Subaru the brand with the worst infotainment in the market is going all electric. That’s going to go well
https://www.subaru.com/vehicle-info/article/what-is-apple-ca...
I don't know if it's gotten any better, but I won't buy another Subaru after my 2020. It constantly beeps at me whenever the EyeSight can't see the lanes in the road, even when it's not steering for me. It's a safety hazard that pretends to be a safety feature.
If they think they need to show you this (for whatever reason, their legal department said so), then it has nothing to do with bad UX design but really, being in between a rock and a hard place. If my legal team made me do this, I'd also show it every single time, because you have zero guarantee that the person driving the car this time is the same person that saw and accepted the dialog the last time. Even if you think about "driver profiles", that totally goes out the window in a rental car scenario for sure and even in a non-rental one, not everyone that has a car that has "driver profiles" will make use of the feature.
So as a dev I would show this for whatever period of time legal required me to show it, to CYA for the above cases and then I'd just close it because I don't want to annoy people so much as to actually require an actual "click" on the accept button.
Im guessing its the opposite - the devs involved in this were probably outsourced (famously legacy car manufacturers do this, its all cobbled together external chunks), and didnt give a shit at all. Closed the jira task for compliance and moved on without a second thought. This is why Subaru and other legacy car companies make such atrocious UX.
And yes it beeps and you can't turn the beeping off completely. It's supposed to annoy you into using the blinkers properly. Different cars/model years seem to have different levels of annoyingness in the actual beep and different volume settings available though.
My (also 2020) never beeps when EyeSight can't see the lanes, whether its steering or not. It beeps when you cross a line without blinking or you're crossing the lines and would soon be driving on the shoulder/into the trees. It does sometimes have issues where it beeps a bit too early, i.e. it seems the calculations from the visuals are a bit off in certain situations.
I don't get the "turning off because lane markings" comment tbh and we got some pretty bad ones here as well, especially in winter (i.e. often none at all :) Are we talking completely different things or did they change anything past 2024 models (last one I know)?
Coz EyeSight does not turn off just because there are no markings. It turns off if it can't see, i.e. too much rain, smudgy glass in front of the cameras etc. It doesn't care about the lane markings just to follow the car in front of me. But sure if it can't find the lane markings then I can't enable the auto-steering (which I find way too janky anyway - pretty annoying that it seems to steer left and right between the markings instead of holding steady in the middle and adjusting smoothly, so I never use it).
I can never remember where settings I touch exactly once to set them up either. For any car. Set it and forget it.
No experience with carplay but Android Auto support does depend a lot on the phone. My older Motorola and Samsung phone always sucked, often didn't connect at all with most cables. Since I got a Pixel, zero problems at all.
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It won't start unless I've done my seatbelt up, which is annoying when I'm e.g. driving in a cow paddock at 10km/h and trying to get through multiple gates, but it doesn't do lane assist or have a driver-facing camera or anything like that.
Also, it locks onto cars taking the offramp... and as they slow down, you'll be in an empty right lane going 45mph. I've driven a 2024, and a 2025, and the 2025 has way less false alarms, but it still drives me crazy.
Oh yeah, and my favorite thing about adaptive cruise, is how you come to a stop in traffic, and the cruise control just turns off, but only after you're stopped for more than 15 seconds of so. Then it beeps at you telling you the car in front of you is moving. Thanks dickhead, how about you just accelerate and follow the car then like you would do if you only stopped for 5 seconds?
And not to mention, with the steering on, and my hands on the wheel, it bitches at me to put my hands on the wheel. MY HANDS ARE ON THE WHEEL. The only way to get it to realize your hands are on the wheel is to turn the damn steering wheel just a tiny bit, and let it fight back against you the whole time.
Total fucking garbage.
Like I’m sure people will have preferences or pet peeve that effects one brand more than another other, but the infotainment systems just all seem uninspiring to me. Some do some parts better while doing others worse.
Please name some cars that have standout bad/good infotainment because none of those stood out either way.
Or at least since you’re griping about what you think is a particularly bad one, name three good ones.
Also it's based on Google maps which I'm also not a big fan of.
