Everyone who can afford a car with an infotainment system also has a high-end smart phone that they replace several times over the life of the car. It's not quite as bad an idea as putting a tablet in your refrigerator door, but the product lifespan mismatch is of the same nature.
To handle the case where the customer would prefer not to think about interfacing their phone or tablet to their car, a branded compatible tablet should be a dealer option, or at least the tablet-like part of infotainment should be replaceable.
In the US, reversing cameras have been mandatory since 2018, and in the EU since 2024, so any new car sold there will need a display for the camera output.
I wonder if the law specified a minimum display size and resolution, otherwise a car company could sell a car with an Apple-watch-sized display to save costs. I imagine selling a car where the display depends on the user's phone and complying with these laws will be virtually impossible.
I haven't driven this particular car, but if it's anything like any other infotainment system I've seen, I'm really hoping they're able get a profiler running on there to determine the technique they use to get massive frame drops on hardware they fully control.
BMW has a talent in that space. Over engineered modules with terrible software. I recently drove a Toyota rental and they seem to have hired some former BMW software people as well.
I don't need 120hz Apple-like design, but it's crazy how they can't even keep a basic 30fps UI running smooth. And they still try to throw in more and more bad running animations.
Those UIs are made by embedded software engineers that have been in the automotive sector for 40 years. They have no clue how to make a modern functioning UI. The company then hires a UX expert that draws out a full plan. The software engineers implement it, it looks identical to the UX specification… but occasionally drops to 10FPS.
Probably because an important message passed by on the CAN-bus and that got a bit more priority from the CPU than the GUI
It's actually a little harder than people outside the UI framework space might think (there's really not a lot of time per frame; it's easy to put too much work where it doesn't belong; it's easy to regress if you're not monitoring for it after code changes).
It's core to usability at this point, though. They should make the effort.
A friend had a nice job of driving BMWs for a manufacturer of such a system (it was early 2000s and the system was more embedded than Android/Linux). One test was setting a calendar alarm (because yeah of course the BMW needs an on-board calendar), and while cruising down the highway, wait for the alarm to go off, and then open a door. He said a colleague did this and the system crashed and went dark...
I suppose even driving 20kmh should trigger the "door open!" alarm.
(Maybe it's one of those that supports split outputs for multiple screens for all passenger positions? - i.e. kids in the back? That might be a bit more understandable.)
Everyone who can afford a car with an infotainment system also has a high-end smart phone that they replace several times over the life of the car. It's not quite as bad an idea as putting a tablet in your refrigerator door, but the product lifespan mismatch is of the same nature.
To handle the case where the customer would prefer not to think about interfacing their phone or tablet to their car, a branded compatible tablet should be a dealer option, or at least the tablet-like part of infotainment should be replaceable.
In the US, reversing cameras have been mandatory since 2018, and in the EU since 2024, so any new car sold there will need a display for the camera output.
I wonder if the law specified a minimum display size and resolution, otherwise a car company could sell a car with an Apple-watch-sized display to save costs. I imagine selling a car where the display depends on the user's phone and complying with these laws will be virtually impossible.
I haven't driven this particular car, but if it's anything like any other infotainment system I've seen, I'm really hoping they're able get a profiler running on there to determine the technique they use to get massive frame drops on hardware they fully control.
It went like this:
We need a team of very good sw developers.
Maybe we can have 20% of the team be cheap "developers", people that have no inclination towards sw development to do the boring stuff.
Maybe 20% of real developers is enough in a team. The rest will learn from them.
Let's have 100% cheap developers, the project only needs changes.
We can get even cheaper developers, come to us with no prior experience and in 3 months we will teach you what you need to know.
Our projects are delayed due to covid.
Oh no, the Chinese!
BMW has a talent in that space. Over engineered modules with terrible software. I recently drove a Toyota rental and they seem to have hired some former BMW software people as well.
I don't need 120hz Apple-like design, but it's crazy how they can't even keep a basic 30fps UI running smooth. And they still try to throw in more and more bad running animations.
Those UIs are made by embedded software engineers that have been in the automotive sector for 40 years. They have no clue how to make a modern functioning UI. The company then hires a UX expert that draws out a full plan. The software engineers implement it, it looks identical to the UX specification… but occasionally drops to 10FPS.
Probably because an important message passed by on the CAN-bus and that got a bit more priority from the CPU than the GUI
It's actually a little harder than people outside the UI framework space might think (there's really not a lot of time per frame; it's easy to put too much work where it doesn't belong; it's easy to regress if you're not monitoring for it after code changes).
It's core to usability at this point, though. They should make the effort.
A friend had a nice job of driving BMWs for a manufacturer of such a system (it was early 2000s and the system was more embedded than Android/Linux). One test was setting a calendar alarm (because yeah of course the BMW needs an on-board calendar), and while cruising down the highway, wait for the alarm to go off, and then open a door. He said a colleague did this and the system crashed and went dark...
I suppose even driving 20kmh should trigger the "door open!" alarm.
16 GB of RAM for a car infotainment system!!
(Maybe it's one of those that supports split outputs for multiple screens for all passenger positions? - i.e. kids in the back? That might be a bit more understandable.)
The word 'Infotainment' makes me want to barf.
It’s obsolete anyway. If the board is analysing video for safety purposes it’s a core part of the car.