it. It isn't just that they pay bad, it's that they produce bad software because they don't get it.
How does Europe make it work? Lower salaries, higher cost of living. Is it just that so many essentials are handled by the government? Or are they still coasting on the colonial wealth (this doesn’t seem likely)
From a tech workers perspective in Western Europe, we have relatively high wages compared to the median, but it's just heavily taxed. For reference: when I started my first tech job 5 years ago, I started off at a pay higher than my mom who's 30 years into a career in public services. I started off in the highest tax bracket from the get go too.
These high taxes are indeed used to run a lot of public services such as schooling, infrastructure, socialized healthcare etc. As such there's a high degree of wealth re-distribution since the people that don't/can't contribute as much still get the benefits of all of these public services.
As to the higher cost of living, I personally feel like we tend to have access to the staples at a similar level of purchasing power as Northern Americans, but our disposable income doesn't stretch remotely as far beyond that. Automobiles are far less accessible, a new iPhone would eat up a substantial amount of my monthly take home, etc.
Just my anecdotal and very top level two cents right here.
They also use weird tricks like underpaying health staff (doctors and nurses make 40% of what they do in the US, look at NHS salary tables), relying on US defense subsidies, and taxing everyone making over 100k at insane rates.
We already have "socialized education" in public schools in most blue states if you make under 120k. The financial aid is generous enough that you aren't paying any tuition. The 70k sticker price is only paid by wealthy students, as a means of price discrimination.
yes, things like surgeries or dental dont bankrupt you in Europe, and doctors dont automatically become millionaires collecting vintage cars or buying private planes.
> doctors dont automatically become millionaires collecting vintage cars or buying private planes
Yes, instead they make less than new grads working in literally any white collar field in the US, less than nurses in the US, and less than most blue collar trades in the US [1]. 91k GBP for the highest pay grade specialist doctor is just sad given how much training you need to become a specialist. That doctor could be making millions here in the US with their own practice.
GPs in the US (lowest paid specialty) get paid 2-3x what GPs get paid in the UK, according to the NHS payscales.
I think doctors working 80 hour residencies and grinding through med school deserve to get paid more, don't you think?
> Is grinding thru med school somewhat sacred? should they earn more than EEs? civil engineers? architects?
Everyone you mentioned should (and does in the US) earn more than 90k GBP. Nurses in the US (at least in California where they make 50-60$/h) earn the same as top pay grade specialty doctors in the UK according to that NHS payscale.
> yes, fixing noses or fake tits
No, there are many specialties which don't involve plastic surgery but make millions. Cardiologist, dermatologist, dentist, etc. Or if you're a surgeon and work at a big hospital, you can also make 500k+. All of these involve mitigating pain and suffering and saving lives.
Sorry you think plastic surgery is the only way to earn a good living in medicine.
> like almost everyone else. Newsflash - US is really expensive.
Compared to what, London? Amsterdam? Paris? The US isn't more expensive than anywhere else, and for a doctor working in the suburbs, it's way cheaper than any major city in Europe. Don't forget, health insurance for white collar workers in the US is cheap compared to their salary, and taxes are lower. Energy costs as well. And a 401k is a lot cheaper than paying progressive social security taxes that redistribute earnings.
At least the US doctor can afford a house, whereas the UK one will never buy one within an hour's drive of London in their lifetime.
More like oh, those UK nurses in the poorhouse. They deserve to make what their US counterparts are making.
> It's more like "keeping the US defense industry afloat by buying expensive gadgets we don't need"
Yes, because that's what's defending Europe against Russian invasion, right? Expensive gadgets you don't need? Or is Germany's broken down, dysfunctional army [1] going to do that?
Sure, but most people aren't skilled white collar tech workers with in demand skills who could be earning 3x post-tax salary in the US.
Health insurance is essentially free or cheap at any good tech company. EU pensions are underfunded (just like US ones) and as a high paid tech worker you're better off with maxing your 401k anyways.
If you look at the nationalities in any top US MS/PhD/MBA program, you'll find it's about 40% European, far above what undergraduate programs look like. That shows quite a few skilled workers in Europe want to leave.
If you are an unskilled worker, Europe is better as long as they can continue to sustain their social programs by taxing high earners and having defense be subsidized by the US. If too many high earners leave or the US becomes unwilling to pay for bases all across Europe, the whole system collapses pretty quickly.
Half the people I work with are from Western Europe and they won’t waste any time to take a dig at our lack of social safety net.
However, the thing I’d be worried about in their position, is, if the safety net is actually a sustainable project in a time of declining economic growth. They’re extrapolating on 30 or 40 years worth of data and if you’re retiring in 30 or 40 years a lot can change. Look what’s happened with the austerity crisis, something EU folks usually don’t want to talk about. Personally I’d want to manage my own retirement and risk tolerance.
I’ve spent the last decade working with very good EU engineers. If I wrote a list of the top 50 people I’ve come across in EU, I would estimate 45 of them now work remote for US companies or have moved to the US.
> By their CEO's own admission, Ford sees itself as a "data company":
The linked article quotes the CEO, "Overall, when you look at our business, we're not only a car manufacturing company. We are a technology company. As our vehicles become part of the Internet of things and as consumers give permission to us to collect that data, we'll also become an information company."
That's marketing related to the IoT buzzword. Next week they might talk about using blockchain. The other part of the statement is that they are a "data company," because they can sell information about their customers.
The words from the CEO are the same words from a data analyst, but they each mean something entirely different.
Margins for car companies are shit. Why would anyone invest in a race to the bottom high marginal cost company when differentiated zero marginal cost companies exist? And what if we just told everyone we were the latter?
It means they figured that monetizing the data they collect on people driving their cars will bring them more cash than selling the cars themselves. The same way electronics manufacturer have doubled their profits on "smart" TV sets over a few years by feeding advertisers knowledge about what you're watching, and when, so you can be targeted more precisely in future ad campaigns.
Have you heard of those small companies called Google and Facebook? Care to compare their market cap with Ford's lately? Do you really think they're worth that much because of their quick web search and easy friend-finding?
lol silly why would you think they use data to make business choices. They make the choices then make data to justify said choices. That’s how legacy companies do it
We don't want to leave but you can bet american companies have it easy fishing here. It's increasingly common for american companies to set small teams around here.
The only problem american companies have is dealing with the workers rights around here.
I honestly think having an underpowered low-spec SoC is a huge problem. Sure, if you have top programmers who have experience writing low-level code and best in practice algorithms and data structures for speed you can get that low-spec SoC to have a good experience. But, I think the odds of you getting/retaining, and finding more of those types of programmers is low. So soon you have some programmers trying to cram python or javascript or lua in the underpowered SoC and using Qt or some other wholly inappropriate high-level API and then you end up with those gas station gas pump computers that take 3-9 seconds to respond to single clicks.
Of course having high-powered SoCs won't guarantee you'll get performant displays either but I think have low-powered ones generally guarantees failure except for maybe some initial small team of experts.
University types infect the private market. They think they can turn programmers into standard office workers to lower their pay. And, unfortunately, they're right. Consumers will buy, so no need to produce quality. They can slave away graduates that have to pay back loans and have 0 guidance on the market or how to negotiate.
Excuse me guys, but I think your comments although interesting for their story are out of place here. The Verge articles talks about a slow computer. The F150 issues can literally be fixed if Ford decides to install a quicker one on MY23.
What does this thing have to do with software engineers payment and the rant that followed?
>The F150 issues can literally be fixed if Ford decides to install a quicker one on MY23.
I’m unconvinced the problem can be fixed by “installing a quicker computer”. The functionality here isn’t materially different from what Tesla offered almost 10 years ago at this point. If nearly 10 years of hardware advancements couldn’t close the gap, a marginally faster computer next year won’t do it either.
You're assuming that the processor they're using today is ten years more advanced than what Tesla was shipping ten years ago. Automotive is very conservative. I wouldn't be surprised if the processor used here were very old indeed.
The unavoidable Tesla comparison sorry, I am not convinced. What functionality is better? Not everybody is interested in fart apps or Steam games or other questionable "extra" functionality. OK, let's just say that Tesla has better software. It lacks however in other departments, such a build quality.
But fact of the matter is here the following: if one reads The Verge article, his complains are mainly about the slow software and some unlabeled functionality here and there. Which can easily be fixed in a future iteration (ie MY23). He does not complain about the software being "that bad" or needing to offer fart apps or anything. Just slow.
Hardware problem, not software. And yes, the same applies for many car companies, even ones that sell premium products (BMW, etc). They need to offer faster processors.
In embedded, software developers are always running up against the bean-counters trying to get the BOM cost lower. You can pretty much expect an underpowered SoC.
It's the job of embedded developers to work with the constraints. This isn't end consumer hardware. The cost of the device is multiplied by the number of cars shipped. So you keep it as low as you can.
You have a budget of cycles between display refreshes. Often the perception of slowness is not that the throughput of the software is too much for the hardware, it's that the work is done in the wrong place or wrong time. It's that the budget was poorly allocated -- work was done in the wrong thread or on the wrong core or in the wrong loop or at the wrong time.
All of this to say the perception of bad performance on these type of devices can honestly just come down to sloppy programming, not the power of the device.
Because in the end, what are they actually doing? Mostly just moving stuff around on the screen. The thing isn't computing a giant spreadsheet or blockchain crap. It's telling the MCU in the climate system to turn on.
So you learn how your display controller works, and you optimize optimize optimize.
>The unavoidable Tesla comparison sorry, I am not convinced. What functionality is better?
I never said the functionality was better. My post says "The functionality here isn’t materially different from what Tesla offered." 5 year old Teslas, today, do not have laggy interfaces.
Your claim that it will be "easily" fixed will remain to be seen. Ford isn't new to touch screen interfaces. Every consumer has been opining for Android Auto/Carplay because they know stock interfaces will be laggy, unresponsive and unintuitive. This has been an issue for years, before EVs, and it takes a very healthy amount of optimism to believe it will just be fixed next year.
The iPhone was able to have smooth, responsive interfaces on a battery powered device in 2008. That was 14 years ago. How much more powerful of a device do you need than the iPhone 3GS to open a touch screen menu at 30fps? Only a handful of auto manufacturers care about software, and it's been that way for years. This isn't new.
You can write programs that run very well on underpowered hardware. The fact that they haven't does not indicate that they "just didn't buy a fast enough computer", it indicates that the quality of their software is low.
Sure, for MY23 they can upgrade the hardware, but probably also they will add more functionality to their software. And if they're not careful (which it seems like currently they are not), those features will require more compute, causing the software to remain slow regardless of hardware upgrades.
Generally speaking the horrifying quality of Ford's electronics have been enough to keep me away from even considering purchasing one. Absolutely nothing works right and certainly nothing works well. It may or may not be able to connect bluetooth, it may or may not acknowledge a USB device, it may or may not start blaring whatever FM station was last tuned in for no reason on startup, or start playing the first album on your phone. Phone audio will sometimes play as media, and sometimes show up as phone calls. And of course, cripplingly slow, which for a touchscreen is deadly -- you have no idea whether or not the system even realized that you pressed it, and when you mash the button more than once you may find that you've clicked a button on a not-yet-visible-screen. Absolute garbage.
Mazda is apparently taking the right approach here -- increasing the tactile buttons on the dash and console, and ditching touchscreens.
Really, cars should just have a built-in phone mount and connectors, and just let the phone do pretty much everything. If Ford wants to have a map of charging stations, partner with Apple or Google (or Waze) or build their own OSM-based maps app. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are okay-ish, but frankly I find the experience of just having the phone on a mount and using that as the display to be far superior in almost every way.
>Mazda is apparently taking the right approach here -- increasing the tactile buttons on the dash and console, and ditching touchscreens.
Huh? After using both Ford's (2022 Explorer) and Mazda's (2022 CX-7) infotainment systems recently for several weeks, I couldn't disagree more.
Android Auto and CarPlay interfaces were designed for touchscreen control. Mazda forcing the use of a wheel, like a joystick is a safety hazard. Turing the wheel unpredictably selects objects on the screen, forcing you to keep your eyes off the road while you keep turning the wheel until the item you need is selected. In Ford's system, a quick glace us all that's required.
What good is tactile feedback when you have no idea what you're adjusting without staring at the screen?
> Android Auto and CarPlay interfaces were designed for touchscreen control. Mazda forcing the use of a wheel, like a joystick is a safety hazard.
What? How is it a safety hazard? I'm far more distracted trying to touch the button on display or scroll in my Wrangler, than using a wheel in my Miata. Selection is extremely predictable and always the same order, it's a basic accessibility feature of android.
I enjoy using the knob with android auto far more than touch screen, specifically because I don't have to move eyes of the road or have a hand in an uncomfortable position trying to touch something on the screen.
Plus, switching between navigation and media is a press of a button that is always in the same space - next to the knob. Compared to touchscreen... And on top of everything, it remembers which navigation/media I'm using, so switching between radio and android auto navigation is a single button press.
It's like one of the important features why my last two cars were mazdas.
Mazda provides physical buttons for 90% of the controls you need on a daily basis but there's no realistic way to use apple carplay without looking at a screen. Were you expecting mazda to have a "Search for a song" dedicated button on the steering wheel?
In my view Mazda's modern interface is almost as safe as you can get while still having modern features that require a touchscreen. I only wish there was a button to physically turn the entire screen off when driving at night (you can do this but it's buried in a menu).
In my 2020 CX5, the screen is actually a touchscreen as well, but it only works at low speeds which may be safer but is not very convenient when a passenger wants to control it at speed.
