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Surprised no one's mentioned it so far, but CarPlay / Android Auto aren't just features, they're consistency. Across makes, models, years. I know what I'm getti
by faitswulff 3mo ago
Surprised no one's mentioned it so far, but CarPlay / Android Auto aren't just features, they're consistency. Across makes, models, years. I know what I'm getting when I connect my phone - and if anyone uses my car with their own device, they get their own dashboard, as well. One interesting use case I saw was a couple where one used a left-to-right interface and the other a right-to-left UI. CarPlay makes this easy, because the interface is linked to your own personal device.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3mo agoI would prefer knobs and buttons over a screen flow in either direction, but no modern car caters to this anymore.
- doug_durham 3mo agoMy Hyundai Ioniq 5 has Car Play and knobs and buttons. It's not either or.
- bux93 3mo agoThat's in fact one of the pros of carplay/android auto as opposed to just putting your phone in one of those windscreen attached holders; you get to use the volume buttons on the steering wheel. Annoyingly my car doesn't have play/pause buttons on there, but if it had, they would work.
- stavros 3mo agoEven on the holder, you'd use Bluetooth, and those buttons work. With Android Auto/CarPlay you can also use a joystick, if your car has one.
- christoph 3mo agoOur BMW i3 also has CarPlay and it’s all knobs and buttons for interaction!
- jackvalentine 3mo agoI bought a BYD that is as close to that as I could. https://esv6hz7yeij.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/byd-dolphin-chinese-ev-electric-vehicle-steering-wheel-and-digital-display.jpg.jpg?strip=all&fit=2560%2C1707 https://esv6hz7yeij.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/b...
- dhosek 3mo agoFrom everything I’ve read about BYD, I’m thinking it’s almost certainly going to be the car I buy after my move to Mexico.
- stavros 3mo agoBut still no pause button, only mute! Just maddening, do they think I only listen to radio?
- JoBrad 3mo agoNot only does my wife’s vehicle pause CarPlay audio when I mute it, it can also pause the radio, and pick up when I play it again.
- stavros 3mo agoMust be frustrating for the radio host to have to wait mid-sentence for you to unmute.
- fuzzmz 3mo agoIn my Hyundai pressing the mute button while on Bluetooth/Android Auto pauses playback and mutes. Pressing again resumes playback and volume to previous level.
- stavros 3mo agoThat's a great solution, I wish mine did that.
- empiricus 3mo ago
- stronglikedan 3mo agoSome still have knobs. My mom's caddy has knobs in front of the armrest that control everything, so the touchscreen is optional but works just as well for those that want it.
- aetch 3mo agoMazda has knobs and buttons that can even control carplay
- dhosek 3mo agoSame with Toyota (fun fact—I discovered earlier this year, over three years that I bought my Prius, that there were whole displays in the dashboard I didn’t know existed while trying to adjust the volume from the steering wheel while I was backing out of my garage, but because the wheel was rotated 180°, I hit the wrong button. Turns out the navigation between different info displays is 2-dimensional and the ↑/↓ gives additional views into some of the information that I had no idea existed, as well as revealing some functionality I didn’t know was there for the HVAC).
- gf000 3mo agoI believe even they dropped it in the latest cars, unfortunately
- izacus 3mo agoYeah, the latest CX-5 and 6e went all in Tesla screen derangement and folks don't love it.
- bluescrn 3mo agoAll the effort put in to stopping drivers distracting themselves with phones while driving, then we get big distracting touchscreens with apps front+centre in many new cars, and apparently that's OK.
- alias_neo 3mo agoI think it's just typical that this is allowed because it maximises profits; let's be real, a big fat touch screen and nothing else, is significantly cheaper than all of those expensive buttons, knobs, dials and switches that have been engineered and tested to perfection. Did cars get cheaper when they took all of those out? I certainly didn't notice.
- izacus 3mo agoMy Mazda controls Auto/CarPlay with a physical controller so it's not either/or.
- yuye 3mo agoLast time I got a rental car, it was a Mazda 3. I really enjoy how the dial works.
- hnlmorg 3mo agoLots of modern cars cater for this. It’s actually a marketing point with manufacturers like the VW group publicising how they’re bringing back tactile interfaces. And some ranges of cars never took that away (for example Jaguar).
