Farley is questioning their increasing control over cars, asking 'Do you want the Apple brand to start the car?'
At the center of the conflict between Big Tech and Big Auto is CarPlay Ultra, the newest version of the popular CarPlay system that can mirror a user's iPhone interface on a screen within a vehicle. Announced earlier this year, CarPlay Ultra is going a step further by displaying car functions like fuel level and speed. It also lets drivers control the air conditioning, radio, and driving modes, all from the same screen. Aston Martin is the only automaker that has fully integrated CarPlay Ultra into its vehicles.
While Ford is committed to Apple, CEO Farley said: "We don't like the execution of Ultra in round one.
"I've talked to Tim [Cook] many times about this. Ford does not have the right, in our opinion, to disrupt someone's digital life when they get in their car," Farley told The Verge in an interview.
[...] "How far do you want the Apple brand to go? Do you want the Apple brand to start the car? Do you want the Apple brand to limit the speed? Do you want the Apple brand to limit access?" asked Farley.
[...] Carmakers are in a tough spot as Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are considered must-haves for many new car buyers, according to preliminary data from research firm AutoPacific. A McKinsey report from 2023 found that 85% of car owners who had CarPlay or a similar system preferred it over the carmaker's operating system.
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The Screens in Cars Are Becoming a Problem:
You're driving and you're bored. Tired of staring at the road, your eyes drift toward the polished touchscreen to the right of your steering wheel—what the auto industry calls your "infotainment" system. First you scroll through its menus to select a pump-me-up playlist; then you use its mapping tool to reroute toward a nearby Starbucks.
Sounds like a typical driving experience these days. Sure, you temporarily looked away from the road while tapping through the infotainment system, but that's no big deal. Right?
Well, it could be. You might have been distracted for as long as 40 seconds while changing your destination, according to an analysis by the AAA Foundation—long enough to cover half a mile at 50 mph. As for choosing playlists, one study found that drivers selecting music with Apple CarPlay or Android Auto had slower reaction times than those who were high from smoking pot.
"Today's infotainment systems can be as distracting—if not more so—than personal electronic devices," says Jennifer Homendy, the newly confirmed chair of the National Transportation Safety Board. The federal government blames distraction for around 10 percent of the 38,680 annual traffic fatalities in the United States, but that's almost certainly an underestimate, since people aren't inclined to admit they were fiddling with a phone or a navigation system prior to a crash.
Last summer I bought a 2021 Hyundai Ioniq SEL. It is a nice fuel-efficient hybrid with a decent amount of features like wireless Android Auto/Apple CarPlay, wireless phone charging, heated seats, & a sunroof.
One thing I particularly liked about this vehicle was the In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) system. As I mentioned before it had wireless Android Auto which seemed to be uncommon in this price range, and it had pretty nice, smooth animations in its menus which told me the CPU/GPU in it wasn't completely underpowered, or at least the software it was running wasn't super bloated.
As with many new gadgets I get, I wanted to play around with it and ultimately see what I could do with it.
The IVI in the car, like many things these days, is just a computer. My goal was to hack the IVI to get root access and hopefully be able to run my own software on it. Of course, the first step in hacking a device like this is research.
Some of the obvious things that I looked up were:
- What is the device running?
- There are two versions of the IVI, the navigation one that runs Android, and a Linux based one.
- Has anyone else hacked this before?
- The Android based, navigation version is easy to hack by installing your own APKs through the engineering menu.
- The linux based one has not been hacked.
- Does the non-navigation IVI have an Engineering Mode?
I love developer settings and test apps. There is usually tons of fun to be had playing around with them. I thought I might even get lucky and it would have an option to enable an SSH server or the like.
This is one of those summaries that can never do the full article justice. The only option is to read the linked article - I found it well worth the read! [JR]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 09, @02:19PM (5 children)
"Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are considered must-haves for many new car buyers"
Time for people to put down their crack pipes.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Snotnose on Sunday November 09, @03:38PM (1 child)
The only time I use Android Auto is for navigation. Even then, if I have a passenger I prefer to have them use their phone for navigation.
I get music from a USB stick, and there are no other phone functions I want to use in my car.
Trump has decided to rename California's San Andreas fault. He's calling it Biden's fault.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday November 10, @07:52PM
I've never used it that I know of. I wish its mapping functions WOULD use it, they changed 4th street to a two way late last year and the stupid car still tells me I'm going the wrong way when I go south on that street.