You can press the speak button on the steering wheel and say “turn screen off” and it will turn off on the Mazda 2 door hatch. Might have changed for latest version, I would google it to find the magic phrase incantation.
Both Apple Carplay and Android Auto support voice controls via their respective assistants. And most cars come with native voice control these days as well.
> What good is tactile feedback when you have no idea what you're adjusting without staring at the screen?
This is what people don't understand about touchscreen vs dial-based UIs. One is not safer than the other if they both require you to take your eyes off the road and look at a screen!
If car makers want to have a button control a feature, then they should simply make a button that controls that feature. Cars worked that way for many years. Buttons, dials, or trackpads that move a cursor or select items on a screen are slower than touch-based UIs, require at least as much driver attention, and are less ergonomic than just putting your finger on the exact item you want.
Mazda still provides a lot of those buttons that other manufacturers don't - for things like HVAC/Music - let alone basic features like windshield wipers and gear shift which should never have gone behind a touchscreen IMHO (cough Tesla cough)
> Buttons, dials, or trackpads that move a cursor or select items on a screen are slower than touch-based UIs, require at least as much driver attention, and are less ergonomic than just putting your finger on the exact item you want
Mercedes does this really well. I was surprised.
You can use the screen as a touchscreen, or there's a dial thingy on the armrest that lets you scroll around the UI by flicking your fingers. Similar to keyboard navigation on computers.
The end result is a touchscreen you can use effectively when stationary and an easy-to-use control for when you're moving and need to deal with your arm moving relative to the car. And the sequence of UI selections are intuitive enough that after 20min you can do it almost without looking.
My understanding is they've been working on this combo for 10+ years. Newer models (since ~2018) have a full on touchpad instead of the wheel.
Unfortunately they got rid of all that in new models - e.g. the EQE has no more controller dial and all the buttons are now the cheap horrible capacitive buttons :/
This is what people don't seem to get...with a set of physical buttons, you can find what you're looking for just by feel, glance down briefly when it's safe to do so to make sure it's the button you want, then press it.
With a touchscreen, in contrast, you have to hover over approximately the location you think you want to press, and either hope you don't hit a bump before you have a chance to look down and make sure it's the right spot or look down immediately.
I put a touchscreen head unit in my car in 2016. If I drove more often I'd dump the touchscreen in a heartbeat.
The idea with the touchscreen controls is that the driver shouldn't really be using the touchscreen at all while driving except as a quick reference to the map.
You're not supposed to be using the screen to adjust your media while driving, there's steering wheel and voice controls.
You're not supposed to be adjusting the climate controls while moving, auto climate should just handle it. Why would I want to be distracted by needing to change the climate controls? I shouldn't have to adjust them while the vehicle is in motion.
Yeah, they drive while holding their phones on speakerphone while talking into it like they're about to take a bite out of a sandwich.
Other than volume and next track/station, just about any other media control is going to have my hand off the wheel for a bit and probably require me to look at what its doing even if its all just a bunch of buttons and knobs. Like what, change which folder I'm in? Change to a different playlist? Choose a different app entirely? None of that is going to be done by just feeling around the dashboard.
And as mentioned, I'd probably return any car that I have to adjust the climate more than once a quarter. Every car I've owned for over 20 years has been able to keep its climate consistent and comfortable without the need for me to make adjustments for months on end. Why would I want to be distracted making minute adjustments to the climate settings while I drive? Why would I want to have to change the mode or turn it to more heat or more cool or turn the AC compressor on or off while I drive? Shouldn't it just be able to figure out if the car is cold turn up the heat and if the car is hot turn on the AC compressor? Wouldn't it know the optimal way to cool itself? Shouldn't it be able to figure out the best fan speed to keep the climate as programmed ahead of time?
Honestly, why should I even have to tell my car to turn on the heated seats? I don't need to on one of my cars, it turns it on automatically when its cold outside.
> Every car I've owned for over 20 years has been able to keep its climate consistent and comfortable without the need for me to make adjustments for months on end
This doesn’t work when sometimes the sun is shining and sometimes it isn’t.
For me, this is exactly why I do have to change the "climate control" target.
Last Sunday I spent 9 hours driving through on/off rain and sunshine.
The sun shining in adds significant radiative heat directly to my body. Climate control can keep the air temp constant(convection) but there is more to my personal comfort.
I think this is a very valid point. The car cannot detect that you are receiving sun rays through the windows. Making you feel much hotter than the ambiant air.
Sometimes you need to adjust the vent to blow in your face more directly, or set the climate control to cool the air further to offset the inconvenience.
It could detect it quite easily but this is the industry that thought they were doing you a favor putting a CD player in. There are so many awesome things cars could do but they don’t.
> The car cannot detect that you are receiving sun rays through the windows.
I wouldn't get a car that doesn't have some kind of low emissivity tinting on it. Also, all my cars with screens could detect how intense the sun is overall. It can easily adjust.
At least with Mazda, yes, the intention was to make driving safer. And just because some people make poor choices, doesn't mean manufactures should encourage poor choices.
> You're not supposed to be adjusting the climate controls while moving, auto climate should just handle it. Why would I want to be distracted by needing to change the climate controls? I shouldn't have to adjust them while the vehicle is in motion.
That auto climate thing does not work well for me. I end up messing with it so much because it can't keep me comfortable. The old style where I set it at some level between hot and cold and some fan level from 1 to 5 or whatever and it just does what I tell it works perfectly. Plus I can adjust it if I have to without looking at it.
That is a false binary. Drivers are inundated with distraction at every moment, from the rapidly changing world around them to idle thoughts arising inside their minds. A competent driver is situationally aware and chooses an appropriate moment to be intentionally distracted with a glance away to adjust the climate or radio.
The job of technology is to be extremely predictable and, ideally, multi-sensory.
as soon as you're taking your eyes off the road or your hands off the wheel to look at or touch anything else you are distracted by definition, half a second is the difference between breaking fast enough to not kill someone in an accident.
The only people who shouldn't be driving are the people not aware of that fact.
Taking my hand off the wheel and thinking about making the climate change changes my attention and focus, even if only slightly. It's better to not even have to think about it at all.
As the other commenter said, people who don't even notice when their attention changes probably shouldn't be driving.
Honestly, the broader problem that isn't directly car-related is that voice control doesn't generally work as an alternative to punching buttons (whether virtual or physical) and looking at a screen. You can reasonably do some fairly standard tasks using CarPlay such as answering the phone.
But you mostly have to have pre-setup entertainment options, for example. Not that this is really a new thing. People fiddled with radio stations while driving more than they probably should have back in the day.
And, yes, I do need to adjust climate controls now and then while driving although my vehicle does have fairly reasonable physical controls for that so it's not appreciably distracting.
Navigation systems themselves are something of a distraction although I'd guess that overall less so than glancing down at a map or directions on your lap.
I recently got a Mazda CX-5. Previous car was a Ford Escape. I much prefer Mazda’s approach. The touchscreen on the Ford was a pain to use after several years. I think the screen’s touch sensitivity degrades over time. I don’t know. It was especially bad in winter. I haven’t owned the Mazda long enough to know if the joystick will degrade much over time but I find the interface easy to use and navigate. It does sometimes take a while to acknowledge a click. That’s annoying but overall I really like Mazda’s approach.
I haven't actually driven a Mazda, I just heard that they were getting rid of touchscreens and it honestly didn't occur to me that they'd try to shoehorn full Android Auto or CarPlay into that. I just assumed that they would have a minimal interface and let your phone do the work, and then have "next track" and "previous track" buttons and a volume knob, plus climate control and stuff, and the screen would just have various car information; tire pressure and fuel efficiency and various camera systems for parking.
It might still work for me (I'm definitely going to test drive a Mazda when my current car needs replacing), but this is me; I disable CarPlay because I can't stand it; I prefer to just put my phone on a mount and use it directly; I just need the car systems as a speaker for the phone.
I own a Mazda and using Android Auto with physical controls works just fine, no idea what the OP is talking about. All the main driving features are accessible by buttons and don't need eyes off the road.
It's a massive difference in compasion to some brands that require you to use touchscreen to switch to next track or adjust AC temp.
My Subaru doesn't have any buttons to go to preset radio stations. I can use the steering wheel buttons to go one by one till I get to the right one but it's an awful experience. It takes a second just to switch one time. Several seconds just to get to something that's instantaneous in cases that have buttons.
Changing the AC, even with physical controls, is a distraction from driving. I don't get why anyone drives without it being on auto climate as you're inviting more distractions. If its on auto climate why are you making adjustments while you drive?
What kinds of cars you driving that are making the process that distracting.
I have three giant knobs inches away from my gear lever to control the climate. Climate control status is on a screen just below line of sight to the road.
I'm moving my hand a few inches and generally not even needing to look at anything to get feedback (I can set the fan speed by ear...), and if I do I can do it without taking my eyes off of the road.
I'm controlling the climate control for my comfort, not to hit arbitrary numbers. If I make a quick stop and spend a few minutes out in 110 degree heat, I wanna get in and have ice cold air blasting in my face until I'm comfortable. I don't care if the car is already a chilly 66f inside. If it's -40 outside, I want it to blow heat directly on my feet when I get in until my toes warm up even if the car is already warm. Hell, sometimes if it's too warm in there and my toes are frozen I'll drive around with the heat blasting and a window cracked to keep it comfortable.
I shouldn't need to sacrifice my comfort so the manufacturers can continue building shitty and dangerous UIs for basic vehicle functions.
Anything you do outside of driving your car is then technically distracting you from driving even if only minorly. Sure, it's not massively distracting to reach over and turn some knobs. But is is more distracting than never having to make an adjustment at all.
So we should probably focus on making things people need to do in their car as quick and intuitive as possible to limit the distraction.
We put radio controls on the steering wheel to make it easier and safer to do things like adjust the volume. We don't just tell people "set your volume before you get moving and let the speed dependent volume control take over from there".
I have total control over my car's A/C through 3 rotary dials and can adjust all parameters to my liking without taking my eyes off the road a single millisecond. Doing so also requires much less attention than maintaining a non-important conversation with my usual passenger, who likes to talk a lot.
Maybe because its burning hot out and people need high AC to cool down. Or the opposite in cold weather. Or to defrost windshield/rear window.
Climate control is a great feature. But it's not perfect, and there are instances where you need to manually override. Just because you don't run into them doesn't mean they don't exist.
EDIT: BTW on cars with physical controls all of these things are either button press or dial turn away. I've never had to look at the controls to do these things.
So here's an example. It's over 100F outside, my car is probably 115F inside it at the moment.
Setting my car to 70F inside instead of it's current 72F won't make it cool any faster. Even setting it to it's "LO" setting won't make it cool any faster. The AC compressor is either on or off. The car will set the fan speed to it's best possible speed to cool the car as fast as it can regardless of it being 72 or 70 or 68. Me adjusting things manually won't make the compressor work harder or make the car cool faster.
There's zero benefit for me to touch the AC controls. The car knows it's hot. The car knows how I want it. It will do what it can to get it to that target temp. Me doing anything will just result in more distraction away from actually driving the car.
Wouldn't it engage a heavier fan speed if there was a smaller disparity in temperature? For example if it's 75 in the car and I'd like it to be 72 turning the AC down to 70 would engage a heavier fan speed with the downside of increased noise, so practically I would cool down quicker by setting it to 70
and could then adjust back up to 72.
But more practically, if I start catching a lot of sun from the window I might want to go from 72 to 70 to compensate, even if the cabin temperature is more or less the same.
The car knows how intense the sun is. It has sensors to measure that. Coupled with some decent low emissive tint it's really not hard for it to handle such an idea.
I live in Texas. I assure you I live in an area with high heat and intense sun. My cars have glass roofs. My cars seem to handle it fine.
Perhaps it depends on complexity of the system? I like in Florida and have to do some tuning occasionally, but I think it just has a typical in cabin and ambient sensor and isn't aware of how much sunlight there is.
If it has a screen it probably knows how bright it is as it can probably change between night and day modes. If it can tell it's bright, it can guess you're getting more radiant heating. It's been like that on every car with a screen built in that I've owned, more than a decade of model years.
Alternately, I don't care about he speed of change.
That blazing sun shining on you via radiation directly feels different than if the sky is overcast.
I want to easily tweak the temp to account for my personal comfort. I don't care about the temp of the air except as an input to helping me be comfortable.
I don't want to have to start and then sit in my car idling to wait until it gets to temp only to find out I want a little more or less.
I don't experience much difference. Low emissivity tinting does wonders to make you more comfortable. I even have glass roofs on my cars and it really doesn't make that much of a difference in comfort in my car.
On top of that, my cars also know how intense the sun is. It wouldn't surprise me if that's also an input to the climate control.
Renault Zoe was the last one I've drove with that annoying issue (at least the model I had).
There was also a BMW Series 1, that requred selecting a media page in dashboard screen and then selecting a next track button. (No support for Auto on that one tho.)
Interesting. It seems like almost all cars sold in the US these days have steering wheel media controls, even cheaper base models. It feels like you'd have to go out of your way to find one that doesn't have it.
I have a Mazda and I love it. Also have no idea what OP is talking about.
Steering wheel has next-prev track buttons also the volume wheel can be gently slid left/right to do the same thing.
I love the button approach Mazda takes. Stuff like AC etc is all button controlled. It's a 90s car approach with a bolted on screen your phone can connect to. Stupid simple, tactile, nearly perfect.
> Turing the wheel unpredictably selects objects on the screen, forcing you to keep your eyes off the road while you keep turning the wheel until the item you need is selected.
