I wonder how much of those frustrations has to do with Japanese market share of car industry; I think the touchscreen infotainment is not there because car manufacturers value it as integral and central part of car experience but simply because otherwise their product loses against one of Japanese brands.
Japanese road network is a disorganized weighted node graph and absolutely not a grid, and a bulletproof navigation unit has been a must for a car in Japan since its inception around 1990. It is also preferred that they are 2DIN compatible so it can be later upgraded. AFAIK, those are not high priority checkbox items elsewhere, but all cars nevertheless follow the Japanese manufacturer layout because of manufacturers' collective dominance. Cars before 2DIN navigation units seem to have had 1DIN AM/FM radio units with radio buttons[1], by the way.
That dominance leaves a 4:3 8" diagonal hole in immediate view of driver for all cars globally that must be filled with something of value. That doesn't have to be a touchscreen but usually are, and it ends up being a navigation-audio combo unit, and it's outsourced to the lowest bidder. It is not the primary interaction point for cars by overwhelming global demands or principles of automotive product design. That leads to jarring subpar experience that appear to be but are perhaps not intended to be part of core UX of the whole car. I think.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by saying that the Japanese road network is not a grid. In terms of actual layout, it's quite grid-like. I would even say it's usually much closer to a nicely laid-out grid than the mess any European city is.
What Japan lacks are addresses that can be found easily without using a map. Apart from Kyoto, roads in Japanese cities don't have names (or number), so addresses within cities are not "{number} {name of street}". Cities are cut in areas smaller and smaller all the way down to a block. The last number will be the house on that block. So addresses within cities are "{name of area} {sub-area number} {block number} {house number}", with some variations from city to city.
An address might be "Nantokacho 11-16-8", which means the 8th house around the 16th block of the 11th sub-area of the Nantoka area. Good luck figuring that out without a map!
There needs to be a screen: I'm not sure what the incremental cost is of it being touch-sensitive. And I think a lot of designers (or cost cutters) may have figured that since they have to have software anyway, it may easier/cheaper to deal with software buttons than with moving parts like physical buttons and dials.
I'm pretty sure a touchscreen is cheaper than buttons, or at least awful close. You'll still get some buttons, unless the car maker really hates you, and hopefully something to turn for volume control (which may even work most of the time, if you're lucky).
Touchscreen is such a stupid low value move for driver. Physical knobs are safer in many ways, last much much more, I don't need to lose contact with whats happening in front of the car to manage these, just muscle memory. BMW has nice big physical knob (turn&press) to control all menus, much better than hunting on flat glossy screen with fingers.
Some stuff can be managed from steering wheel, but instead of putting there things like AC there are voice controls, while we all know very well this increases danger on the roads and calls shouldn't be made while driving.
That being said, I choose (used) cars based on many metrics, and this is just one of them and not the most important one. So its sort of self-inflicted move to worse.
> Physical knobs are safer in many ways, last much much more, I don't need to lose contact with whats happening in front of the car to manage these, just muscle memory.
None of which some up on a spreadsheet in the manufacturer's accounting department.
Similarly: open concept offices with hot desking lowers the amount of rent (per employee) that shows up on an expense report, but the productivity drop of open offices does not.
I used to agree, but the point I made in GP is that the touchscreen front and center could be a requirement, with what to do with one being open to local market interpretation.
IF that's the case, and that's one big if, debating touchscreen vs buttons might not be meaningful, because touchscreen MIGHT be a requirement that cannot be removed. With un-eliminable touchscreen, buttons becomes just added cost, rather than being a resilt of cost calculations between all-touch vs all-buttons.
Button-y interface can be handled on basically any IO-heavier 8-bit microcontroller with some muxes as all it needs is to handle interrupts and emit event messages over whatever-bus. The solution can even be hard real-time if there is such requirement.
Touchscreen will probably run atop whatever OS powers infotainment system. In theory touch events CAN be handled on the same 8-bit uC, but converting click coordinates to button-press messages requires knowing what is visible on the screen, which either hinders expressiveness of touch interface (fixed islands for controls) or complicates implementation (constant updating of element-coordinate maps). The moment safety-critical control runs along with non-safety software huge validation challenges arise - the performance characteristics of the whole system, including UI, must become at the very least bounded.
Hard button solution can be internally commoditized, whereas soft button solution requires constant babysitting throughout development lifecycle. One is much more expensive than the other, however, once the move is made incremental cost drops dramatically.
Don't Japanese people have smartphones or tablets with navigation on them that they can use? I'd rather cars just have a place I can mount my own device, rather than include any kind of screen whatsoever with crappy un-updated, un-maintained software.
