Hacker News Reader

Comment by esskay | Hacker News Reader

Personally I'd like the head unit to do as absolutely little as possible. Just run CarPlay and Android Auto and let your phone do the heavy lifting. Headunit software in cars is notoriously awful, slow and rarely gets updated. For this reason they should just offload as much as possible.

View on HN

While I love CarPlay for most of the stuff, I hate navigation from Google Maps or Waze / phone. I'm not sure if it's placebo, or something else, but for my car, the navigation is just better, especially when driving in tunnels and other weak GPS areas. The car system seems to use more than just GPS, like speed, direction and distance and even if you drive in a long tunnel or other similar conditions, it just knows not to mess up the position of the car, miss exits and other things. I know it depends on the manufacturer, but I get regular OTA updates for the navigation, live traffic updates that are quite good, dangerous situations on the road ahead and so on.

Fair point, perhaps the solution is the car should feed back more data through to the CarPlay/Android Auto API to allow them to use that extra information?

I've never once seen a built-in nav that I liked. They're always clunky, take weird routes, and cost an arm and a leg to update every [other] year. I'd rather buy a Garmin and have dedicated than use the manufacturers option.

I just don't understand why CarPlay doesn't show the outside temperature. It is readily available information, either from the car itself or from Apple's own weather service. The stock head unit software has no problem doing it. The iPhone has no problem doing it when using its built-in screen. But when CarPlay takes over you're left to guess.

Maybe in sunny California you have no reason to care, but in these northern climates it is useful information. Road conditions can change rapidly as you approach the freezing point.

I use an app called NAVITIME (Japan-only) for navigation in my car and I far prefer it to Google or Apple maps. It functions a lot more similar to a more traditional GPS navigator like a TomTom or whatever, and has a lot of nice features like showing prices on gas stations. It does have an option to show the temperature. It's a monthly subscription though.

Quite the opposite. I'd like excellent offline navigation in the car that doesn't talk to a spyware FAMAG app on a phone, or the internet at all, so that the only people who know where I am going and when are the hundreds of ALPR data brokers and their customers.

Yes, this means you lose real-time traffic data.

Fair enough but you're in the minority there. Average joe just wants directions that will keep them away from traffic jams, and manufacturer maintained head units wont realistically do that without paying a subscription. Even then all their data is going to come from the big tech companies as its them who have all that data.

Pretty sure we're in a thread about reflashing a head unit via bootloader exploits to install hacker apps, no? "Average Joe" never even knew the HOWTO textfile existed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com