You shouldn't need to do anything requiring the wheel while you're driving though. All the controls that you would want to have accessible while you're driving are physical (climate control, basic media/phone controls.) For everything else you should be setting that up while you're parked.
Yet, it's not what people are doing. The UIs of cars and other objects should take into account how they're going to be used, not how they are designed to be used. It's been proven again and again that you can only marginally educate or tell people how to behave. It's better to make a system that is safe 7/10 in real world usage, instead of one designed for 9/10, but actually getting 5/10.
Both hands staying on the steering wheel is a huge plus. And the inputs are stepwise and therefore less prone to error, so safer.
And then there is Siri which makes all the things that you might want to do while driving, and probably shouldn't (touchscreen or not) far easier and safer.
I've never said a touchscreen is better. FWIW, I like the button controls on my car and don't need a touchscreen.
I'm specifically replying to "anything else you should do at the parking lot", which we know people don't do. I'm ONLY saying that UIs should be designed for how they will be used. If people never pull over and do things on the go - either disable them completely when the car is moving or make sure the user is done as quickly as possible and with the minimum amount of looking inside the car. If that's a touchscreen, buttons, buttons next to a screen, I don't really know - that should be done with proper UI/UX research.
I'd claim things are more nuanced. There are many reasons why UIs in many places, not just cars, suck. In cars, wether warranted or not, there is also pressure from legal to err on the side of building a cludge that is unassailable vs. a smooth user experience that could be grounds for a class action because it doesn't make enough of an effort to discourage dangerous user behavior.
It’s because the incentives are in the wrong place. When the average Joe goes to a car lot a new truck with a touchscreen is “Futuristic” and “Modern”. The only cars that come with buttons are the base models, and are therefore “cheap”.
The car industry isn’t in the business of building great UIs, they’re in the business of selling cars off of the dealer lot, unfortunately.
Usually me an my wife take turns driving. And we have a tacit agreement that the passenger control this kind of stuff. So, if I am driving, I ask my wife to set a destination on the GPS, play some music, change the temperature, and when she is driving I become the navigator/flight-engineer.
Having those controls in the wheel would be incredibly annoying for us.
In my Mazda, the climate controls are physical, but in the center console, and easily accessible to both driver and front passenger. The wheel-based controls are things like skip forward/backward, bring up voice input, or end call. That's also about the extent of things I consider the driver should be focusing on. When I was younger, on family trips, even climate control was something relegated to the passenger; Even for the driver side.
I consider putting in a destination on the GPS, or setting up my music playlist to be 'park the car' types of things if simply doing it via voice control doesn't work.
The controls should not be visible to the driver. Move that touch screen over to the navigators seat and make it nice and convient for them to use. A little angle to the driver can't see it at all would be good.
The driver should have limited controls, all physical, and all ergonomicly designed to be easy to find. Even programming your phone GPS while moving should require the navigator to hit accept.
Screens for the driver should be carefully designed to not be something you look at while moving.
Realistically, however, there often is no navigator so reverting vehicle controls for a solo driver to the situation 10 years ago is almost certainly a non-starter. And even that long ago, it just meant people were using a smartphone instead on an in-car infotainment system.
Sure, but now it isn't the automakers fault when someone does something dangerious. Hopefully the police can start enforcing no phone use while driving laws. Google/Apple may in fact be liable as well and forced to check GPS before unlocking a phone (this would be bad for passenger experience, but if drivers can't keep their hands off their phones it might be required to do this)
The thumbwheel buttons on the Tesla wheel are great, and one of them activates listening for voice commands, which work really well. That usually handles all music switching and climate control setting.
I refuse to believe an UX professional or even a programmer ever thought this could be a good idea.
It must have been pushed down the throats of the designers and developers by an edict from some point-haired MBA.
I'm positive this is what happened. My anecodotal evidence: the touchscreen-while-moving functionality was removed when my 2016 got a software update. One day I could just touch the giant map to enlarge it, the next I had to twiddle the knob a precise number of notches and watch the screen to make sure I highlighted it correctly.
It could be worse: Lexus infotainment screens of certain years would refuse to display the radio's RDS song info when you pressed the "Message" button (which enlarges the window to see it) while you were moving. Meanwhile, the RDS data happily continued to scroll by, one word every 3 seconds, in the tiny marquee at the top.
I have a 2020 Mazda 6 and I love the safety focus of its infotainment. But the ludicrously bad latency is infuriating. Button presses - especially <change radio station +/-> will sometimes get buffered for 10/20s and sometimes they're ignored altogether.
The truth is you really shouldn’t be doing anything apart from adjusting the A/C while driving. It’s all dangerous to do, whether it’s a touchscreen or buttons. Everyone does it, but nothing will make it safe.
If you're going down this path, what makes you single out adjusting the A/C? My car has a physical knob to adjust the temperature of the A/C that I can locate without looking, but I need to look at the seven-segment display to see the temperature being adjusted. How is that different from looking at a touchscreen and tapping a button on the screen?
It’s risky too, but it’s pretty much the only thing on the center console that is directly related to your physical comfort which will impact your concentration. That’s why I made an exception for it.
In this case, looking into side mirrors is dangerous, but not looking into them is also dangerous. Thus driving is dangerous, but walking is dangerous too, so better to sit in a safe room away from the dangers.
Driving is dangerous. But looking in your side mirrors is necessary. But looking too long is dangerous, especially in stop and go traffic.
My point is not that we should do nothing because everything is dangerous, but that we should minimize the risk by avoiding things that are unnecessary.
Adjusting the radio is almost certainly unnecessary to drive.
Annoying music makes the driver angry and inattentive, so not adjusting the radio is also dangerous. This kind of risk assessment algorithm is already built into our brains, and I doubt you can improve it with a formal simplistic model, partially because the risk weights depend on circumstances.
I used to own a Ford Fusion with an early version of Sync. The car itself was great. The Sync software by Microsoft, however, was not.
One of the innumerable bugs was in the voice recognition system. No matter what song I requested, about half the time it played "Tiny Dancer" by Elton John.
I was demonstrating this bug to a friend who asked "What happens when you request Tiny Dancer?" Sure enough, it played something else.
I bought a Focus with Sync 1 last year, and it was infuriating. The most infuriating part was that every time the car starts it defaulted to aux in mode, and there’s no button on the panel to switch to Bluetooth — if I wanted to listen to music from my phone, it took about 8 or 9 button presses to navigate through three levels of nested menus to get to the “media source” option. Every time I got in the car.
I finally ripped the thing out and replaced it with a cheap Chinese CarPlay head unit that I got on clearance because it shipped with defective software (there was a firmware update available to fix it). I could not be happier with it.
Did you have any issues with the climate system? I’ve been thinking about doing this for an annoying Sync 3 unit but I’m worried it’s too deeply integrated in some way.
I know exactly what you mean. I didn't replace it, but instead in my muscle memory (and part of my car "boot sequence") is pressing a button, precisely turning a knob twice and pressing a button again. I've done it thousands of times now.
Ah, the combo is actually different, and longer. Funny how you can do something so many times but fail to explain it accurately. I guess that's muscle memory for you.
what year was Sync 1? My 2013 f-150 has sync, i think, no touchscreen or anything, and for bluetooth i do have to push the "talk to car" button on the steering wheel and wait 3 seconds for it to talk to me, then say "bluetooth audio". But i use siriusXM or USB 99% of the time anyhow.
There is a bug in my version though, sometimes it resets to Aux, which is funny, because if you have a USB stick in it, you cannot switch to aux without unplugging it - yet if it bugs out to aux, you can just switch back to usb by saying "USB".
I'm just glad i don't have a touchscreen. I'm not looking forward to a future car purchase where i don't have a choice.
AFAIK, if you don't have a touchscreen you've got Sync 1 (it's the 4-inch LCD). Unfortunately, my steering wheel controls don't work, so I couldn't use voice control to change the input (and replacing the head unit was way less complex & expensive than the steering wheel controls).
I don't mind the touch screen for CarPlay since all the important controls (volume, mute, skip, Siri) have physical buttons, all the unimportant controls are very large and hard to miss, and CarPlay has very few menus requiring more than 1-2 taps; though I had to be careful to pick out a CarPlay unit with an actual knob for volume, since a lot of them just have buttons that you have to mash repeatedly to change the volume. But not having the physical buttons at all would really suck, especially for things like climate control.
For me, Sync only worked well to make phone calls ("Call Joe")
And during a brief period, I also had a windows phone, where you could say "Call Cortana". Cortana was registered as a fake contact behind the scenes, and all it would do is trigger the Cortana assistant through that phone call. You'd then tell Cortana what you wanted, and it had much better voice recognition and capabilities than Sync, so it did what you wanted 99% of the time. It was pretty cool.
Of course it was annoying and a waste of time as you had to always make that call first, but I'm glad the engineers on Cortana remembered that "all problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection"!
>Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are okay-ish, but frankly I find the experience of just having the phone on a mount and using that as the display to be far superior in almost every way.
That's super confusing to me. How is that superior to the larger presentation of (e.g.) CarPlay that has (a) bigger touch targets and (b) an automatically filtered presentation of apps relevant to driving?
I find CarPlay to be so good that I will not consider an automobile that lacks it. I've never used the Android equivalent, but I just assume it's on par.
Zooming in and out on the map is a disaster on CarPlay compared to the phone google maps app. The fact that you can’t keep the map on the cars screen while using other apps is also frustrating and a weird design choice. I’d consider that a killer feature over just using a phone but they chose not to do it. I only use CarPlay in rental cars because it is better than figuring out whatever half baked solution the manufacturer came up with. But for my own car I’m happier with my phone on a mount.
> I can understand the large screen, but really, it should just be a normal external screen your phone can output to.
CarPlay is so good (and far safer) because it doesn't just mirror your phone's landscape view, but presents a driving-specific experience.
Not-mirroring has another advantage in that your phone can still be used (by a passenger, of course) to do whatever while CarPlay continues to do its thing.
That's effectively what carplay is though. There are no smarts in the car, just some protocol to display video output and communicate back touch inputs. All the presentation, etc. is on the phone so that when you upgrade your phone you get the latest car interface as well. The protocol is stable, so your car can be stagnant but the experience still continues to improve as your phone does.
I've rented a bunch of cars, pretty much everything with a jog-dial type setup, sucks - just plain sucks, too much visual interaction is required for me to operate while driving.
Ford and older GM products both has severe issues with lag, the Audi I rented seemed okay, but was maximally unintuitive, the Volvo I rented took me 15 min to figure out how to turn the radio off, the Mazda was pretty good, but again, jog-dial-bad.
The only one I found that I actually liked was the Chrysler/Mopar UConnect, it was intuitive, easy to use, and performed about as well as one would expect any infotainment system to - its the only one I found easy to use too. It was one of the driving factors when I bought a new car, I bought a Chrysler 300S with it for that reason.
I even like the inbuilt nav, even if I only use it on long trips for city to city driving because frankly, entering address data is hard.
I really want simple to use, nicely labeled, buttons for windshield wipers and high-beams. I've given up on anything being usable in a car's interface.
The 300 has that, multi-function switch on the drivers side of the wheel for all of that (as is typical in american cars) clear either icons or text labels.
I've got a 2013 Ford with the much derided Sync 2. Everything pretty much works, it's just the UX is really slow, and the colors aren't pretty. Also, inputs queue up which is weird with a touch screen. It adds up to infotainment being hard to use while driving, but the buttons pretty much work, and the radio stays off if it was off before turning off the car (if you were on Bluetooth before, and your phone isn't present when you start up again, it will try for a while and then fail back to radio, and if your bluetooth audio level is lower than radio, that could be loud... but bluetooth audio levels is a cross car issue)
Compared to my 2017 Chrysler which can't really turn off the radio, only mute it, which doesn't hold across start cycles, and refused to work with my wife's phone for 6 months (probably a Nokia Android firmware issue, because it stopped working with a phone update and started working again with a phone update, but it worked on the Ford the whole time), and the head unit has crashed while in motion a handful of times, the Ford isn't so bad.
But everything is terrible, and I look forward to a future where the phone does most of the work. Although, my (couple of years ago) experience with Android Auto is I'd rather use Android directly, and not let it know it's in a car.
Doesn't the article literally mentioning them partnering with Google and using Android Automotive instead of their own UI? I'd guess they know all too well about everything you mentioned and have given up.
Honestly I've been pretty impressed with the software overall. I bought a used 2012 F-150 last year. There was something weird with the Bluetooth. I was able to update it to run the latest version of Sync which resolved the issue (it was a bit annoying to find/format a USB drive that worked). What makes this even more impressive is the newer software is designed to run on a completely different UI with a fancy screen, but they still support my older system just fine.
I agree the phone should do everything. The equivalent of an old aux cord (maybe via BT) would be enough.
My Kia does have CarPlay, which is very nice for maps and audio, but that’s all I really use. It still has all kinds of issues. My wife plugs in her phone (cable) and it takes over, then suddenly mine wins it back, she flicks some stuff on her screen to get it back again. Pretty messy in all cars I’ve used.
Then, I invite you to drive a Renault Taliant which has no screen and delegates everything to your phone.
Plug it in and fix your phone to the supplied mount, open nav.
Your phone is a throttling, OLED dimming, overheating fireball from all the processing it has to do with the summer sun beaming onto it, broiling and killing it in the process.
I don't recommend this.
The car has a terrific iPod interface built into it though. One of the best working ones.
That model probably wouldn't be legal in the US where all new vehicles are required to have a video screen for a rearview camera. Since they're already required to have the screen for that purpose, it ends up being used to eliminate other controls.