This is sort of the goal of Android Auto and CarPlay, but not as a mount for your phone. Rather, it turns the screen into a dumb terminal for your phone, bypassing all the shitty built-in software and providing a UX designed specifically for use while driving.
And critically lets you directly access CarPlay interfaces to apps for streaming, podcasts, navigation, etc, all of which is much richer than a dumb audio only passthru with skip buttons.
Cars can have better GPS reception, which is important when you're trying to drive in an urban area with a lot of buildings. Phones are bad at accuracy there.
(CarPlay can provide car GPS to the phone though.)
It just pretends to be more accurate by using AI. A car tends to be more raw, which is what you want when navigating at speed.
As someone who used to help out with Waze maps, raw GPS tracks from phones can be WAAAY off from actual roads and other GPS tracks.
Your phone looks for the most likely road for you to be on and snaps you to that road. Your car does a similar thing but has much higher GPS resolution than your phone so it is more likely to be right.
Gosh, so the moment you use an if-statement, or an aggregate function (like sum or average), or weighting coefficients to mark some inputs as more significant than others, it's "AI" already? And I naïvely thought it was just, well, "computing". You could do "AI" on a 8086, ffs.
This is true of literally any software and if you really wanna oversimplify it, our brains are just a bunch of if statements (condition based logic) too...
no it IS more accurate. When i am off-roading i always record my track and have to unplug my phone from the trucks system to get an accurate un-smoothed track.
google maps does weird things but gaia just uses the raw GPS data from the phone and doesn't snap, however when you are plugged into carplay the phone seems to always consider the car/trucks data more accurate even when its clearly not.
this could very well my specific truck (dealer has refused to look and i don't have another to compare to) or a general tacoma thing but it both smooths the GPS data to make "nicer" looking lines and often introduces drift over time as likely some processing it does compounds an error
(i also realize i said the wrong phone, iphone 14 not 12 but even with the 12 it was notably better then the truck but the 14 pro has a much improved GPS and it shows)
AFAIK, and I could be wrong (though I did google this first), plugging your phone into CarPlay does not use the car’s gps unit. That’s just your phone trying to find a road because it’s connected to a car. Even if you are getting the car’s gps, it’s not going to give you raw values, but display values to show in an app, which should be smooth, IMHO.
But the in-car unit has both GPS (with the antenna being on the roof) as well as wheel speed. Noticeable in longer tunnels with traffic jams that make the speed vary. Then it's clear Google maps takes a random guess at where you are while the in-car system knows how far along you are.
the only time i am paying attention is when off-roading and recording a track, and then its very obvious when the GPS is doing a good or bad job and unplugged from carplay i get a far more accurate track.
Phones also use WiFi access points and some Bluetooth beacons to get a better location. AFAIK only Google and Apple have up-to-date maps of these that are useful for navigation, and no one else does (Mozilla threw the towel a year or two ago).
Cars can theoretically have better GPS antennae, and can do better dead reckoning using wheel position and wheel rotation speed. But do they? I haven’t seen any evidence that any car actually does better than a modern phone.
Especially inside a dense city, WiFi location can be much more precise than GPS.
i only really care about accurate when off-roading in the middle of nowhere with no reception and recording my track - my iphone performs far better when unplugged from the truck then when plugged into it.
That's possible too, but the issue I was thinking of wasn't exactly reception - it's that GPS signals bounce off buildings and so it looks like you're somewhere else. Stronger reception might actually make that worse.
Japan has local satellites to help with this (QZSS) and local cars may handle that better than global phones.
The Japanese navigation units in cars have been really good for at least 15 years. The signs and lane markings usually match exactly what’s ahead of you in real-life, and there’s a radio system on the highway gives traffic and road closure information even if you’re not connected to the internet. It’s only recently that smartphone apps are as good.
Phone navigation apps are surprisingly bad in Japan (Google ones in particular). Not unusable, but the in-car GPS is more competitive than in other markets IMHO.
Also with an aging population a phone screen is just too small for many.
BTW, to parent's point VW has been trying different approaches with a top mounted GPS/infotainment unit that can be omitted on cheaper trims.
That's not true. Google Maps, in particular, has by far the best route guidance. It used to be different - but not anymore. Most in-car systems don't even attempt to route the last 300m here because the detailed one-way street narrow layout of tiny streets isn't in their mapping data, or their algorithms are too weak. Google has mostly no problem with that.
Entering Japanese addresses IS tricky, though; here, custom-built Japanese solutions outshine. There are (mainly) no street names; instead, you specify your location by filtering down from Prefecture (Tokyo), City (Ota-ku), Commune (Kugahara), District (1-Chome), Block (26), House Number (1).