If I want that, why wouldn’t I buy Toyota/Honda?
This curious bit is that it was 'You want something between a Toyota/Honda and a Lexus/Acura, but closer to the capability of a Jeep'. Where it's more curious, is that the modern Subaru hybrids are actually better at off-roading than the new Jeep Cherokee hybrid.
Why is that? Well at least IMO it's cause Subaru sticks to their guns, their hybrid system sticks to what they have always tried to do versus the Jeep doing, at least AFAIK, the same sort of 'AWD' hybrid setup of most hybrids, where the rear wheels are electric only and you have to wait for the computer to decide to apply Any power.
Interestingly, The closest hybrid AWD design I'm aware of to what Subaru is doing, is Ford with the AWD HF55 on the Maverick, in that case they are doing it to also help make sure it can meet the needs for 4K towing.
It's not as efficient, but it is at last consistent from a branding execution strategy. Definitely moreso than Jeep who has watered down everything they sell so much it's... who knows anymore.
The last 'forward-ish' thinking thing that I can think of, was the partnerships with Mitsubishi (i.e. Eagle/DSM) and the GEMA engine. But even those didn't really play out as huge wins long term, versus, say, Ford doing the quiet-ish license agreement patent swap around hybrid tech.
Penta-Star as they used to be called in the 90s, well, back then they had the Neon which was surprisingly competitive [0] in the small car segment despite being a relative death trap and having reliability issues[1][2]. They had the Grand Cherokee which was honestly innovative as far as being a Rear-wheel drive Unibody thing that could still compete with a Body-on-frame platform as far as handling/offroading.
The Daimler merger doomed them however, between the various accounting tactics used and overall clash of engineering management styles between the brands. Ironically I will note that of all the things Daimler messed up over there, they did manage to not mess up Jeep that much
But Daimler gutted the other brands, and FCA was fairly not-useful around fixing that... They had the 200, but like everything else let it sit too long without updates... to the point where 7-8-ish years ago, my father wanted to buy another Sebring to replace his increasingly problematic Sebring, and I managed to find a Chevy Malibu of all things to try instead. My dad had purchased Chrysler products since before I was even born.
He has thanked me for suggesting the Malibu multiple times since, he still talks about the things he likes about it sometimes even though it's getting a little long in the tooth, lately it has been more of a "I know I probably should replace it but I don't see anything I want" [3]
(which is the best hope I can have as his son having to do a 'bruh' moment to his father, around a purchase consideration.)
> Stelantis turned Jeep into a lifestyle brand
IMO They only accelerated the process and it wasn't just Jeep. FCA had a mixed bag around 'lifestyle branding' management as well.
After the FCA bit, 'Dodge' started becoming more of a 'performance' brand with the Hellcats/Demon/etc and for a short time had the Base Charger/Challenger and every Avenger as a 'pretender' model and the Dart as a quasi-compliance-car [4].
RAM came about under FCA as the 'commercial/truck' brand, Ignoring the thing where every other domestic maker kept their mainline Trucks [5] under their normal car brand.
[0] - OG Neons had a horsepower extremely competitive with the JDM cars of the Era
[1] - But oh wait they forgot to drill all the head gasket holes to consistent depth leading to head gasket failures
[2] - That transmission was originally designed for cars making way less HP/Torque and from experience it's not fun to deal with the clutch packs failing when trying to get onto a highway.
[3] - I mean, Worst comes to worst I will try to suggest a Crosstrek Hybrid (new) or Fusion Hybrid (used) if it comes up via incidental.
[4] - For the unaware, a compliance car, is a car made by the manufacturer to help improve their overall fleet emissions/mpg targets.
[5] - Sure, GM has GMC, but that was more branding towards a specific age demographic than 'commercial vehicle' or 'truck bro'.
If they sold reliable PHEVs or even BEVs with 220mm+ ground clearance and some branding around torque and traction control, and they had any kind of advantage over Toyota in that niche, they'd probably do alright in the "I don't want a Land Cruiser BUT" market.
(Yeah, yeah, EJ head gaskets, just don't buy anything with an EJ series engine.)