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Comment by Kirby64 | Hacker News Reader

It’s awful if the vendor makes it awful. Know that this is deliberate lack of investment and not that it’s impossible. To my knowledge, there’s a few companies doing it right:

Tesla, whose nav is pretty great and responsive

Rivian, who appears to have copied a lot of the Tesla UI elements (and, has lots of former Tesla employees) and the snappiness and great nav is part of that.

Any car using Android automotive (different from Android auto) such as the Polestar lineup. Basically gives you an Android tablet with Google Maps, so nav is great, and it seems to be all held to a certain level of responsiveness.

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Haven’t been on a Tesla recently but I really disliked the navigation system of the one we rented a while back. Small buttons, and common settings buried in multiple menu layers. What I like about Apple CarPlay and Android auto is that the UI is pretty consistent because it’s driven by the device I have with me.

I’d suggest that’s just a case of what you’re used to. I never use CarPlay except when I get a rental and every time I use it there’s a learning curve to relearn how it works. Just like any new UI honestly. As for Tesla nav in particular, I can’t really think of any nav elements “buried” in the UI except disabling toll routes or something. But that’s a sub-menu on almost any nav software, so not unusual.

The thing that is not subjective though: the UI is responsive and the map data isn’t extremely outdated. Those are the two primary problems with “bad” nav implementations.

> just a case of what you’re used to

Also the reverse -- CarPlay knows where I have been, where I have searched, locations people have texted to me, locations in my calendar, etc. It's nice to not have to type in the address every time I want to go somewhere new.

Not quite as seamless, but for anything like that where you’re headed to a destination, you can always send the location to these various UIs. Tesla and Rivian support sending addresses to their cars via their apps (through the share functionality, so it’s basically 2 clicks).

For the calendar point, Tesla actually offers calendar integration and automatic navigation (if you enable it) to events that have locations near your current time. I don’t use it since my calendar isn’t heavily populated, but I could see that being super useful for certain people.

Whenever I need to use CarPlay in a rental I wanna scream. It's insane people consider this is good UX.

Its better than many alternatives, though. Try using built in nav in many cars. I tried using it in a Hyundai rental when CarPlay was having trouble connecting and it was so truly terrible. It was so unusable I spent the extra 10 mins just trying to fix my CarPlay connection.

> common settings buried in multiple menu layers

Are you sure it was Tesla?

I would never buy a car that doesn’t have CarPlay integration. I’ve rented a Tesla enough times to know that their infotainment system is a reason not to get it.

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