It doesn't have to be a touchscreen, nor part of the infotainment. The inexpensive compliant solution is a rearview mirror with embedded 2 or 3 inch LCD.
I currently have a Subaru, which almost gets it right. It does switch me over to radio, but if you set it to the Sirius "unit id" channel it is at least silent while you fix it, and really you press one button (the "media" button that is a physical button) and everything works again. Bluetooth is spotty, so I mostly use a USB cable.
Ford Sync, on the other hand, once it decides that it is trying to connect to bluetooth, will often completely lock up the system for minutes while it tries unsuccessfully to make things work, and then you have to navigate through their UI to get back to a good state, which means that if it decides to glitch while you're driving, you're just out of luck. If you have a little bit of luck your phone will just play the driving directions out of its internal speaker.
The issue is that the car tries to decide which phone to have take over CarPlay. I actually have a cigarette lighter USB adapter so at least a second person can charge without confusing the poor car.
I generally find CarPlay to be annoying -- it is too limiting a version of what is offered on the phone itself. Notably the last time I tried to use it, it did not have Google Play Music support (now that product is dead, and I suppose by now they probably do support Youtube Music), and it refused to let me use maps in a "north-up" orientation, which is just a non-starter for me.
> Notably the last time I tried to use it, it did not have Google Play Music support (now that product is dead...
I can't speak to CarPlay but Android Auto has changed a ton in that time frame. I think both options are just reaching an actual maturity recently as there is both decent support in a number of vehicles and a notable user base that actually uses the technology. You were certainly an early adopter, code for beta tester.
If Apple Maps does not let you navigate in north up orientation, then another navigation app should be able to. It does not seem like that would be a CarPlay specific restriction, but rather something the app makers did not implement.
And there are a lot more apps that work with CarPlay nowadays. I think it just took a few years for all of them to roll out.
I use Google Maps even with non-CarPlay interaction because Apple Maps does not do north-up. At the time, Google Maps didn't do north-up in CarPlay mode. Maybe it's time I give it another try. Last I tried it, I found generally that things worked less good in CarPlay than they did on the phone itself, and decided to mostly treat the infotainment system as a nice set of speakers for my phone.
Wireless CarPlay hasn't been reliable in my experience either, which is unfortunate. Even if it's not flaky (it is), the audio quality of music being played sounds highly compressed compared to plugging in.
FWIW, I have a 2020 Escape hybrid, and I've been overall quite satisfied with the infotainment system. I'm particularly fond of its UX that favors physical buttons.
(Perhaps my biggest gripe is that the USB plug has a bit of wiggle which can cause occasional disconnects when I move the cable (but no issue on the USB-C plug)
The funny thing is that I've been thinking of upgrading to a bigger vehicle, and for a similar infotainment system on the other cars. But no: the Edge (and heaven forbid the monster Expedition) went for a all-touchscreen infotainment system, which is the stupidest UX design.
I think Ford is on the right track of having a large touch screen with an actual physical dial that just acts as a kind of stylus. The ability for the screen to dynamically adapt to different use cases is huge, but in an automotive context having tactile feedback is also so important. If they could add a couple more of the dials that could be used for climate controls or radio stations and then some buttons that users could set up as shortcuts more people would be happy.
2016 ford escape has both manual clicky buttons and dials for the radio and the HVAC, but also completely navigable by taking your eyes off the road and attempting to tap a touchscreen that isn't calibrated for use by someone off to the f'n side of the display.
it's one of the dozen or so reasons i rarely drive my spouse's car.
> Generally speaking the horrifying quality of Ford's electronics have been enough to keep me away from even considering purchasing one.
well it certainly is reassuring to know that not much has changed at all since my boomer-generation older relatives warned me away from ever buying a north american made car, instead recommending honda/toyota/mazda/nissan sedans, 30 years ago.
It's incredibly frustrating to me that buying a vehicle with a pushbutton, working, reliable interface is becoming increasingly impossible to do. Why is UX so horrifically bad in the vehicle space? Is it poor management decisions or a shortage of good UX engineers? I get that lumping everything into the touchscreen can be a cheaper option to build, but I'd GLADLY pay for a different option. I don't understand it.
> Why is UX so horrifically bad in the vehicle space?
It used to be that vehicle radio units were entirely replaceable. There was a relatively healthy aftermarket, and quite a few shops that would actually do the installations for you. There used to be a lot more competition here, but I think with the general increase in quality of speaker systems combined with smart phones and the much higher level of system integration through the head unit effectively killed it.
Hence.. you get what you buy. In a sense, the manufacturer has a monopoly on your dash that they didn't traditionally have.
A lot of automakers are chasing Tesla's one screen design -- they're so envious of the cost savings there. Except the Germans, they're still putting in lots of buttons and knobs -- my next car will likely be German because they seem to understand what people actually want.
Have you driven a Tesla much? The general UX intent is that you're not supposed to need to interact with the screen while driving. Wipers are automatic, lights are automatic (both can be pulsed with the stalks of course). Virtually everything responds to voice commands ("Play Stairway to Heaven", "Navigate to Albertsons", "Set temperature to 72", etc...). All this stuff works really well.
I won't engage with "what people actually want" except to point to sales figures, I guess. Everyone likes different stuff. But the point is that Tesla is winning in this space because they're handing people an outside-the-box solution. Asking for "lots of buttons and knobs" is just demanding the older solution. That doesn't say the older solution is wrong, but it does argue that maybe you're failing to understand the new paradigm.
Are Tesla's selling because of the interior or in spite of it? I suspect it's more the latter, and it's the powertrain and charging network that are actually the driving force behind Tesla sales, not the interior.
Meh. I'm sure stuff doesn't work somewhere for someone. But... come on. Voice recognition is a long solved problem. Tesla's works as wells as Amazon's or Apple's or whoever's, which is to say sure, it makes an occasional mistake, but it basically isn't a problem except in arguments like this one on the internet. Mine works great. I love it and use it every day. I'm sorry yours doesn't, but at least you can sell your car for a profit and get one with buttons, so that's something.
It doesn't matter how well it works. I want a button. That way, I can adjust things without talking over passengers, and the kids cannot adjust things by talking to it.
If I have to pish a button to activate it, then it is strictly more work than pushing a button. If it filters out all but the driver using stereo location, then the passenger can't futz with it for the driver on long trips.
> I won't engage with "what people actually want" except to point to sales figures, I guess.
I'd say that a person's first purchase of a Tesla only signals what they think they want. If they buy another one after the first then I'd agree it is actually what they want, or at least they like the other benefits of the Tesla enough to outweigh anything they don't like.
I believe I fully understand the new paradigm. I had a 2018 Volvo XC90 and it's sort of a hybrid between the new and old paradigm. They have a fairly large screen (not as large as Tesla) and then a handful of buttons for functions that are fairly important if something is wrong with the screen (front window defrost, rear window defog, etc). I sold it after a year because I did not like it.
It also supported voice control for all of these features, as did my BMW before that, as does my current vehicle. Voice control sucks to varying degrees on all of these vehicles, and if someone in the car is talking or you're on a phone call, you can't adjust things with your voice. I'd rather just have buttons and knobs with tactile feedback that are always available.
But it's true, maybe other people don't want tactile controls. I mean, UX in general tends to disagree with this notion, but the iPhone beat the blackberry so it's possible that my in vehicle preferences are not what everyone wants.
> If they buy another one after the first then I'd agree it is actually what they want
Tesla is, I believe (and I'm too lazy[2] to try to look up where I read this) the most repurchased brand on the market today. The used market for these cars is literally priced above new vehicles[1]! Were you really not aware? Does that maybe change your opinion?
[1] Which is to say, on balance Tesla owners won't sell their cars even if they could make a profit doing so.
That's all great information for the case that people love their Teslas, I have no doubt about that. I'm still not convinced people are rebuying Tesla's because they prefer touchscreens over tactile buttons though. I believe there are plenty of factors that go into that loyalty decision. I'm sure some people do prefer touchscreens, and some don't -- but we don't know what that breakdown is.
Sigh. That link is not a "study", and it's not measuring safety. It's a single test of task completion time run by a magazine supported by advertising from legacy car brands (mostly Volvo, it looks like). It's designed to do exactly what it just did, get itself into conversations like this so people who don't want to believe that their advertisers' competitor[1] has a good product can continue to believe that.
FWIW: You don't need to go to Sweden to find that stuff anyway, Car & Driver and Motor Trend both hate Tesla too (and for the same reason: Tesla doesn't advertise).
If there are safety effects measurable with Teslas, we'd be measuring safety effects. There are millions of these cars on the road. They are safe. I know it, you know it, the time for hand-wavy hypotheticals is long past.
You need something more. Even Ralph Nader started with real accident statistics on the Corvair.
Saving $100 worth of knobs on a $100k vehicle can't be the motivation.
They're probably far more envious of the ability to put the air conditioner behind a monthly subscription vja remote software update, or render the entire vehicle useless with a 'security' update that makes 10yo cars too unresponsive to use
It is, because even saving 1 buck on a 100k car that is sold less-then-what-peiple-think margins hundred of thousands of times is a good thing. Heck, even at higher margins it is worth doing. Welcome to the world of mass production of physical goods.
Have you not seen the interior of a Porsche Taycan? German makes are definitely moving in the same direction because it actually is what people want. They just move slower.
Cadillac went away from tactile controls in 2012 and they reversed their course in the following generation. People think it is what they want, until they have to live with it. The automakers are happy to oblige since virtually every dept loves them for different reasons.
My Volkswagen ID.4 (German-built) doesn't have a single actual button in it. All touchscreens, capacitive simulated buttons, voice control and even gesture control. But no buttons, and the only knob is for the mirror adjustment.
My previous version Porsche (958) has a button for newly every function. Its very similar to a small plane and it 100% allows me to focus on the road and whats important without looking at the change of function.
Kind of. The interior of car from 15 years ago with mostly buttons and a tiny screen is much cheaper than a Tesla with a massive screen and powerful computer.
Of course if you're going to have a massive screen and powerful computer anyways (because people want that), yes, you can save in not having buttons in addition to the massive screen.
But the massive screen is not cheaper than old school cars.
Yet the cars are more expensive than ever. Nah, it’s a bet by the management that people don’t actually choose a car based on the polish of the infotainment system.
Maybe not, but I've done the opposite. The BMW, Subaru, and Fords I tried had terrible interfaces and I ruled them out. In particular BMW's i-drive seems to be hated by many.
Tesla on the other hand has buttons for many things, horn, turn signals, activate the windshield wipers for a moment (I use auto that handles most needs), engage cruise control, set following distance when using cruise control, high beams, pause music, music volume, etc.
Sure seat heaters, interior temp, ac, defrosting etc require touch screen use (or leaving them on auto), but those are emergencies and not much different than having to hit one of 8 buttons/dials on a center console. Especially since most are single touch, not touch -> select menu -> hit button.
While I find the above not annoying I really love the 15" screen that devotes the majority of the screen to things around the car (lane markers, cars, motorcycles, traffic cones, trucks, pedestrians, etc) and the map (with traffic). If the car sees a problem it blinks that object red, which I find helpful. Sure if I want I can get an inch for the current song. But generally I feel more situationally aware with a nice big nav screen up. On more than one occasion I've seen motorcycles splitting lanes behind me because of motion on the screen before I notice the noise or see them in the mirrors. I also really miss the current speed limit on the screen when I switch cars.
I also really like being able to say "play pink floyd", or "navigate to ...".
The logic is that removing buttons would make the cars cheaper as they have historically had buttons up until very recently. I imagine it did, by several dollars, but it was overwhelmed by the increase in other features. Now with touch screens they are able to iterate even quicker and add more features of dubious quality, but it looks better in comparison checklists.
People like sitting higher up, or do not like being seated lower, or so much lower, than others.
It might also be safer to be in a higher up car in the event of a collision.
Pretty much all the families I know with young kids and toddlers has a full size SUV. Every time I ask why they did not get a minivan such as Odyssey or Sienna, every response is they like SUVs and do not want to sit lower in the minivan. Even though the minivan has better fuel economy, seats more people with more legroom, and has more cargo space, the answer is still SUV is cooler than minivans.
I even see families who live with elderly parents prefer to drive two SUVs (or 1 SUV and 1 pickup truck) somewhere with 3 to 4 people in each, rather than have one minivan to be able to transport all 7 or 8 at the same time. And these same families growing up went everywhere in minivans because it was the most economic way, but now that they can afford SUVs, that is what they choose to use.
I've been slowly writing a near-future science fiction story where everyone drives around 15 feet above the ground and has to enter their car on a ladder, because over 50 years vehicles slowly crept up in height and nobody wanted to be the "low car" on the road.
It started out as a joke back in 2010, partially inspired by "A Nice Morning Drive" (http://www.2112.net/powerwindows/transcripts/19731100roadand...) from the 1972s. It is no longer very funny -- Ford killing its sedans a couple years back was a sad wakeupcall.
Have you heard of jean yanne’s l'apocalypse est pour demain? It is a story about a society where people live in their cars 24/7. It is very interesting but I’m not sure if there’s an English translation
I know two couples who both started out with small efficient cars. And then had to upgrade because they could not fit a stroller in the back. It feels like car companies just want to have skews that are intentionally compromised to push people into the next tier. When most people just need a compact sedan.
The corolla/civic buyers seem to be on a longer planning horizon than the RAV4/CRV buyers. It's tough to compare sales apples to sales oranges when new car buyers on average buy sedans on 10-15 year schedules and SUVs on roughly 5 year schedules.