Japanese systems allow you to enter it this way - with Google (or, even worse, Apple Maps), it's a bit hacky. You would specify it as Kugahara 1-26-1 and hope for the best.
Google Maps fails in subtle but weird and sometimes costly ways.
On one side, it can't route through a bunch of valid paths. I first assumed it could be because of residents asking Google to cut traffic, but sometimes it's not even through residential areas. I see routes on the map that are avoided in favor of bigger loops, and when trying the shorter routes they're perfectly fine. Or perhaps it's the vehicle size and they optimize for SUVs ?
On the other side it will happily route you through paths that are restricted to specific categories of cars. It's up to the driver to carefully avoid them, but it really wants you to go through and reroutes you there when you deviate, so it's a huge PITA in areas you don't know and try to navigate while ignoring the navigation instructions. Cops seem to have noticed it, We've got fined the first time we fucked up, and now that I'm aware of the issue I see the cops in many of these spots basically waiting for the jackpot.
I notice that Google Maps does very poorly on my iPhone 13 Pro with the multi-level roads, like riding around in the tunnels under Tokyo or on the roads with highways above the local roads, whereas builtin navigation units usually have no problems with this. I also find their directions to be much harder to follow than the built-in navigation units when riding around the major roads where turning right requires you to exit to the left for instance. Also, Google Maps fails to provide the variety of route options with fine-grained toll-booth costs, that all navigation units I've used in the last 5 years have gotten spot-on.
The weird part is Maps will accept them for search, but not display the plus code except when looking at POI (randomly selecting a point on the map doesn't show it for me, I only could get that from the /pluscodes/ map)
This seems genuinely useful, but as usual we're having the chicken and egg problem to get it adopted ?
In mobile at least, you can touch and hold to make a red temporary POI that will show you the plus code.
But yeah, nobody uses it in the real World. If I need to share a point with someone else I'll just send them the Google Maps share URL instead, which has its own shortcode
> The Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS), also known as Michibiki (みちびき), is a four-satellite regional satellite navigation system and a satellite-based augmentation system developed by the Japanese government to enhance the United States-operated Global Positioning System (GPS) in the Asia-Oceania regions, with a focus on Japan.
...
> The primary purpose of QZSS is to increase the availability of GPS in Japan's numerous urban canyons, where only satellites at very high elevation can be seen. A secondary function is performance enhancement, increasing the accuracy and reliability of GPS derived navigation solutions. The Quasi-Zenith Satellites transmit signals compatible with the GPS L1C/A signal, as well as the modernized GPS L1C, L2C signal and L5 signals. This minimizes changes to existing GPS receivers.
That definitely does not match my experience. I was in Japan in December of 2022 and used my phone to get everywhere, the directions were extremely accurate, more-so than in my home town in the US.
That’s one reason I use CarPlay - the interface hasn’t changed for years. Apart from one really annoying change to Apple Maps when they replaced the “silence directions” toggle from a big square to a touch, wait, touch tiny icon interface.
Ironically, the nav unit I used on a rental car circa 2007-08 (birth of touchscreen smartphones) was exactly like the GP describes, a separate unit that had a mount like the modern smartphone variants.
I don't own my own car here, but whenever I ride taxis or rent cars in Japan I noticed that they almost all appear to have aftermarket infotainment units. This makes sense now!
Honestly I would prefer to have a 2DIN hole where I can put whatever infotainment I want, instead of being stuck with whatever the car maker included, and that I can change without changing my car.
Yeah, it can't get pro-consumer and pro-right-to-repair than that. Disappointment with lackluster stock infotainment followed by disappointment in the move away from repairability felt a bit hypocritical to me knowing that world. 2DIN holes are fine!
Japanese road network is a disorganized weighted node graph and absolutely not a grid, and a bulletproof navigation unit has been a must for a car in Japan since its inception around 1990. It is also preferred that they are 2DIN compatible so it can be later upgraded. AFAIK, those are not high priority checkbox items elsewhere, but all cars nevertheless follow the Japanese manufacturer layout because of manufacturers' collective dominance. Cars before 2DIN navigation units seem to have had 1DIN AM/FM radio units with radio buttons[1], by the way.
That dominance leaves a 4:3 8" diagonal hole in immediate view of driver for all cars globally that must be filled with something of value. That doesn't have to be a touchscreen but usually are, and it ends up being a navigation-audio combo unit, and it's outsourced to the lowest bidder. It is not the primary interaction point for cars by overwhelming global demands or principles of automotive product design. That leads to jarring subpar experience that appear to be but are perhaps not intended to be part of core UX of the whole car. I think.
1: https://www.alamy.com/1956-mercedes-benz-190-sl-steering-whe...