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday November 09, @04:04PM (2 children)
The usual statistical manipulation by survey manipulation.
My car is just a gasoline powered bluetooth speaker. Thats about right. It also has a nice shelf thing that holds my phone for google maps. That's the extent of my car's integration. I don't even have a charger in the car most of the time although I own one somewhere, I think it's in my wife's car's glove compartment. It autoconnects on power up, pretty reliable. Usually, I press "play" on an audio book when the car starts and don't touch it until I'm parked at my destination. I get pretty annoyed by incoming phone calls while driving, its 2025 the only legacy voice phone calls I get are from spammers. If there were a way to "do not disturb" any time bluetooth is connected, that might be interesting....
I suspect the survey was designed to generate the result they wanted by asking if they "want to play their phone's music on their car speakers" or "use google maps or similar on their phone while driving" and then carefully providing the only POSSIBLE solution to those needs is Android Auto therefore the customer "wants" android auto. Nobody wants android auto LOL.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday November 10, @04:20AM
That's pretty much how I use my phone in the car except I usually use a charger plugged into the socket formerly known as 'cigarette lighter'.
(Score: 1) by Bentonite on Wednesday November 12, @04:48AM
On Android it is possible to programmatically enable DND on connecting to bluetooth, but you might need root.
As below should be a good starting point;
`git clone https://github.com/MBach/AutoAirplaneMode` [github.com] (you would need to add the missing GPLv3-or-later headers)
https://anonymousoverflow.privacyredirect.com/questions/4715865/how-can-i-programmatically-tell-if-a-bluetooth-device-is-connected [privacyredirect.com]
https://anonymousoverflow.privacyredirect.com/questions/31862753/android-how-to-turn-on-do-not-disturb-dnd-programmatically [privacyredirect.com]
It really should be easier than the nightmare of writing and compiling an apk, but Android has got to Android.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Sunday November 09, @02:22PM (3 children)
Cars need physical gauges and physical controls, not screens and touchscreens. Cars should not be remotely controlled by a mysterious third party. Cars should be controlled by the driver, at all times, and only the driver.
What is the world coming to?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RS3 on Sunday November 09, @02:57PM (1 child)
I have the same question. We're starting to sound like our grandparents. Ugh. They might have been right after all?
One one hand we have people (authorities) who are supposedly making our world "safer".
On the other hand, we have people (authorities) allowing all kinds of distractions for drivers, including overly bright oncoming headlights.
I'm going to try to vie for audience with a local legislator or two. Not sure how long that will take but if it happens soon I'll report back here, or more likely start a journal.
(Score: 3, Touché) by mcgrew on Monday November 10, @08:04PM
Contacting their staff is easy unless they're really shitty at their job, they're called "representatives" for a purpose. I contact mine a lot.
Getting an audience isn't so easy unless you're filthy rich. YOU can only contact your own rep and senators, although a Gates or an Epstein or a Sackler or a Walton can call any of the 535, plus the president.
We live in a fascist plutocracy. The worship of wealth is our national religion. If you work for a living you don't matter to government, especially to the Republicans.
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE
(Score: 3, Funny) by mcgrew on Monday November 10, @07:56PM
Indeed. My car pisses me off every time I go through a drive through in the summer, because after I roll the window back up and drive off, the car gets damned hot because it's changed the cab temperature to 82°F. I guess they don't have drive throughs in Korea, I think I'll buy an American car next time.
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 09, @02:22PM (23 children)
Wise people will be willing to pay a premium for a car with ZERO digital integration. Give us knobs, buttons, switches, and levers please. After several days or a couple weeks of driving, you don't need to take your eyes off the road to operate any of them. Unless the auto makers can give us a fighter pilot's HUD display on the windshield, no touch screen can ever compare to that. And, whatever they do or don't do, the HUD should absolutely NOT be a touch screen! Imagine trying to see late at night, with finger smudges all over the windshield!
New car buyers need to pull their heads out, and demand that distracting technology be scrapped, or at least severely restricted.
I'm going to buy my defensive radar from Temu, just like Venezuela!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 09, @02:27PM (4 children)
The kind that survive for 10 or 20 years.