- happymellon 3mo agoHow can they be "bringing it back" if they already offer it? So they can't be currently catering for it. Also, the Jaguar F Pace was a big screen with the only knob being the vents, so they did take the majority away.
- benjymo 3mo agoThey did away with a lot of physical buttons in the past. Now they are in the process of bringing them back. There are some models still sold with the old design while all new models have physical again. Also some of their brands had physical buttons all along. I think Skoda never removed them in the Elroq or Enyak.
- benjymo 3mo agoVW is bringing back physical buttons in their newer models, e.g. ID.3 Neo and Polo. Skoda never did away with them. It's also part of the safety rating of Euro NCAP, and AFAIK China mandated physical buttons for important functions as well.
- bestham 3mo agoThe wheel in an Enyaq before the facelift is the same haptic one-button shitshow. They have some buttons that act like shortcuts below the infotainment. But it the screen is still essentialistisk for managing crucial functions.
- arethuza 3mo agoThe steering wheel on my Scala has 8 buttons, two knobs (which can be clicked), 2 flappy paddles and 3 stalks...
- earthnail 3mo agoI have a 2021 Skoda Octavia and boy do I have to touch the screen a lot. Yes, you can open the AC screen by tapping the AC button but then you still need use the touch screen for any actual AC adjustments. It’s a joke that that’s legal. Looking at my phone is illegal, yet it’s many times faster.
- technothrasher 3mo agoMy 2025 Audi A3 is pretty good with buttons and knobs. The only time I need to touch the screen (other than for CarPlay) is to tell it, "no, you still cannot steal my data" every time I turn the car on.
- brookst 3mo agoJeep may not be modern, but all of the windows, climate, etc, are physical buttons.
- quickthrowman 3mo agoIt will also depreciate by 50% or more in 5 years, so there’s that. Honda and Toyota mostly use knobs and buttons for important controls and retain their value much better than Stellantis trash.
- dlcarrier 3mo agoEven physical controls can be a downgrade if poorly implemented. R.I.P. Anton Yelchin, who brought us joy with his portrayal of Chekov in the Star Trek films, before losing his life at only 27, from a switch poorly masquerading as a brake lever.
- rbanffy 3mo agoIn my mind it's always because he played Kyle Reese once and the car was just confused about it.
- macintux 3mo agoAt this point, I feel like automakers should be criminally liable for redesigning the automatic shifter UX. It's probably the 3rd/4th most dangerous control in the vehicle; why do we want people to have to relearn it every time they're in an unfamiliar car? (I stick with a manual for my vehicles, so fortunately I'm mostly immunized against the madness.)
- rbanffy 3mo agoI use CarPlay all the time and I almost never use the touchscreen - as you shouldn't while driving. The car has buttons and knobs, on the dash and on the wheel, to call up all sorts of options in the UI. The only time I need to touch the screen is if I want a full screen map (instead of the three-panel usual view).
- macintux 3mo agoI'm unconvinced. Navigating the UI via knobs seems much more distracting to me. I have to reach farther in my vehicle, but more importantly, I have to watch the screen anyway to make sure the knob ends up on the right control. Am I missing something?
- rbanffy 3mo agoIt really depends on what you are doing, but yes - if you need to look at the screen to do anything, you still fail safety. A knob is nicer than a touchscreen because you don't have to adjust to a moving vehicle to hit the right spot of the screen (for this same reason recent airplanes have buttons in addition to touchscreens). Still, if you are very used to the UI, you can say the music app is one item down from the map, and the phone is two, so you can count presses. I was able to SMS people with a Nokia phone with a hand on the steering wheel and one on the phone (back when it was not forbidden).
- jameshart 3mo agoVoice controls?
- Scubabear68 3mo agoMy 2023 Mazda CX-5 uses knobs to control car play, it basically acts like using Tab key to walk through selectable UI elements.
- Tagbert 3mo agoThe things that CarPlay does are not the things that are controlled with buttons. Navigation, music, audiobooks, notifications work best with a screen. The driving and vehicle features like heat, blinkers, etc are where you want dedicated physical buttons.
- rjrjrjrj 3mo agoAgreed. Extremely important on rental cars.
- izacus 3mo agoYeah, this! Getting all my information - calendar, maps history, music, contacts, etc. on a rental car without syncing that info to it is absolutely great.
