I really liked CarPlay when I first got it seven years ago. Tesla (and I presume GM) developed their own system.
Tesla natively has Spotify and SoundCloud. It natively has a navigation system that uses Google maps. It has Bluetooth capability so that you can stream any audio from any other service to the speakers and of course phone calls and voice to text. If you must, you can get an inexpensive third party mount for your phone.
Why would you need CarPlay or Android Assist? What does it offer that the car doesn’t already have?
It currently has parallel parking and back in parking lot parking (for some reason only for perfectly vertical spots, not slanted ones yet). Of course that’s only for people with subscriptions.
I’ve never experienced a top down camera so I’m not sure how they’re an improvement but the regular back up camera with the overlaid directional lines and audio proximity warnings is sufficient for me and I suck at parking. It wasn’t that long ago that we didn’t have parking cameras at all.
@LSLGuy , if it’s convenient, you should test drive a Model S. I’d love to hear your first hand impressions.
I keep my calendar on my phone, the addresses of all my appointments are stored in my calendar. Before I’m about to go somewhere, I load up the Google Maps driving times on the phone and keep an eye out for the clock to know when to leave. I get to the car, plug the phone into the car, the driving directions I’ve already pulled up go into the centre screen and I’m off.
I also put on a podcast as I’m walking to the car, when I get to the car, I plug the phone in, take my airpods out and the podcast switches seamlessly to the car radio. All of my listened to status etc are always in sync and I can choose a different podcast on a giant car screen.
When I have friends riding with me, I want to offer them control of the audio. It’s much easier for them to just plug in a cable than faff around with bluetooth and maybe have their settings stick with me forever.
I refuse to buy another car that doesn’t have carplay and I’m looking forward to Carplay 2.0 if it ever comes out where I can store the complete customization of how I want my car UI to look on my phone and never have to deal with car maker UI again ever.
There’s no license fee, both CarPlay and AA are free APIs for car manufacturers (they have to meet certain minimum hardware specs to be certified though).
McKinsey says nearly half of car buyers wouldn’t purchase a vehicle without Android Auto and CarPlay, with 85 percent of owners preferring the smartphone projection systems over the software offered by the carmaker pre-loaded with the vehicle.
Car manufacturers aren’t rejecting it because of lack of consumer demand, they’re rejecting it because it doesn’t allow them to build subscription fees into services that they control. Every car manufacturer knows the devil’s bargain made by Compaq/Dell/Gateway when they acceded to the Wintel monopoly. Car makers are deathly afraid that their vehicles end up just becoming hardware frontends for giant software companies and all of their competitive advantage disappears.
You’re right. It’s more seamless for sure. I’d consider those to be minor inconveniences but that’s of course a matter of opinion. I don’t think that most people are power users like you are. Given that Tesla, most Hondas and all GMs won’t have it, and I suspect others will follow suit, you may have difficulties going forward.
The top down view is helpful for parking because you can see the lines on both sides and the bumper in front and get yourself positioned exactly where you want.
The rear camera with projected turning circle is great for avoiding hitting something with the ass of your car backing out. But doesn’t do much for parking pulling in. Nor does it help when judging how close your nose will swing versus the obstacles on either side as you’re backing out of a typical space.
For sure we all got along without these things for years. But they’re darn handy, and the bigger your car or the smaller the space youre trying to fit into, the more valuable they are.
Unrelated to the above …
It’s interesting to hear the various use cases of users. @Shalmanese has a system that happily works for them while I can’t imagine wanting to do any of those things on a routine basis.
Part of what makes mass-market software hard is the mass market is so broad in what they think is essential vs. useless or at least won’t be used.
I can see that now. Teslas do have a visualization when you’re pulling into a parking spot that shows you and alarms when you’re about to hit something. I’m sure it’s not as clear as a nice camera bit it works well for me. An image from Reddit is below. It normally shows the lines in a parking lot.
