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Comment by strenholme | Hacker News Reader

My car came with a cheap low-quality aftermarket combination car stereo and GPS. It would only play music from discs (no USB support), didn’t even support variable bitrate MP3s, and the GPS didn’t know the car’s location half the time.

I finally replaced the head unit with a plastic bracket and a standard old school in-dash stereo system. Much nicer setup.

It’s the cars which can’t have their head unit replaced with a simple stereo which worry me.

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> It’s the cars which can’t have their head unit replaced with a simple stereo which worry me.

I agree. There's a lot of room for innovation, consumer choice, and competition that was previously guaranteed to be available in those one or two DIN units of space.

I haven't seen them present in any new car I've looked at in nearly ten years, but they were in every car I saw from the 50 years prior.

Denso head units for Toyotas can play MP3s, but the order of the files is when when they were copied to the SD drive. And you can't sort them any other way.

You can move files off and back on the drive and they’ll be in alphabetical order. If FAT, fatsort can do it afterwards.

Yes, I can move the files, but it's also ridiculous in the 2020s that I have to resort to doing this workaround instead of the software reading ID3 metadata and sorting by one of the well-known fields.

Thanks for the tip on fatsort, it does save me a bit of trouble.

Embedded controllers of that class are usually not able to do such things. And if they are, it becomes a bottleneck when you plug in say a 64GB device. Five minute drive? No music because the stereo takes six minutes to sort the files on startup.

Another drawback of the death of DIN aftermarket stereos is that they stopped innovating there, I last updated my stereo in ~2015 and not found a more advanced replacement since. So never got one to accept a >256GB drive, though trivial elsewhere today. Raspberry Pi level tech.

>>never got one to accept a >256GB drive<<

My car stereo, in theory, cannot accept a drive over 32gb in size. In practice, I have a 128gb drive in there. I used a third party utility to format it as a FAT32 filesystem to be 128gb in size. The car stereo only claimed a 32gb limit only because that’s the largest fat32 filesystem Windows will make from the GUI.

Yeah, that's often the case. It's not really the size of the filesystem I think, my description was simplified. Believe when I got over N thousand songs it stopped working, which defeated the whole purpose of having my entire music collection on a drive. Still works on the home stereo though.

Fun fact: the FAT32 limit - which, by the way, was literally just added by Dave Plummer because he thought anything larger would have too much wasted slack space - made its way into the SD card spec. It is perfectly valid behavior for a device to refuse to read a >32GB card with a FAT32 file system, or a <32GB card with exFAT, or a card with multiple partitions, etc. None of those are actually SD cards as they are formatted.

In practice, nobody in their right mind would design a device's firmware that poorly, unless they were deliberately trying to force users to stay within the bounds of the device's QA test procedures. I don't have any examples of this. There are devices that will misbehave with such a card, however: for example, the Nintendo 3DS will happily use an oversize FAT32 card, but the Data Management screen will take way longer to load for some reason.

Also fun fact: the first time you plug a correctly formatted SDXC into a Nintendo Switch, it "downloads an update" and restarts. Presumably Nintendo wanted to save money on exFAT licensing fees so Nintendo is only paying for each unit that actually uses the exFAT library?

3- Yup, nailed it, same reason WMA and Flash require "activation" on the PSP and why newer MPEG codecs like H.264 and AAC require an "optional media update" on the Xbox 360

2- The slowdown usually comes from scanning the FAT to count the free space, with the PSP being notorious for this

Another related point is the varying support for the "semi-official" 64K cluster size, which gives a curious effect on the 3DS: in GBA mode (officially only used for 10 games only distributed as compensation to those who bought the original model at full launch price), a strip of "junk" (coming from the virtualized GBA's VRAM, IIRC it's just wraparound) will be shown at the bottom of the screen...

64GiB of storage would house around 10-15k MP3s: sorting these with ESP32 will likely take less than half a second.

I seriously doubt compute is an issue for a music player in the last 20-30 years (and more).

I’m talking about flacs and pioneer stereo from 2015, which don’t seem to have been updated since except cosmetically.

I understand — I am only counter-pointing the following statement:

> Five minute drive? No music because the stereo takes six minutes to sort the files on startup.

With FLACs, you'd have even fewer files in 64GiB, so sorting a full list should be even quicker — Raspberry Pi HW (any generation) would do that instantly for all intents and purposes.

I don't have a raspberry pi in the car, I have an older DIN car stereo. RPI was used as example that this isn't hard technically. Also left 64GB behind many years ago for non-car applications.

Whoah!!! First time I ever read Denso in an HN posting!

Used to work at their HVAC facility in Battle Creek. Ahhhh, memories!

The counter argument to that is well designed modern cars have great info-tainment systems which get regular updates. My Tesla gets regular software updates, has upgradable hardware, and won't be subject to these kinds of issues for decades. Old cars encouraged exchanging and needed aftermarket parts because they didn't care or try, so the products were low-quality and often failed.

Legacy automakers are still using the "ship it and forget it" approach. If I want my 2023 Hyundai to have the same features as a 2025 (manual battery preconditioning, Google Maps directions on HUD, wireless Android Auto, etc), I need to root the head unit and install a bunch of vibe coded packages from randos on GitHub.

Although to be fair the vibecoded packages are probably higher quality than what Hyundai would've shipped.

ioniq 5? The 2023 didn't have manual battery preconditioning?

Correct. Without root, the only way to heat the battery was if you use the cars built in nav to get directions to a fast charger

The problems being:

1. It didn't always recognize a destination as a fast charger

2. The built in nav is missing recently opened fast chargers

3. It only does this if you have the "preconditioning" setting enabled, but the car has a bug where if you use the (maybe only US version) Hyundai app to change the AC or DC charge limits it unchecks that setting.

4. I prefer Google Maps to the built in nav

Ah, I have an Equinox EV and it will automatically precondition based on the on-board maps, which, in my case, is Google Maps. I don't have the luxury of Android Auto or Carplay unless I jump through some hoops and self-publish an app in the Play Store. And even then it is janky.

Even so, I have a button in the battery settings which can start the preconditioning whenever I want to. It's been a fantastic car, but I am envious of your DCFC capabilities. But not of your ICCU. :-)

> well designed modern cars have great info-tainment systems which get regular updates. My Tesla gets regular software updates

And tracks you everwhere you go, resulting in that data being available to hackers, marketers, and any sleazeball that wants to extort you by suing you.

Not unique to tesla, of course, but a property of all those 'well designed modern cars'.

> My Tesla gets regular software updates, has upgradable hardware, and won't be subject to these kinds of issues for decades.

Teslas from four years ago with Intel Atom processors and HW3 are already getting different and lesser updates than new Teslas, without any hardware upgrade plan in place.

A Tesla you buy right now is running HW4 which is inferior to current Cybercabs and HW5 has already been announced.

Every new car on the planet has better hardware than the previous generation car.

Except for maybe the '58 Thunderbird, but that was rectified in '61 in my opinion.

What? No they don’t, the build quality of most Western cars has dropped sharply over the past decade.

My Tesla and it's satisfaction ratings disagree.

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