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Comment by fourside | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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The thing that is not subjective though: the UI is responsive and the map data isn’t extremely outdated.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?

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