What percent of cell phone users in 2008 said that they’d never buy a phone without physical buttons? I definitely thought I’d miss CarPlay a lot but it ends up that I don’t at all.
Finally got to see a Cybertruck. My Dad’s neighbor who also has a solar roof had one parked in her driveway. I might have said this: to me, the old prototype pictures always looked like something from a low budget 70s sci-fi movie. In person it looks like something from a high budget 70s sci-fi movie.
I like it because it doesn’t look like every other car in the road. That is different than liking it because I think it is attractive.
I have read that the reason Tesla does not have a top down camera view is because they are unwilling to license necessary patents.
6 years ago I was disappointed Tesla wouldn’t have Android/Apple screen sharing, but I really haven’t missed it. I’ve never had a daily driver with them, so maybe I don’t know what I’m missing, but the Tesla Google map works better and updates more frequently than any other in car nav I’ve used. In my experience the Tesla nav works just as well as Android/Apple.
The Tesla nav is quite good but I think doesn’t quite rise to the level of CarPlay once you get into the territory of making changes to the route while underway using Siri as the interface. In our Tesla, that role is performed by the co-pilot with a fair amount of poking at prodding at the screen. The thing that ultimately drives me nuts everytime I’m navigating in unfamiliar areas is how long the Tesla takes to fully redraw the map when zooming. That’s significantly slower than CarPlay doing the same thing.
Re: top down view. I think our Tesla from before the ultrasonic sensors were removed does pretty well without top down. I have heard less than good things from friends that have the models that rely on vision only. That said, I prefer the top down view. My wife’s new car has the full top down view (as well as an interesting external 3D view of the car that I’m not quite sold on) and I can promise she does a better job of parallel parking with the top down view.
I use CarPlay a lot while out geocaching. I can pick my next target, click the car icon and it opens a route in a choice of either apple maps or google maps. CarPlay then has that route up on the screen and ready to go. How would that work in a Tesla?
I’m not quite sure what you’re describing. Are you saying you use your phone, connected to the car, as input device to pick the destination?
That works with Tesla. I can pick a destination on the phone from a map, contact, web page, etc. and “share” it with the Tesla app, and then it will be sent to the car and loaded as a destination. I can open the Tesla app on the phone and enter a destination directly into it. I can enter a multi-destination trip into the app, and send that to the car. It will automatically add any necessary charging stops.
The car also tries to be smart about destinations. In the morning it assumes I’m going to work. In the afternoon it assumes I’m going home. If I have a calendar entry with an address later in the day, it assumes I’m going there. These are just the default destination, and are easy enough to override. There are also shortcut gestures to go home or work.
Having said all that, by far the most common way I enter a (non-home) destination is to pick it from the in-car list of recents or favorites. Second most common is entering the name directly on the screen, and then choosing from the resulting search list.
I’m not saying this is any better than CarPlay or Android Auto, just that I don’t miss those things in the Tesla, particularly around navigation. A big caveat to that is my car does have lifetime premium connectivity, so I get live traffic information in the car’s native nav.
The geocaching app integrates directly with google or apple maps. So I pick a geocache in the app and click the button and it works out the route.
When that feature wasn’t available to me*, I had to manually try and find the location in maps and drop a pin in order to get the route. Not always easy when you’re just looking for a random spot that may or may not be near a road. And not something you can do quickly while stopped at traffic lights.
So it’s less of a carplay issue and more about the integration between the geocaching app and the mapping app.
It’s possible that the geocaching app also integrates with the Tesla map, I just don’t know any cachers with a Tesla. Or else it’s back to the old manual way of doing it.
*Not available to me as in, I didn’t realise that’s what the car icon in the app did!
Depending on how the app is written, I think that will integrate with the Tesla app. The Tesla app tells the OS that it can handle map data, so when the geocaching app is trying to open a location in a map, it should offer the Tesla app as one of the choices. At least that is how things generally work on Android.