That planning horizon differential alone is enough to explain why car manufacturers would be greater incentivized to iterate on SUVs faster than sedans and include more features. Iteration and feature differentials will contribute as much to sales choices as "sit higher up" will, acting as a reinforcement in the cycle/spiral towards larger vehicles.
Car manufacturers aren't incentivized enough to lengthen their own planning horizons or otherwise better accommodate "sensible" sedan drivers, and it becomes very easy to pretend they don't exist and chase the short-term profits of the faster cycle time (especially when pushed by quarterly-earnings focused shareholders).
My Prius can fit a large stroller and still have room for shopping in the trunk. As much hate as it gets, it's actually surprisingly roomy inside. Under the trunk floor there's a removable compartment that I use to store a 100pc tool kit, first aid kit, fire extinguisher and spare washer fluid. And under there is even more space. People who do LPG conversions store the tank there, so no loss of trunk space.
On road trips, my wife and I would fold down the rear seats and sleep in the back. I'm 183cm (6ft) and there is plenty of space. You can fit 2.4m lengths of wood if you need trips to the hardware store. I guess full plywood sheets would need the hatch open, but there wouldn't be much overhang.
A year or so ago I tried a RAV4 and it felt much smaller inside. In the rear seats I felt much more squashed.
You're also not able to visibly broadcast that you're "doing parenting right" to all the other rich parents when you drop your crotch-fruit off at summer camp and that's the key feature that a hell of a lot of people are buying for.
I'm very jealous of the US car market where there's a lot of AWD sedan options.
Here in NZ we have the Camary, Mazda 6, Lexus IS etc but none of them are available in AWD. Only crossovers, SUVs and Utes (small pick up trucks).
I've actually been toying with the idea of getting a Subaru WRX. I'm not a a boyracer or anything, but it's about the only japanese, AWD sedan available here. Feels like a weirdly practical choice (good cornering, better handling in ice/heavy rain/gravel).
EDIT: wow even modern Rav4s fail the moose test - a car which I'd call pretty mild for an SUV, even wagon like.
That blind spot houses a curtain airbag that has significantly increased safety in crashes. Engineering is managing tradeoffs. Safety is now a mandatory standard. We can have small a-pillars at the expense of safety.
As with any blind spot, one just has to move their head...
The data I can find with a very quick google shows that higher vehicles are more dangerous to pedestrians and so the move towards SUVs and trucks has put pedestrians at higher risk .
Side curtain airbags are probably a bigger plus to the safety of reasonable people who are wearing seat-belts and not crashing into shit head on at high speed than frontal airbags since the latter is just the last stage of a bunch of tech whereas side curtain is doing most of the heavy lifting in its direction.
I think it is because A)Good UX is hard and there is a shortage of people who have experience a mixed hardware/software UX. B) Car companies are rather old fashioned in setting their priorities. They haven’t caught on yet at management level that the modern car is a different beast and needs different priorities when designing and engineering. C) A car company is big. It takes a long time to change, and a lot of people are really sceptical and don’t believe the future needs to be different.
Funnily enough, given the… mixed results Apple's UI team has been putting out recently, it remains to be seen how "ergonomic and reliable" the UI actually ends up being.
It reminds me of cell phone interfaces back before the iPhone. I had high hopes that Carplay would motivate the vendors to put some effort into their own interfaces but sadly that doesn't appear to have happened.
Depends on the car and the person. I have back problems and almost no office chairs are usable for me. I can easily drive 10 hours in my car with no issues. Sometimes, my back feels better after a drive that long.
I wouldn't say this is universally true. Lexus and Volvo tend to make amazing car seats. I say this after driving 2000 miles last week and not feeling a thing in my old Lexus GX.
I just had a Kia Sportage as a rental car, and it wasn't too bad: it had buttons for everything you need (dials for climate control, buttons for seat ventilation), and still a pretty big touch screen for navigation. So there are still cars that don't use the touch screen for everything.
With the performance of this and other EVs now beating the Raptor pickup, do you think we’ll start to see performance regulated for safety reasons? A massive pickup able to 0-60 in a few seconds is cool, but in the hands of the less responsible it sounds like a huge safety risk. We cap the performance of tiny scooters but multiton trucks are able to go as fast as humanly possible?
Massive, heavy trucks with a blind spot, the ability to accelerate very rapidly, and a fiddly screen that you need to use even for the most basic of things like heating and cooling.
My Volt does 0-60 in about 7 seconds or so in sport mode but even better @ 0-30 and it feels so ridiculously torquey and instant to me and I can't even imagine needing anything beyond that ever. All the jockeying about 0-60 in 3 seconds or whatever on various Tesla machines just makes me shake my head. I really fear what that means in a large massive vehicle.
As someone driving a Tesla, I disagree. Going from 0-60 in 3.1 seconds is useful if you do a lot of highway driving and need to merge quickly. Also, it's fun to accelerate like that.
I think that's the point... For many people the "slow" cars are more than fast enough. For what it's worth the low end evs are much better at 0-30 than 30-60.
Maybe we'll see CDL requirements for more vehicle. I mean, it's a new thing that people can just go out and buy nine thousand pound cars that can do 0-60 in about 3 seconds (i.e. the EV Hummer) and I don't think society has adjusted to the ramifications of that yet. Sports cars are largely tolerated because they're (generally) small and light and if you drive dangerously in one you're as big a risk to yourself as to everyone else.
The F-150 is actually not a terribly unreasonable vehicle. It's about 6,000 pounds and accelerates a bit slower than the Hummer. It's shaped like a battering ram, but isn't a whole lot heavier than a Model S, which are more in the 4,500 to 5,000 range. (I think Tesla kind of gets a free pass for building scary fast/heavy vehicles simply because they don't look like trucks and so it's easy to not realize how heavy they really are.)
Unfortunately it's hard to build EVs that are light, due to battery requirements. Maybe horsepower/weight ratio limits on public roads are actually a good idea though.
Way back when EVs/hybrids were first hitting the market, I remember some chatter about basically adding an external speaker to play fake engine noises. Not perfect, but it might help a bit.
I've personally encountered a decent number of Tesla/e-bike drivers who have... nonstandard views on what a stop sign means, and the fact that the vehicles are silent is always a bit disconcerting.
Most EVs do have such a speaker. But it only plays when they're driving at low speeds where they could be a threat to pedestrians, bikes, etc. And also there's no standardization of the noise.
All EVs have a speaker and the noise is standardized. The problem is there is a different standard in each country and the solution is to make one noise which covers all of the standards - thats why it ends up sounding so strange. The combination of the various standards varies from OEM to OEM - thats why it ends up sounding different OEM to OEM.
I mean... maybe in the US? Here in Canada all the EVs seem to make a different noise. The noise my Volt makes is entirely different from my friend's 2nd gen Leaf, for example.
Maybe that's changing with the latest round of vehicles, but I don't recall hearing about any regulation passed.
That’s an interesting observation that I hadn’t considered. My enthusiasm for EVs has been pretty unmitigated previously. I still think climate is important enough that dealing with the safety stuff is probably tractable and also the lesser evil, but it’s good to have line of sight on it.
A Tesla Model 3 weighs 3,582 lbs. Even if you chose a Smart Fortwo (1,984lb) as your comparison instead of an equivalent-size ICE vehicle, it's still not doubling the weight.
None of Tesla's sedans or compact SUVs are over 5,000lbs. Their only vehicle over 5,000lbs is the Model X, their big SUV. The only ICE vehicle you mentioned that weighs less than half of that was a sedan. And the Cybertruck is going to be in the same class as the F-250, the lightest of which is 5,677lbs.
I'm not really. The vast majority of infrastructure degradation is because of trucks which weigh 100 times as much as cars. Their weight will be decreasing by a much smaller factor.
No, because it's still going to be negligible compared to the wear done by trucks. The average 18-wheeler weighs ~80-90,000 lbs, and the relationship between wear and weight is exponential, not linear. So while 25 Teslas weigh the same as a single 18 wheeler, the 18 wheeler contributes a lot more to road wear than those 25 Teslas. And in any case, infrastructure costs are going to be a rounding error to the economic costs associated with climate change.
Heck, even the safety aspect. And the mining of materials. The recycling aspect (or lack there of), or the disposability of the vehicles if the battery/charging system bricks itself. The Chevy Volt forums are full of people losing thousands of dollars because their low miles car worth about $10k, needs a $10k battery module or two.
Well, we're talking about the safety aspect right now. I'm not particularly worried about the mining of materials or even the disposability because (1) those are tractable problems and (2) ICE cars do many orders of magnitude more damage to the environment even ignoring their associated manufacture and disposal costs.
> Atleast when a Dodge Charger is charging up from behind, I can hear the thing.
Do you mean while driving? How does that work? Even with my windows open I can't hear vehicles until they're at least next to me. I don't have a loud vehicle and hearing tests show I have good hearing.
Either dodge chargers in your area don't have the loud exhausts that they do here in California, or you have a problem of some sort. Loud noises bounce off the road, off buildings. Basically the reason you can hear someone talking yell even if they are facing away from you.
Maybe it's because I rarely drive in cities where there are buildings around for the sound to echo. 95% or more of my driving is in the country at 45 MPH or higher, or on highways at 65 or 70MPH. There are plenty of very loud vehicles in my area. Maybe the sound just can't go as fast as I'm usually driving. Or an idea I just thought of, maybe at the speeds I typically drive, by the time the sound does get to me, it's not enough to hear over my tires?
Yes, obviously the danger of getting passed by a much faster silent vehicle is much less in an area with low traffic density, low intersection density, yada yada. I'm glad we finally got to the bottom of your confusion.
Edit: Also I feel like, from your last reply, that you might have taken one or both of my replies in a way that wasn't intended. It's also possible that I didn't word my replies in a good manner. I'm not always good at that. I am genuinely curious about how it is that others can hear loud vehicles behind them when driving while I can't. Your mention of echoes off buildings got me thinking of driving through a big city surrounded by big buildings, and that's an environment I am not familiar with except in pictures and videos. If that's the reason then it answers the question I've had for a couple years now when I first saw someone mention that they hear loud vehicles behind them.
I was recently driven by someone in an EV in a busy parking lot and the amount of pedestrians that were entirely not aware of our presence as we slowly creeped up behind them was disturbing. Some even had to be horned. Ten or twenty years ago, people would notice you approaching just from the engine sound and naturally move aside or at least turn around and look.
The fact that the artificial sounds some of them have are not all that different from the sound of the wind doesn't help either.
There's nothing unsafe with having lots of acceleration at your disposal if you use it appropriately and responsibly. In fact in some situations it's safer to have that acceleration.
Let's not continue regulating things that are fun and/or useful just because some people might misuse them.
It probably wouldn't really make much difference in the real world. How many crashes that resulted in serious injury actually happened only because the car could do 3 seconds 0-60, and if the car was only able to do 0-60 in 7 seconds, the crash wouldn't have occurred?
I know there's lots of videos of people driving Lambos for the first time and immediately crashing after spinning or something. But even in those cases, it's almost always low speed crashes with nobody getting hurt.
> ...the Mustang Mach-E and the Lightning have a 15.5-inch portrait center screen running Sync 4A, which is the same as Sync 4 with the addition of touchscreen climate controls and widgets that fill out the vertical height of the display.
Why??? Climate controls should not be on a touchscreen. Display is fine, but control is not. Just leave space for some knobs and a mode switch.
I don't know about the F150 Lightning, but the Fords I've seen all use a HOTAS style setup where the climate, radio, etc... are all controlled by buttons on the steering wheel. The touchscreen is more for passengers.
The Mach E climate controls on the touchscreen are fine. With modern cars, mostly just set it to the temp you like and leave it. It isn't like old cars where constant fiddling with fan and temp to get everything correct is needed.
> With modern cars, mostly just set it to the temp you like and leave it. It isn't like old cars where constant fiddling with fan and temp to get everything correct is needed.
Opposite for me. I can set and forget the old style. This auto crap requires constant adjustment to keep me comfortable.
https://www.theverge.com/23307298/ford-f-150-lightning-revie...
-- "Happily, the F-150 Lightning is a terrific F-150 — and a terrific truck. If you can find one to buy for a reasonable price and you’ve got a handle on charging for how you’ll use it, it’s clearly a better choice than a gas-powered truck."
So... what exactly does The Verge think that a pickup truck is used for? Spoiler alert: if they think it's for running the kids to soccer practice, occasionally moving some plants or lawn furniture, showing off your bling around town, or coping with thinning hair and loss of libido at midlife, there are far better EV options. And for those who are going to argue that the 100-mile range isn't an issue, even if your time is worth nothing, try getting a truck towing a camper into a typical service station parking lot some time. Once every 5+ hours is plenty, thanks.
I'm all for EVs, and I'm certain they're the future of the automotive industry. I'm also certain that Ford has a long way to go before I'll even consider swapping my 35-year-old diesel F-250 HD for an electric hauling rig(1). Finally, based on the article, I'm fairly certain that the last thing the good editors at The Verge towed was a Radio Flyer.
(Note 1: for those breaking out in a rash, I use the F-250 about once a month and it runs WVO. The daily driver is something with a much smaller carbon footprint.)
> what exactly does The Verge think that a pickup truck is used for?
I think that The Verge has a better idea of what most F-150s are used for than you do. There are a whole lot of trucks out there that are never going to tow anything.
Why on earth would you think that? The Verge is a link farm at this point, and Nilay (IMO the party most responsible for The Verge’s precipitous slide into irrelevance) is routinely one of the most out-of-touch sanctimonious personalities in tech.
I am in 100% agreement with you about The Verge in general. I used to visit a lot and have completely stopped. It's garbage now. I only see their articles if they pop up on top of HN or Reddit.