What is the actual useful life of an LCD, electrolytic capacitors, or flash memory?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RS3 on Sunday November 09, @03:56PM (3 children)
As always it all depends on the design, manufacturing, and implementation (functional environment).
I have some LCDs that I know are from the (late) 1970s and they work perfectly. Several, in many different devices including digital VOM (meters). Point is, they can last, maybe forever.
(Gas-plasma displays can also last very long- I have some also from the 1970s.)
Electrolytic capacitors: complicated answer. They contain a liquid water-based electrolyte that the electron current flows through. They're sealed by various means. Most seals don't last forever (engines, valves, whatever), and as such the caps eventually start to dry out. As that happens, the ESR (Equivalent Series Resistance) increases and the cap becomes less functional.
In some cases (power supplies, etc.) there's enough current flow that the increasing resistance causes increasing heat buildup which dries them out even faster.
Of course we have the caps that weren't made correctly [wikipedia.org]. They'll heat up so much that they'll leak electrolyte out and onto things like PC motherboards.
Some years ago, maybe 20, and for more than a year, I blamed many PC crashes on Microsoft. Somehow at some point I decided to replace the motherboard capacitors and amazingly the things became 100% stable. What threw me off was that one of the machines was a dual-boot- I mostly ran Linux on it, and never had one hint of a problem. Somehow Windows does something different that caused tons of crashing. I suspect it involves how Microsoft handles protected-mode VMM (virtual memory mapping), and that they do a poop-ton of it (mapping, paging, virtualizing) where Linux is much saner.
All that said I have many things: audio, test equipment, etc., as old as 1960s (some 50s) that still work just fine.
There's a factor where electrolytic caps degrade if not being used, and applying full run voltage can cause them to go pop. So in those cases we apply voltage very slowly, over weeks or more, to "reform" the aluminum oxide layer. It doesn't always work. Most people replace them, but sometimes I'll try to restore them if I'm restoring vintage electronics. (As much as I'm into improving electronics when I do repair work, sometimes. like in a guitar amplifier, adding capacitance can change the "sound" of the amp and ruin its personality and value.)
I can explain more if anyone's interested.
FLASH: well, the lifetime is pretty well known- they will fail. They lifetime is largely dependent on write cycles. But of course some cells may fail sooner, some later. SSDs generally keep track of that info and with the proper (usually proprietary) software you can assess your SSD's health. There exists FLASH test software, like for USB "thumb" drives, but it generally can't know the actual cell "health".
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday November 09, @05:16PM (2 children)
My experience is I'll set the supply to constant current mode to 1 mA or so and the max V to match the cap and if it doesn't reform or stabilize in an hour its usually junk no matter how long it sits there.
I've tried the "leave it attached for weeks" strategy but I've not had much luck. I'm mildly curious what your luck is with caps that spontaneously start working after a few weeks. I've never had much luck but it probably does happen sometimes. For an expensive enough cap I suppose its worth the effort.
I have a mental model (possibly even accurate) that it repairs 90% of the damage every hour its attached so if it aint working by the end of the day it'll likely never work again. But maybe you have better luck.
Another interesting point: I have not found a source for a "kilovolt class" adjustable bench supply with digital current limiting etc for less than $1000. If I found one I'd probably buy it as ham radio transmitter caps are a PITA for those I use a roughly 1 meg higher power resistor (take advantage of higher voltage rating not wattage). Take for example an old heath sb102 a classic transmitter from like 1970 uses a 6146 tube around 800 volts. I'll disconnect the separate chassis power supplies cap and install a 800K (ish) resistor in series with the electrolytic and let it run. Even if the cap is shorted out, 800K at 800 volts is only 1 mA at 800 V which is 800 mw so I won't smoke anything. Obviously with everything disconnected including any discharging resistor across the cap. I would not touch the resistor to see if its getting warm LOL. Anyway I can stick smaller resistors in until everything seems normal (in practice 800 K resistor would be a PITA to make like use a 470 + a 330 or four 220s and call it close enough, so I used a 1 meg, and instead of installing smaller resistors later I parallel extra 1 meg resistors and try it again) I would caution that ye olde cheap floor sweepings quality generic 1/4 watt film resistor will only have a 200 or so max working voltage which might be a problem for a KV class power supply; once you get up to 2, 3, more watts the data sheet rating of even the cheapest resistors is usually over a KV. You can indeed arc over a cheap POS quarter watt film resistor running a neon bulb indicator, its quite exciting and I've done it. Higher quality brand name resistors might flash over at higher voltages...