- jwr 3mo agoExactly! I can't stop wondering: are these executives just not thinking, or are they blindly repeating what they were told to? If I get into a rental car, do they seriously think I want to spend the next 30 minutes logging into Spotify, mapping apps, Overcast and anything else that I want to use but that needs to know me? And then worry about logging out of all that stuff once I return the rental?
- ZeroGravitas 3mo agoIt is hard to make an executive not enshittify something when his salary bonus depends on him enshittifying it.
- bluGill 3mo agoThe power here is on the rental car companies. They buy the most cars by far. And so when they say that customers won't accept a rental car without a CarPlay, the car makers will listen.
- michaelt 3mo agoDoes their salary bonus depend on that though? Car makers make money selling cars. Which buyers happily pay five figure suns for. An executive can add to the bottom line by raising sales prices/volumes with a more competitive product, or lowering component costs. This isn’t some weird social media business with non-paying users and a reliance on ad money.
- arikrahman 3mo ago[flagged]
- pesfandiar 3mo agoThere are legitimate reasons to get help from LLMs when writing, including being an ESL. The comment has substance.
- jhhh 3mo agoThe prompt they used was probably more succinct. Not everything needs fleshed out.
- PlasmaPower 3mo agoI'm not sure if the parent comment was written by AI or not (you're probably right) but consistency is indeed one of the main things I think about with Android Auto. Not just consistency between cars, but also consistency with the rest of my phone. The principle seems worth considering.
- vincefutr23 3mo agoHow could you say something so brave yet so true
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Poacher5 3mo agoThis is huge for me - I'm in rental cars every other week or so 'cause I fly a lot for work and getting to factories in the boonies isn't really doable on public transport. I used to spend 20 minutes in the europcar car park every single time and then have to log out of everything when I dropped the car off. Now I just hook up Android Auto and I'm back into the same podcast I had on the flight, my itinerary is planned in already and I can head straight to my hotel. Still have the old problem with smart TV's though. Can't usually be fucked to login for two nights so I just watch TV on my laptop.
- alias_neo 3mo ago> Can't usually be fucked to login for two nights so I just watch TV on my laptop I recently had the idea of taking the FireStick 4K Max that I bought ~1year ago for the living room smart OLED TV which is getting a little older, I had gotten ready to take it on a few trips I'm doing this year, thought I was being clever, unfortunately it died a literal week after the warranty, boot looping constantly. I won't buy another Firestick again, it was atrociously add-riddled and often showing things inappropriate for the kids in the middle of the day, but if generic Android TV stick like that was available with good performance and all the necessary DRM levels, I'd probably use that. For now, I will just carry an HDMI cable and use my laptop.
- lopis 3mo agoHotel TV's often have all inputs blocked out actually. It's really stupid.
- 0x457 3mo ago> Surprised no one's mentioned it so far, but CarPlay / Android Auto aren't just features, they're consistency. No, they are not. When you press "Home" button on your car where does it go? In some cars it goes to CarPlay main screen, in others it goes to car's built-in system main screen. When you press back what happens? When you press Nav/Maps button where does it go? Again, some cars will launch built-in navigation while others will go in whatever last nav app you used in car play. Mazda disables touch screen when car play is enabled (which is good and I like it) > One interesting use case I saw was a couple where one used a left-to-right interface and the other a right-to-left UI. That depends on if car was originally made for left-hand or right-hand traffic, some cars allow you to change that (in my BMW it required messing with obd port)
- vtbassmatt 3mo agoWhat vehicle did Mazda screw this up so badly in? Neither of my Mazdas with CarPlay disable the touchscreen in CarPlay. The ‘21 Miata disables it while in motion (which sucks badly, and I just learned there’s a hack to fix). The ‘24 CX-5 doesn’t ever disable the touchscreen.
- 0x457 2mo ago2018, 2020, and 2021 MX-5 (so all of NDs?) disabled touch screen in CarPlay unless you're in Park. I'm okay with it because using touch screen in ND Miata is uncomfortable for me to use any way, and Mazda really nailed hardware buttons navigation there.
- faitswulff 2mo ago> That depends on if car was originally made for left-hand or right-hand traffic I was referring to i.e. Arabic vs English