But that doesn't mean they are always wrong about everything.
They look comical to me; like a monster truck, so freaking tall the proportions just look insane.
And most of the ones in Denver (which has a lot more people who actually go outdoors) don't look like they are used for anything except commuting.
I started driving again to get into the mountains more, and got an old tacoma.
The new ones are too big AND the dealer only had 4 doors with a mini bed!!! Just get an SUV....
And even my 2010 one looks big next to the generation before it. The old ones tow stuff just fine and it fills what I need: a ton of storage for climbing gear.
Searched around for electric tacoma info last night.
Looks like one might be coming 2024 (which i guess is sold 23?).
But it looks huge. One youtube reviewer of the render image said it looks more like a Tundra which are just insanely big.
I looked into the e f150. it would barely fit into my parking spot - not enough room to get bags in and out of door. Not even considering how to get an electric charger in there... In the near term I think I would have to use the whole foods.
I really really want an electric pickup, full bed, 2 doors - at a small size, light weight.
Sadly the range looks like a problem too.
Which would be better if they weren't so giant and heavy.
Hybrid sounds like only option unless they start to offer 400/450+ mile batteries.
At least until we build a ton of rapid chargers pretty far out.
Maybe someone can invent a jerry can of electricity!
> I'm also certain that Ford has a long way to go before I'll even consider swapping my 35-year-old diesel F-250 HD for an electric hauling rig(1)
It's not as if they're unaware of it. Their CEO even said that for some users, an electric truck won't work. From https://archive.ph/6Deq6:
> Farley emphasized that Ford plans to continue investing in gasoline-powered vehicles, noting that the Super Duty pickup trucks generate huge revenue for the company and battery technology isn't yet advanced enough to pivot.
> "If you're a Super Duty customer towing 10,000 pounds in Montana or on the north slope of Alaska," he said. "An electric vehicle is an awful solution, the batteries are too heavy."
Even with those statements, I think Ford is seriously sugarcoating the issue. It seems that the F-150 Lighting is basically a vanity vehicle at this point.
To be fair, that (vanity vehicle) is probably at least half of the F-150 market today anyway. I don't have a problem with Ford putting on a show to make money. But if The Verge is going to work in a Ford showroom, they should at least be up front about it.
The lightning is for mall crawling. It's not really a serious truck if you do legit truck stuff that involves travel aka blue collar workers that often travel to jobs.
If it really gets 300+ miles per charge and gets back up to 80% in 41 minutes, then it should be fine for workers that are travelling less than 5 hours a day (or 10 hours if there is a charger near the job site...)
It gets 100 miles per charge if you're hauling a trailer is my point. The lightning gets 1/3 range when hauling. I say this as a EV owner. Constantly thinking about chargers is a huge pain in the ass and I promise you, many of these blue collar workers ain't going to want to deal with it.
I wish someone would just build an EV pickup truck. There have been DIY instructions since the lead acid days, since the frames already have ample space and load bearing capacity for the batteries.
My grandpa outfitted his LUV diesel to burn vegetable oil. I always thought that was an exciting way to build a more green vehicle. I personally think hydrogen is the way to go for "heavy" tow vehicles. Has great energy density and it burns green. I believe planes would work well on hydrogen as well.
Is it? I'm not in the demographic that would buy one, but it seems that for a contractor that doesn't tow tons of stuff or drive long distances it would work well, especially with the outlets.
Maybe I'm missing something but say a landscaper or a carpenter, wouldn't it work for them? What kind of scenarios would involve towing heavy loads?
I have a few specific examples in mind, but my brother does tile and he's often carrying a load of tile, a saw, etc 50-60 miles in traffic to jobs. Sometimes he hauls a trailer with even more gear for bigger jobs and with that trailer, you're looking at 1/3 the range of the battery which gives it about 100 miles which isn't really conducive to those long trips. Even if those jobs are only 2-3x a year, that truck is pretty DOA.
I'd say you'd probably get the same range for those guys who haul a lot of mowers, weedeaters, gas, etc. They have shorter ranges though so they may be fine.
Union jobs that go distances to factories carrying welders would struggle too. No one wants to think about range in the winter while you've got a crew of 5 people and a trailer.
I'm sure there are plenty of jobs that'll be fine, but I think the line is drawn if you have a crew + a trailer. It's just too risky.
No worries, I'm aware that there are plenty of use cases for the truck, but for the people who actually use trucks, I don't think it makes a great one. The range for towing pretty much cuts the battery to 1/3 and that's just extremely limited unless you're a commute is 30 miles or so and you have a great charger at home. It takes a lot of flexibility if you have to run to home Depot to grab some extra wood or something too if you're really worried about your range. Diesel trucks can just go forever.
Can confirm. I have an F-150 Lightning. The UI sucks and is slow. Much worse than my Teslas. It takes like 30 seconds when I get in the truck and turn it on before it's even usable. Switching between CarPlay and the native interface is ridiculous. It's a great truck though. Love it. :) AMA.
One of these days we will have big enough batteries to power a superduty a reasonable distance. I can't wait. I've loved my EVs, now I want that for my F250.
A bigger concern for me is the charging speed/infrastructure for what an F250/350 might want to do. For me, that's tow a 5th wheel or trailer a UTV for hundreds of miles. Need better infrastructure and much higher voltage packs to make that viable without spending hours at the chargers blocking parking lots.
This is highly dependent on how you drive, elevation changes, weather conditions, load/trailer weight/aerodynamics, and average speeds. So... I've seen both better than EPA ratings and worse than EPA ratings. It's rated at 320 miles on the 131kwh battery, which is about 2.4 mi/kwh. I've driven at times ranging from 1.5mi/kwh to 3.5 mi/kwh. So, I think it's accurate for their mixed highway/city test. If you're doing pure highway and thinking about a road trip, that is worst case scenario. At like 70 mph it's going to be around 2-2.1 mi/kwh unladen, so it'll be less than EPA rated, faster speeds get worse due to aero. At 2 mi/kwh that's 262 miles of range.
On a road trip I'd also keep the truck between 10-80% state of charge for optimal charge speeds, so I'd only get 70% of the range, or 183 miles. So I'd plan to stop every 150 miles or so.
This is actually similar to my real world results driving a Tesla Model 3 and Y. For the most optimal total trip time you're usually stopping every 150-200 miles or so.
I don't know if its just me but electric trucks/cars and the buying experience there is one giant pit of frustration. I want to buy a electric truck, was thinking of a Rivian, but good luck getting one in the next 2-3 years. And if you do manage to get one watch out for your axel coming apart! [1], maybe I will get a lightning, looks like same leadtime issues, 2 years+ wait and they are totally changing the brain(from ford to android) so the ones now will be obsolete.
Also from tesla to rivian all I hear are horror stories about the service, and tesla's build quality is nowhere near any of the traditional automakers(fit and finish). I just want to buy a reliable electric truck or suv that has a decent finish and don't want to wait 2-3 years, someone please take my money!
What you're asking for just doesn't exist yet. The marketing teams at these companies are clearly doing a great job selling these vehicles as reliable simple alternatives to ICE-powered, but that's just not the case.
Ignoring all of the supply-chain issues from the pandemic lockdowns (shipping, chip shortages, labor shortages, etc.) you're still purchasing new technology that will take years to iron out the quality problems. I've friends who work in the automotive industry in various engineering roles and none of them are driving brand-new platforms because they know better. Just like the software world, manufacturers will take all of the maintenance data from dealerships and use it to improve the design and production. If you're OK with being the beta tester filing bug reports in this relationship, by all means, buy an electric truck.
I'll agree with that. Yet I alsonever want to buy anything from an enforced middleman again. First I avoided that with Tesla, and now I did it with Rivian. It does have some bugs, so did my last car I bought 20 years ago form a major manufacturer.
The enforced middle man gives you a place to hold accountable or to physically complain to. And provides local jobs. Not to mention the infrastructure to handle things like recalls.
People complain about Tesla service but actively want MORE faceless corps not held accountable to sell them things. It makes no sense.
There's one thing you can do to have a shot at getting a rivian quicker. Spec one out that matches the current launch edition (4 motors, don't get the ocean coast interior, get the tonneau cover) and you might just get one. People have gotten them in a couple of months, but they are lucky. Go to the reddit.com/r/rivian forum and read people's descriptions. What seems to happen is they have some ready for a location and someone at the last minute drops out and they can't find someone so they can go way down the list quickly.
It's really funny to see the cargo cult design coming out of all the car companies switching to electric. "Tesla has a giant touchscreen, therefore our EV must have a giant touchscreen different than all our other models." "Tesla has OTA updates, therefore our EV must have OTA updates even though our other models don't." "Tesla has a 3D render of the car interior for climate control adjustment, therefore our EV must have a 3D render of the car interior for climate control adjustment even though our other models don't." etc etc
It's been 10+ years since cars have gotten screwed in the Consumer Reports and other outlets for bad infotainment.
What's the fix? VW's MIB2/MIB2.5 was pretty much the pinnacle of automotive head unit innovation, IMHO, and it wasn't due to the technology - it's QNX and J9 Java like so many head units before it. It just... worked, which seems a bridge too far for modern infotainment.
I think C+D and other outlets need to start scoring cars based on their head units, or at least considering them. Much like tires, it's clear that these venues have enough power to bend the industry to some extent.
I cant purchase a car that doesnt let me just aim the fan at my face, and set the temperature to a specific mix of outside air and heated air. I dont want automatic environments. Fan, face, 16C/60F degrees every day of the year.
There will come a day where we will prove I dont know what I want cause I cant buy it anymore.
> but also a stopgap as Ford resets its entire software strategy around Android in partnership with Google.
This doesn’t seem like a good idea because there are Android people and iOS people. Alienating a large swath of customers is not a good idea.
That and I don’t want Google monitoring all my car data. One of the big reasons I don’t have a Tesla is their data policy. But I’d rather Tesla have my data than Google because at least it won’t be linked to everything else about me.
Also, I want to drive cars for 10 or 20 years. Google has never maintained Android for that long.
I’d rather just have an embedded os written and maintained by ford (that doesn’t suck).
> This doesn’t seem like a good idea because there are Android people and iOS people
Android Automotive (the "base OS" that's not even really "Android" in the way that you think of it from phones; the impression I have gathered is that it is a separate embedded Linux sharing only a few parts and iterating in a different pace) that Ford is moving to still supports Apple CarPlay as well as it supports Android Auto (the Apple CarPlay competitor). It's another fun place where Google's branding strategy confuses way more than it helps by having very similar names for very different products, in this case Android Automotive !== Android Auto.
But yeah, the other complaints are valid: Android Automotive is still so new we have no idea if Google is truly in it for the long haul or if that's another badly named brand eventually likely to end up in the graveyard. I don't think we know how much data Google will be monitoring from it either.
As long as Google will pay to recall and repair the truck the day they stop security updates, and also guarantee that it makes zero connections to their servers, the arrangement you describe is no worse than the status quo.
Why would Google pay for something Ford is entirely responsible for? Ford is rolling a customized version of Android Automotive, as all car OEMs are. Do you blame Google for Samsung not updating their phones?
> I must have mussed the part where Dell compiled the Windows OS source code and created their own OS.
We don't know yet how much Ford plans to/is working to customize Android Automotive, just that they said they are customizing it. It may be pretty likely that they only plan to customize it about as far as Dell or Samsung do as the two above examples: change some logos, some default wallpaper, auto-install some different apps. None of those require recompiling Windows or Android from source (respectively) today, and there's reasonable assumptions that Google would intend Android Automotive to be similarly customizable by car vendors in ways that cellphone vendors customize Android today, so the analogy to Samsung may be very directly comparable.
> Additionally, do you blame Debian when Ubuntu isn't updated?
I have in the past. At one point when I was regularly using Ubuntu there were several apps that I couldn't easily install because the chain of blame was directly: the right library version for a dependency is not in Ubuntu's distribution; it's not in Ubuntu's distribution because it's not yet in Debian Unstable because it was causing problems in Debian Canary though that may have been because of other things Debian was trying to integrate around it. In such a case, that's definitely Debian's fault that Ubuntu wasn't updated in the way that I wanted it to be at that time. That's not flawed logic at all. Since then Ubuntu has done a lot more to isolate itself from Debian integration issues and the PPAs and Snap communities have done even more to expand what's possible without needing a full distro upgrade, but that doesn't mean there haven't been times when it was directly useful to point a finger at Debian rather than Ubuntu for an update problem.
What's not to like about Tesla's data policy? I mean, for one thing, they don't have any of your data unless you opt in, and they don't resort to any tricks or pressure to get you to opt in. And even if you do opt in, it is not linked to any identifier for you or your car. How do you perceive that as a bad thing? Or were you just mistaken about their policy?
Based on friends cars, you either opt in or don’t get any features like nav, autopilot, and even music.
I remember during a crash investigation, Tesla released data on a customer before they gave it to the family and the NHTSA. I perceive that as a bad thing.
> The result is that the software experience of the Lightning often feels trapped in the past, with no clear path to the future because Ford’s real software efforts lie elsewhere.
I have a Ford Fusion. The software has remained essentially untouched since I bought it. They rely almost entirely on Android Auto, which has it's own host of bugs and incompatibilities.
There's a primary learning from Tesla to be made here: infotainment is a core part of the business. Build it in house.
I disagree, Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are great. The problem comes when the manufacturer’s interface collides with the Android / Apple interface. Just build a great touchscreen, let Android / Apple handle everything they can, and leave the rest (HVAC controls, volume controls) as physical buttons and switches. You get the best of both worlds - no need to pay an in house team of software engineers who will never be able to compete with Google or Apple anyway, and you please your customers who by and large want physical buttons and knobs.