Another funny one is I would not feel comfy measuring a 800 volt supply with a CAT II 600V rated voltmeter. high voltage work is an expensive PITA. A Klein 700-series costs over $100 but at least it probably won't electrocute you LOL unlike the Amazon no-name brands that are CAT I 200 V or whatever nonsense rating. I've seen meters sold without a CAT rating which you'd think would be illegal or something.
It's cheap and easy to buy a constant current constant voltage digital calibrated "thirty volt" supply for a couple hundred its the high voltage ones that are hard to find or way out of my budget so I play stupid resistor games.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday November 09, @05:43PM
Oh and lest I forget test leads and clip leads. I have a special box for high voltage only gear.
There's no point buying a kilovolt rated Fluke meter if your hands touch the 600 volt rated no name test leads.
Or clip leads are like 20 for $1 if you're comfy with no voltage rating. "Real" alligator clip leads that are kilovolt rated are like $2 to $3 each.
The bad news about high voltage is its expensive to play, the good news is its only expensive once then the gear lasts the rest of your life. I suppose, in a sense, using 600 volt or 0 Volt rated clip leads on KV-class power supplies will also last the rest of your life, it just may not be that long LOL.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday November 09, @08:14PM
For many reasons I did much more cap reforming as a kid in the 70s. Had a couple / few problems, so I've mostly stopped doing it, but there have been a few exceptions, mostly with repairing some older tube (valve) thing that had been sitting for years. I never got fancy with constant current, but you're spot-on. I'm not electro-chemist enough to know but I wonder if the current should taper down as you approach WV?
One of many factors: as a kid I had no budget, but tons of curiosity and determination. So in a few cases, with very old can caps, and some understanding, I injected some water through the dried-out rubber plug (blow-out plug), let it sit, tried reforming. Been far too long to remember if it ever worked, but it's possible if someone ever wants to do an authentic restoration. (You could also gut an old can cap and hide a new one in it...)
I love the 6146! Made a guitar amp with a pair I still have somewhere. Just amazing sound. Tubes are probably "gassy" by now.
Back to caps- I don't remember times for reforming. I always erred on the side of caution. I had done a bit of experimenting with electroplating, etc., and I remember it's a very slow process, and could be dangerous. That said, I don't imagine the cap manufacturers could make electrolytics economically if it took a long time to form the oxide layer. Something to research later...
I had one short out once, fried the current-limiting resistor which wasn't well chosen (I was a young teenager), burned up transformer, and almost started a fire. So that caused me to back down on such experiments. And as I mention further down, I now include an incandescent bulb in series with 120VAC stuff when there's doubt.
Along those lines, i'm sure you know that even within wattage / dissipation limits, there are voltage limits on resistors, so messing with the voltages you mentioned can be a problem in that way.
Although like most electronics tinkerers I've made some HV circuits, almost always very low current (flybacks, etc.) My understanding of the dangers of current + volts, and an inherent self-preservation, has kept me from doing much with things involving serious volts + amps. For example, I've repaired some pretty big tube amps (6 6L6GC output) but am super cautious (and a bit nervous) doing so. If I'm extremely sure I've done everything correctly, I'll use a Variac with incandescent bulb in series in the primary and bring things up slowly, no matter what the experiment is. That brightening incandescent is a great indicator of problems! Yes, isolation transformer too.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 09, @03:33PM (13 children)
> Wise people will be willing to pay a premium for a car with ZERO digital integration.
This is already happening--there are shops springing up all over that buy older vehicles (often pickups), repair/rebuild them as needed and then sell then with a warranty. Not cheap, but then a new car that you don't like is hardly a bargain.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Sunday November 09, @04:13PM (12 children)
This is good news! I've never worked full-time in auto repair but for the right pay, or semi-retirement, I will do this. I've always owned "older" cars and I assert they are much less expensive to own. Anyone who whines that "parts are hard to get" is full of crap.
It's newer cars that have been getting harder and harder to work on, and car repair labor costs are going through the roof. There's a huge demand for repair techs, for many reasons including that things are changing so fast, and so significantly, that it's too difficult a field to work in. Mechanics are spending more and more time just learning how to do the work, rather than doing the work. Sometimes they learn by doing, sometimes by making costly mistakes (and who do you think pays for that?) If you're inclined to do hands-on work, you're MUCH better off doing electrical, plumbing, carpentry, etc. There are small changes in those worlds, and many make things easier (especially in plumbing, like PVC and PEX).
A co-worker had an Audi. Not sure the model- something top of the line, sport. Big $. About a year ago it needed a water (coolant) pump. Car was less than 2 years old, low-ish miles, but out of warranty. Dealer had the thing for literally months. He had a different loaner every week. It was going to cost him almost $10,000. I'm not sure why the long delay- it might have been a shortage of labor at the dealer. He eventually pulled it out of the dealer, took it to a really good local shop. Still it cost him almost $2,000 - for a coolant pump - that should never have failed so early. He got rid of the car shortly after, now has a BMW.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday November 09, @04:32PM (4 children)
Not pay though.
Plenty of shops with posted shop labor rates billing the customer over $150/hr but the dude doing the work is getting only $25/hr or sometimes even less.
The powers that be want the cost of the land for a car repair shop to be like $10M or preferably much more. After all they could have built three $5M houses on that plot of land. So charged rates have to be like "lawyer rates" to pay the mortgage. Meanwhile there's a HUGE supply of trained experienced techs but a shortage of ones willing to work for less than fast food wages, so you'll hear a lot about the "shortage of auto techs" when IRL its a "shortage of auto techs willing to work for less pay than McDonalds"
Its a common problem in retail, see also fast food ironically. I got a ton of shit locally when there was the usual sob story about how awful it is that a mom-and-pop diner closed down, I was glad to see them go because they were the last facility paying less than $10/hr in our city. Say what you want about how shitty McD and Panda Express are as corporate employers or nutritionally, but at least they are paying around $20/hr to $25/hr according to my kids friends. "woe is me nobody wants to work kids are so lazy now" is the mating call of the guy only willing to pay $9/hr in a $20/hr labor market, F those guys.
I just checked online and the local stealership is paying $23/hr for a total noob oil changer, vs Panda Express is paying $25/hr. Of course the longer term upside for a car mechanic is much higher.
The customers (or their insurance companies etc) are willing to pay $150 but the government and middlemen are such scamming thieves that workers would rather leave $125/hr on the table than go into business themselves and put up with "them". I always kind of laugh at people who describe this as some unfettered "free" market as if that premium were $0/hr instead of the observed $125/hr.
(Score: 5, Informative) by fliptop on Sunday November 09, @06:05PM
Overhead has gone up a lot too. The shop I work at was flooded in June and we had to get new compressors, tire machines and balancers. Equipment that used to cost a few thousand is over $20k now. Utilities are up as well and all vendors providing supplies are charging about 40% higher rates when compared to pre-Covid. Don't get me started on insurance, those guys are just plain out of control.
Running a business related to automotive repair is expensive.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday November 10, @06:41PM (2 children)
Crazy real estate prices (and rent, residential and commercial) aren't the sole factors destroying our economy and threatening everyone's well being, but they're a huge part of it.
That's the real killer of the brick and mortar store. People really do prefer to try on clothes first and really do like to look at and touch what they buy first, but with commercial rent driving brick and mortar prices into the stratosphere compared to Amazon et. al., shopping by web is taking over.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday November 10, @08:28PM (1 child)
Crazy real estate prices (and rent, residential and commercial) aren't the sole factors destroying our economy...
The biggest driver is our incredibly tiny federal minimum wage laws. They're disgraceful. In 1969 I earned $1.50 an hour at the Futura Drive In Theater. A McDonald's hamburger was 15¢. That burger is now $2.49. The federal minimum should be $24.90 at least.
Our pitiful minimum wage is the cause of most of America's problems and will be the cause of its next great depression. It was the 1990s before I saw homeless. They blamed video games on teen insanity and violence, now they blame cell phones, when the real reason is they were raised from birth by corporate babysitters instead of a loving parent.
And what is the cause of it all, the wages, rents, etc? Corporate Greed!