As much as Tesla's stock prices is inflated a lot of people dont appreciate just how behind the other car companies are when it comes to electric cars.
Non tesla fast charging is an absolute disaster, likewise most/all of these companies havent figured out how to update software without plugging in a usb stick at a dealership.
Maybe electric cars will be more like Apple/Samsung in terms of market share then the current range of car companies.
Doesn't seem to be. Tesla's chargers have been behind the curve versus others with lower speeds, still only 400 volts, and only supporting one brand of car. Tesla is at least slowly starting to support other brands:
Not my side of the pond, but clicking around on Gridserve I'm only seeing a maximum charge rate of 60kW. I haven't found a Circle K above 50kW. Ionity has chargers that go to 350kW.
For comparison, Tesla superchargers are 150kW or 250kW.
That metric shouldn't be interpreted linearly. You only really saturate a charger for the first few minutes of a charge when fairly depleted. Above 15% to 40% of your battery capacity the charging rate slows down (depending on what sort of battery you have).
As an example, a 2022 Lucid Air Dream Edition can use 350kW chargers. Going 20% to 80% on a 350kW is 31 minutes, and on a 150kW is 32 minutes. That's negligible. If you start lower than 20% then there is a bigger difference, but I picked 20-80 because it might match a person that exclusively uses non-home chargers. Data from chart in: https://insideevs.com/news/567714/lucid-air-fast-charging-co... (Also, I suspect a real 20-80 test might show a bigger difference. The 0-20 part of that charge probably heated the battery up more on the 350kW.)
Use cases matter a lot. The only time I use a supercharger is when I'm driving more than the range of my car in one trip, 900km is typical of a driving day for me. I'll stop 3 or 4 times at super chargers. Other than that I just charge off the regular old wall outlet in my garage.
But if you live in a place without garages you will use chargers a lot and care about where they are located. I have to say a lot of the US superchargers are in odd places, like no bathroom available at night. Most of the rest are in the far corner of some enormous parking lot of an enormous grocery store. By the time you hike to the store, find a bathroom, buy a snack, and hike back to the car you are mostly done charging.
Which brings me back to the parent post… "Location!" I absolutely prefer a Circle K with a supercharger. Short walk, open 24 hours, grab a snack, and back to the car with time to check email and maybe HN before heading back to the road.
> Gridserve I'm only seeing a maximum charge rate of 60kW
No, Gridserve has 350 kW and 90 kW chargers in their new forecourts (see the videos). The 60 kW chargers you're seeing are from Gridserve's acquisition of Ecotricity:
> As an example, a 2022 Lucid Air Dream Edition can use 350kW chargers. Going 20% to 80% on a 350kW is 31 minutes
And that's a big battery with a conservative charge curve for its size. A Hyundai Ioniq 5 can do 10 to 80% in 18 minutes on a 350 kW charger. A Porsche Taycan and an Audi e-tron GT (same platform) can do 10 to 80% in 19 minutes:
As a cyclist, I'm super excited about one day being run over by one of these things. The giant vehicle trend is getting a lot of people killed.
And why does any vehicle need to accelerate that quickly? It's irresponsible on public roads. I would really love to see acceleration and speed limiters on vehicles.
Not sure why you are so concerned with acceleration.... If you're on a bike, it doesnt matter if you get hit by a truck at 30, 45, or 60. You're most likely dead anyways, adnd if you survive, there is a good chance you wish you were dead.
at 40 mph there is a 90 percent chance they will be killed.
at 35 mph there is a 50 percent chance they will be killed.
at 30 mph there is a 20 percent chance they will be killed.
at 20 mph there is a 2.5 percent chance they will be killed.
thanks, that is very interesting data, i wonder how they collected it. i supposed if you are on a bike wearing a helmet these percentages all go down....
Why irresponsible? it is better to get to the desired speed quickly, it means less congestion and less distraction for vehicles behind you. Every driver should thrive to drive as fast as they can as long as it is not above the speed limit or road conditions.
Fast acceleration is nice occasionally, but driving aggressively in my EV nearly halves its range vs. carefully avoiding switching rapidly between charging and discharging the battery.
Also, fast acceleration from a stop eats tires. Some EV owners report 10-20k miles per (premium) set.
Two acceleration downsides with electric vehicles. Fast acceleration will wear out tires much faster. Also, the fuel/battery economy is poor. I know the Prius Prime will give you a driving score which is greatly reduced by fast acceleration. But I agree is it helpful to accelerate quickly when the light turns green to get more throughput through an intersection.
There isn't and that's because it didn't used to be a big deal. But now, everything has a modem in it. Cars are now part of the IoT with all the security that implies.
The Google Pixel 5a, which came out a year ago, will only get Android updates through August, 2024. That's THREE years, on a Google phone. They're basically telling you that they want you to landfill your phone so they can make more money.
Android is a shitty ecosystem for anything long term.
I'm firmly in the camp that it's not patriotic to stylize the American flag in any way... but I'd love it if you expanded on how this version is racist.
That would be true if they were actually using it to indicate support for police. But they're not. You'll only find it next to MAGA and expletive-laden flags.
Every time I've seen that flag, it's next to a Lets Go Brandon sticker or a Gadsden flag or similar. If I heard someone claim it was to show support for their local police department, I'd expect to see them smirking as they said that.
If that were true, it would have arisen spontaneously and not been rolled out as countermessaging to a protest movement about police violence.
No, this is 100% a political symbol with partisan (though not strictly party-aligned) intent, not a celebration of law enforcement. I don't think it's helpful to call it "racist", but neither is it appropriate to pretend that this isn't at least in some sense a "Fuck BLM" symbol either.
It can be a response to people taking a handful of incidents and ignoring the millions of safe and courteous police interactions a year. So while it may have been a response to cries about police violence, it doesn't automatically become some white supremacist pro police violence symbol....
What is the balance of experience between touch, aural/tactile/visua push response on screens, and actual physical buttons which go "click" and light up?
I think the place we know most about this, is the Aircraft space. I am interested because I used to live in 'press it go click' world and now live half-blessed by a car with some controls which are real and a lot of controls which are soft, and I have to say I don't entirely like the experience.
When you look at a Concorde control deck, its a 3 man (4 man?) crew, and its unbelievably complex. The replacement in a current spec Boeing or Airbus is simpler, but it's hardly one touch screen.
Older aircraft have the Flight Engineer position, which is the 3rd or 4th person in the Flight Deck. Modern aircraft do not need flight engineers because of the improvements we've been able to make to aircraft reliability, longevity, and ease of use; but at the time, they were worth their weight in gold and absolutely essential for any flight.
Current-generation Boeing aircraft have what's called a "moonlit" configuration, which are switches with lights in them. When the lights are white, everything is okay. When they're yellow or red, something is wrong. When the lights are off, that system is off. Very easy UX.
This is "we thought about it, and decided to keep real mechanical tactile switches" but also "behind the scenes, these may be like the apple mouse: there's a widgit to go "THUMP" when you press it"
Given how many aircraft are fly-by-wire the physical tactile component of a lot of these must be notional, except for the ones which have fuses next to them and are literal cut-outs. You have a switch with a bump, which goes click. The valve 20m away quietly gets turned on by an actuator. The valve completes a circuit to a sensor, which sends a databus signal and the light in your tactile switch comes on.
I've always been of the opinion that automobile manufacturers have no business writing software. They just don't have the capability (currently) to do a good job.
What they should have done is deliver kick-ass hardware in-tandem with CarPlay and Android Auto, and make THAT software first-class citizens.
Every manufacturer is investing as little as they can on in-house (or off-shore) software teams to write crappy UIs on pretty crappy hardware, and meanwhile we're sitting in our cars with computers in our pockets with enough calculating power to send a rocket to the moon.
Is it just me that wants an EV with just ‘dumb’ switches on the dash?
I find car companies overstretch with trying to make fancy touchscreens etc.
Plus in car computers go out of date much quicker than motors and batteries.
Just give me some robust physical switches for the important stuff, and an empty space to put my phone / tablet.
That also has the benefit of being able to keep looking out the windscreen while driving, if I need to turn the air on on, rather than opening a ‘climate control’ menu on some creatively designed touch screen.
Exactly, I've been changing my consumer habits towards products that either don't need maintenance at all (GoRuck) or are optimized for ease of maintenance (Fairphone). Sadly haven't found an EV (or a modern IC engine car) that matches these criteria.
All the systems and components are sitting on a CAN bus anyway, in the base configuration you can just control the CAN master with analog switches like in the old days.. You can make a paid mobile app for the same controls but digital (and allow more fine-tuning). This eliminates the display from the car though, so I guess a parking camera is a no-go.
All you need hardware-wise on the car at that point would be a CAN Master device with bluetooth, which is a stupid ESP32.
> Happily, the F-150 Lightning is a terrific F-150 — and a terrific truck. If you can find one to buy for a reasonable price and you’ve got a handle on charging for how you’ll use it, it’s clearly a better choice than a gas-powered truck.
So... if you manage to buy one for much less than they sell for, and if the downsides of electric are not a problem for you, it's a better choice than paying market price for a gas truck?
Reading this article and the comments is frustrating given everything about these infotainment systems has been the same for 10+ years with very little improvements. Its embarrassing an iPad from 2012 can out perform these multi-thousand dollar car systems in both UX and speed. I was hoping the tesla experience would light a fire in traditional car companies making it more a priority but here we are basically just using the system as a screen to project our phones “car mode”. If it were possible I would rather buy a car with a floating usb-c mount for a tablet than pay 5k for an expensive system that I “basically” only use the display to mirror my phone.
My PoR: I use ford sync 3.x daily and recently used several popular models of Subaru, Hyundai, Dodge, and Porsche.
It's not getting better because people keep buying them.
Shitty UX for the infotainment console doesn't stop people buying something that starts and drives from A to B (so long as it has bluetooth audio reception).
The screen people use while driving is the one that lets them scroll Instagram.
The thing I don't understand is that a huge portion of the Americans who drive pickup trucks do not live in the big expensive cities, but in rural areas with lower costs of living, yet the prices are so high. Pricing pickup trucks at half to 2/3 of the cost of the house mortgage for customers just seems... stupid. They're pricing them at double the gas models in some cases and acting like they're luxury cars. If anyone were willing or able to cut back on automated touchscreen gadget headaches and offer a solid EV utility pickup, then EV adoption could be vastly accelerated in the USA.
My dad has an F150 with Sync and it's so slow and bad. I've read this isn't uncommon in many manufacturers, even the Porsche 911 supposedly has a very slow computer system.
Well no publicity is bad publicity I suppose. Hopefully the nav screen thing will improve in future releases of this truck.
Most surprising was the frunk and blazing quick 0-60mph times (4.6s?)!
Hope they work out for people,; still prefer my ‘88 f250 but the Lightning basically has equivalent, if not superior, specs
Cars OEMs know (in general, more or less) how to build cars. In electronics tend to be crappy at best in IT terms they are like classic dumb users, except they actually design crapware.
And doesn't support basic functionality like CarPlay or Android Auto, which is supported by almost every other manufacturer even on their base model cheap cars.
And other cars don't support Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Twitch, and arcade games while in Park, which are great when waiting for something, as well as Spotify, TuneIn, etc., so I guess we're even? I'd rather have a bunch of competing services rather than just a generic UI from one vendor that's always pushing service upgrade packages like Apple One.
I suspect CarPlay and Android Auto come with strings attached from Apple (must fall in line with the Apple walled garden rules) and Google (must track users on behalf of Google) so, no big loss.
LOL. I couldn't get Spotify to work correctly on my Tesla, so there is no plus there. I have Netflix, Youtube, Hulu, etc, on my phone. Arcade games are cute for the kids, but hard on the tires and right along with fart noises pretty useless and not interesting after the first day or so.
Apple always pushes service upgrades? I can't remember the last time it pushed any advertising like that at me. If it does happen, it's an offer as part of a major OS upgrade that includes the new feature.
> I suspect CarPlay and Android Auto come with strings attached from Apple
Doubtful. Adoption by manufacturers is what Apple and Google want, so you'll stay in their respective ecosystems. They're not doing any more walled garden or tracking than they do when you use your phone normally, so I don't see the problem. Tesla tracks you with their system, too, but as a corporation they have a much sketchier history with their customer relationship. There's no way 99% of cars would come with support for CarPlay and AA if there were strings attached.
Nonsense. Android Auto (and likely CarPlay as well) is just a video player. They just take H.265 frames and feed it to the head unit, and feed user feedback back to the phone. Audio stack is I believe somehow piggybacked off Bluetooth, but I could be wrong. As far as I know no software from Google runs on the head unit itself.
I couldn't get Spotify on my tesla to even see my playlists, much less connect to my Apple Music account (which I would have preferred). The text message handling was abysmal, and the audio reading failed after two weeks and no amount of rebooting or resetting would get my Tesla to talk to my phone again.
My phone supports multiple map apps, podcasts, etc. Lots more choices than Tesla. About the only thing the Tesla has different is Supercharger integration and remaining range integration with the nav. Except the range estimate dropped on the freeway about 1.2 miles for every 1 mile driven, so it was pretty useless for that.
You can do service requests in the app for help with stuff that’s not working. Worth a try. Spotify does pick up my playlists ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
They may give you help over text, or push a software update for you, or if warranted even send out a mobile tech or have you bring the car in to be looked at.
There are some short sellers spreading misinformation about Tesla service being bad, but that hasn’t been my experience at all. I hope it gets better for you.