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday November 15, @04:35AM
There is a lot to that. A great many more ills of society would be solved or at least alleviated if we returned to a single income being sufficient to support a family.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Sunday November 09, @05:52PM (2 children)
Yeah, good luck w/ that.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday November 09, @07:02PM
I haven't had the heart to ask if he bought some kind of extended warranty, but he probably did after the Audi adventure. My '06 Volvo is German enough (too much) for me- I can't imagine dealing with even more German "engineering" (and I'm at least 50% German by ancestral genetics).
(Score: 3, Funny) by mcgrew on Monday November 10, @08:30PM
Even though I'm not a betting man I'd bet that his phone is an Apple. Like Audis and BMWs they're status symbols. Pitiful.
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday November 10, @08:18PM (3 children)
Anyone who whines that "parts are hard to get" is full of crap.
You would get an argument from my friend Mike, who's having a hell of a time with his little '80s pickup truck. I had to maintain my own cars when I was young and poor. But they only hire idiots to design things these days. Five minutes for me to change a battery, twenty for a water pump. But my '02 Concorde had the battery under the right front fender underneath the radiator overflow bottle! Took a trained mechanic forty five minutes to put a new battery in it.
The car I'm driving now needs almost no maintenance; none at all on its drive train. I never realized what an expensive hassle pistons are until I bought an electric car. It is to every car I've driven since 1968 what a Model-T was to a Studebaker horse-drawn buggy.
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday November 11, @01:34AM (1 child)
What make / model is Mike's '80s pickup?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday November 12, @02:07PM
Don't know, never noticed.
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 11, @01:35AM
But how many minutes will it take for a trained mechanic to put a new battery in it? 😉
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday November 09, @04:16PM
Phone slop is unavoidable with cheap consumer cars. Spend more money to get a better UI.
You can get close with SOME Porsche models and SOME Alfa Romeo models.
Whatever you do, don't buy a BMW that UI is roughly the opposite of what drivers want LOL. Nice cars as long as you don't have to use them.
(Score: 3, Informative) by epitaxial on Sunday November 09, @05:18PM
Alfa Romeo boss: "I don't want to sell an iPad with a car around it"
https://www.topgear.com/car-news/interview/alfa-romeo-boss-i-dont-want-sell-ipad-car-around-it [topgear.com]
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday November 10, @02:05PM
I agree, but would make one exception: some modern cars do offer a bird's eye view of your car when parking which is synthesized from cameras around the car. For a future car, I would definitely want this feature as it would improve my parking performance. For the rest, it's a no thanks.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday November 10, @08:08PM
Wise people will be willing to pay a premium for a car with ZERO digital integration. Give us knobs, buttons, switches, and levers please.
The fact that they got rid of buttons and knobs has nothing to do with it being digital and everything to do with trying to be cool. "Form follows function" seems to have gone out of style.
The problem isn't digitization, it's moron designers.
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Sunday November 09, @03:00PM (2 children)
When you get in to a car, turn OFF your fucking retarded toy cell phone. Anything that comes through that addictivity center is NOT IMPORTANT. (Oh, stop crying like I just kicked your damn dog or something.)
Cars are NOT cell phone, and they should never be, no mater how much idiot cell phone lovers may want them to be. Touch screens in cars are DANGEROUS and should be illegal.
The only thing a car dash board should display is your speed, remaining fuel, and general vehicle status.
Alerts about what your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate ate for breakfast should never, ever be on there.
Start... your car... for you? What? Why? Oh, it's a cold morning out, universe forbid you might actually have to PUT ON A JACKET! Your jacket doesn't match your shoes? Ah, well then...
Control air conditioning? No, no, no, no, and FUCK NO. Just NO. Did I mention NO? There should be a physical knob/buttons that I don't have to even look down at to change.
Just stop it with this silly shit already.
Hey, if these displays can do anything, can they beat the living shit out of high up reality-disconnected corporate executives?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RS3 on Sunday November 09, @04:18PM
I agree, but I feel somewhat sad for people who become so addicted to these things. I remember some years ago when almost everyone walked around talking to a cell phone, often with that ear-clip Bluetooth thing. Then "smart" phones were coming out and everyone was walking around glued to that thing, walking in front of cars, into poles, etc. Made for funny videos but sad overall. I've always had an aversion to anything addictive, so I held off on getting a "smart" phone, and still do very little on it. "Life is what's happening while you're absorbed by your cellphone".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 11, @01:40AM
Skill issue. When driving I use my phone for navigation and traffic alerts. Helps tell me where the cops and road blocks are etc.