I want to know if it's even remotely possible for a EV truck company like Rivian to unseat the F-150 as America's best selling truck within the next 5 years?
I absolutely LOATHE the Verge's reviews. Just such low effort, "Let's talk about how this thing makes me FEEL rather than how it PERFORMS" garbage for an ostensibly tech focused website. Like they don't actually compare the Lightning against any of it's competitors, have no charts or graphs showcasing performance relative to competitors, ICE trucks, or over time, and they completely ignore one of the most damning performance downsides of electric trucks, that being their greatly reduced range when towing or carrying heavy payloads.
Seriously, Verge's reviews are some of the lowest quality content from any so called "Major" tech site.
Ford is not allowed to sell direct to consumers in I believe 48 states because they already have dealers. They're apparently planning on spinning off their electric division into an entirely new company to get around those laws, but remains to be seen.
This is one of those things I'll never experience, and doubly so: I have no use for a truck (I live in a city), and I have never owned or wanted to own an American-made car. They're just all so _bad_.
>Ford’s entire suite of driver-assistance tech is called “BlueCruise,” which is deeply confusing because it means that everything from boring old cruise control to full-on hands-free driving is technically “BlueCruise.”
This seems far less confusing than the Autopilot and FSD bifurcation that Tesla has.
It beeps at you to get your hands on the wheel when you're trying to autosteer in places it's not allowed. Sounds reasonable, no?
They strapped on an Android tablet and called it a day. From my experience (ex-mobile game dev, Medical SaaS), Android tablets are very slow. We encourage our customers to not buy Android tablets because the patient experience is not the greatest.
Current versions of the Ford infotainment platform are based on QNX, actually. The article mentions that Ford is switching to Android, but that hasn't happened yet.
Because there's a vibrant ecosystem around Android with wonderful third party support, with a rich platform & ecosystem already well known & loved by many developers & consumers alike. Where-as QNX is a toolkit for building one-off custom appliances that no third party will ever see or improve or enrich. One is a dead end stuck in a niche, the other realized it had to create more value than it captured. And generally the Google open ecosystem one is pretty ok.
Well that's you, somebody else might want to use the subscription music service they pay for and use car controls to change the tracks, someone else might want a map that displays in the center console as opposed to their phone, etc etc. With android there's the possibility of adding apps that people would want to the car itself. This would be something device manufacturers could be interested in for dash cams or other electronics that could benefit from richer control interfaces.
And, if like more than half of Americans I decided I didn't want an Android phone, now I get coerced to use Android to listen to my subscription music service, etc.
I suggest you research Android Automotive and what exactly it is, as it's not an "Android phone". As for half of Americans not wanting to use Android, because it's Android, I find that statement amusing as you would rather force their customers to continue using their maligned Ford Sync system then a superior solution with an actual ecosystem.
Yes, it's not an Android phone. It's an Android tablet hardwired into my vehicle's bus so it can hoover up data directly from the vehicle and has to be on when the vehicle is. It still runs Google Maps (and reports my location to Google) has the Google Play Store (so any apps would also feed data and money to Google) and still permanently runs the microphone's input through Google's algorithms 24/7 for the Google Voice Assistant.
I don't see what meaningful way it differs.
Is it even going to get updates for a longer period than Android phones? Maybe against security threats. Or it's just been 3 years, upgrade your car.
I suppose it doesn't make phonecalls, that's a difference.
And yes, what I want is a bluetooth speaker that has a radio. My point is I don't want an ecosystem for my car. Saying "Ford Sync system then a superior solution with an actual ecosystem" as an argument to upgrade gets everything backwards.
No, it's not an Android tablet, just like it's not an "Android phone" as you previously purported. I suggest you research Volvo's implementation of Android Automotive to get a better understanding of what it is rather than trying to equate it to an old version of Android you used on a phone or tablet.
How about you tell me where I am wrong or how they are different . Because I read your wikipedia link and it just seemed to reinforce that it's extremely Googley with Play Store, Voice Assistant and GPS built in to Fords and Volvos. And I found no meaningful differences I didn't already cover. Nor did I on Volvo's page[1]
I'm not going to watch like an hour of youtube videos. I tried scrubbing and didn't see any great UI, although if you want to show me some screenshots I'll look. But it also doesn't matter. I wasn't saying "the UI/UX is bad". I was saying "I don't want any touchscreen UX in my car". I also said "they are uploading my position, speed, car data and microphone data inside the car to Google, as well as letting them control the App Store to my car and thus impose things on all the apps I would want." Although Google may in fact process the audio locally.
Because the car company has a talent pool it can hire from & will have an easier time not f-ing it up. Because what you already know about screens is already present & not reinvented totally custom.
You seem to have very select demanding opinions about what is and isnt ok to allow in, and to reject being over well served. From what I can see, neither QNX nor Android nor any carmaker of note (aside from exotics) has your selective anti-needs in their concern. At this point I dont disagree with your desire, but trying to insist on un-soft computing, on only a couple hardset paths is an elite & narrow concern intolerant to broad usability. We should both understand & respect your narrow, peculiar desires, because they tell an important tale, but have deference to more general answers.
And alas, we just see shitty implementations. Slow ones like this article, where Ford seemingly must be running on a 8 bit toaster controller. And just as bad, the very very very little reporting/available information on what data gets sent to whom. Which I feel is probably not so very bad as many jump to assume... but we dont know & there's no benefit of a doubts left remaining, especially given how impossible finding answers is.
If "broad usability" and "general answers" suggest many people want a touchscreen, why not make it an option? And is it "general answers" to create a piece of technology that will rapidly become out of date as opposed to some simple gauges and a bluetooth connection for audio? Broad usability, to me, implies simplicity. QNX, by virtue of being harder to move functionality into, better fits my anti-needs (nice phrase).
I'm not sure why a company Ford's size couldn't handle "it's a screen" in QNX, but it can handle how many I want in a car - no pixel matrix screens at all. The article makes it clear that a major annoyance with the slow computer is the replacement of physical buttons with slow swiping. Well, we could just have buttons.
Okay, but I recognize that for some reason I've lost this fight. Fragile, quickly obsoleted and hard to replace computers are going to try to make cars have a short lifespan. The fact that they're harder to use while driving will also continue to perplex me but there will be no other option.
But then they want to install software on my car that helps Google spy on my real-world locations? Or where the only way to sync my phone to the audio is to let Google listen in to the connection. You're right that we have no clue if Ford is spying on us now, but surely that data collection is going to continue. We're just adding Google to the list of companies.
All this makes me sad because an E-F150 was the EV I was hoping to get once supply exists.
How on earth is it "better"? Dumb cars are better. Obviously, I want the EV to have mission critical things related to it being an EV, but there's no reason for anything else to get fancy.
Tesla has the worst cockpit experience because it's a single large screen.
It has to be an automotive-grade screen or one afternoon in a Phoenix parking lot will be the end of it. It's absolutely not a tablet, or even a part from one.
Does it do CarPlay/Android Auto? If that's the case, I honestly don't really care how fast it is - I have an older EV with Sync3 and it's fine (more than fine, I just use my smartphone for most interactions using CarPlay).
The only thing I may dislike is not having physical buttons/dials for climate.
this is addressed in the article. You can just Cmd/Ctrl+F for the word CarPlay for an answer.
There’s a quick action button to navigate back home on the map widget, but it just opens the map app full-screen, defeating the purpose of the widget entirely. I’d love to have CarPlay open to handle my phone and messaging alongside the radio, but that’s not possible, even though the display is clearly big enough to show both at once.
All of that is made worse by how slow everything is. Switching between the radio and the map or the map and CarPlay is… slow. Swiping along the cards is pretty slow. The display can be responsive, and the games are certainly playable, but in most instances, it’s just slow.
This is the point in any car review where many people are already drafting emails to me about just using CarPlay or Android Auto instead of the stock software, but friends, CarPlay and Android Auto are not good at helping EV owners navigate charging. If you want to plot out a route with accurate range estimates and an effective charging strategy, you have to use the built-in nav — especially since Ford has taken the time to organize charging stations by speed, and seeking out 150kW fast chargers is an important part of the Lightning experience because the battery is so big. Apple and Google are a long way behind on this front.
“If you want to plot out a route with accurate range estimates and an effective charging strategy, you have to use the built-in nav”
I saw that phrase in the story and came here to comment and saw this thread.
I think we should be honest with ourselves about recent history: Apple and Google will be quicker to roll out functionality for EV specific navigation (i.e. chargers) in their apps then car manufacturers will be to fix their UI problems.
Edit: I also dont want to spend $xxx a year on map updates from manufacturers when Apple Maps are free (I understand I’m not the customer with Google even if their mapping product is great) and better
I also dont want to spend $xxx a year on map updates from manufacturers when Apple Maps are free (I understand I’m not the customer with Google even if their mapping product is great) and better
I visibly jerked in my chair reading that from remembering all the GPS devices I relied on for years that happily bricked themselves after the company stopped supporting them and their internal maps "expired".
> I think we should be honest with ourselves about recent history: Apple and Google will be quicker to roll out functionality for EV specific navigation (i.e. chargers) in their apps then car manufacturers will be to fix their UI problems.
I think you are missing the point of what the actual problem here is. Apple and Google already show EV charging stations on their maps just fine, you can even filter by type of charging (CCS, CHADeMO, etc.). That's not the issue.
The issue is the navigation system using information about your vehicle in real time (current outside temperature[0], battery charge remaining, speed, AC usage, calculated estimate of distance of range remaining using all the info above, etc.) to automatically create a route to your final destination that includes charging station stops on the way. To calculate the frequency of those stops, locations, how long you will need to spend charging there in the most optimal way (e.g., it is actually much faster to make 2 stops to charge from 15% to 50% than to stop 1 time to charge from 15% to to 85%), you need real time data about your own vehicle specifically.
Unless Google and Apple somehow get access to that live data from the vehicle itself in real time, that functionality is impossible to implement. And, naturally, the only entity that would have that info is the car nav system itself. Plus, I don't think many users would be enthusiastic about sharing such sensitive information with Apple or Google.
0. In case anyone is curious why outside temperature is relevant, EVs take outside temperature into their calculation of estimated range, because lower temperatures reduce range available.
This is simply growing pains. Nobody who needs gas plans out their stops on a road trip. They simply notice they're low, and pull of at the next station. As much as I'd like to have two way communication with my car and android auto, it's probably unrealistic to expect the auto industry (in tandem with Google) to actually move fast enough to implement something like that before it's no longer useful.
> 0. In case anyone is curious why outside temperature is relevant, EVs take outside temperature into their calculation of estimated range, because lower temperatures reduce range available.
That's actually not important at all. Simply noting the current rate of discharge/speed is enough. I use ABRP with a bluetooth ADB dongle to get live data to my maps for long road trips and it works wonderfully. It doesn't have to be perfect since hardly any EV driver is going to want to be under 20% battery when they arrive at a charger.
> Unless Google and Apple somehow get access to that live data from the vehicle itself in real time
Apple is working on it. Google will likely follow suite. Neither are likely to be implemented in a vehicle I own before it's irrelevant though.
Thanks for the link. I had no idea CarPlay was not only planning to go in that direction, but have already done the work to make it happen, and are fairly close to releasing it soon. Their car manufacturer partnerships look pretty solid as well.
Still, late 2023 as of now seems a bit far out. But I don't think that majority of car manufacturers will manage to get to the CarPlay level of quality for their own in-house infotainment systems even by 2033.
EVs with Google's software native like the Polestar have that functionality. Google Maps can do it, its more of a limitation of the current Android Auto implementation.
I wonder if Android Auto would be able to get this data with the current structure of Android Auto, or if existing cars would never be able to support it.
Right now automotive UI's and sw are in the equivalent of pre iphone era mobile phone jankyness, just good at one or two things with a ton of cruft that doesn't work well.
We all know BEVs are fast - even a 1960's UK electric milkfloat is amazingly speedy from standstill - but I'd say Ford are years away from their BEVs being viable and reliable, not least due to lack of charging network. The lousy towing performances on BEV trucks rings alarm bells too.
https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/ford-f150-lightning-elect...
A little off topic but it appears Anne Heche's vehicle was a hybrid or BEV and caused a huge fire, one of my biggest BEV concerns - It took nearly 60 firefighters more than an hour to douse the flames.
It's true that there need to be more fast chargers, but it's also true that this notion of "no charging network for CCS cars" is making less sense every month.
You can get across America and Canada on CCS chargers. For example on Petro-Canada or Electrify America (and there are more charging networks than just these two):
Europe sensibly standardized on CCS type 2 Combo so any brand of car can charge on any brand of charger. Even Tesla is finally opening their chargers to all brands in Europe:
The lousy towing performance probably doesn't matter. 75% of truck owners tow one time a year or less. I've had my F-150 for 8 years 45,000 miles, and it's seen a trailer 3 times for a total of less than 400 miles. I'm close to being in the market for a new truck, and the biggest deal breaker for me with the lightning is the 5.5' box instead of the 6.5' box. Weighing over 6,000 lbs also means you can't register it as a passenger vehicle in NYS without capping it - meaning you can't drive on the parkways.
I want my next truck to be an EV, but towing does matter to me. I hope by the time I replace my 2007 Tundra there will be an EV truck that does tow well. I just broke 130k miles, and easily have another 100k, so I have some time.
There were news articles that they revised this law for the rivian and presumably the f150ev. At first people ran into this weight / registration issue.
Anecdotal, but I just drove my electric Ford from Sacramento to Seattle and back without any particular planning or problems. Just used the built-in nav to find chargers.
All of this to say: You get what you pay for.