I wouldn't be surprised, but my frustration is a poor implementation or unintuitive implementation. Quite a few cars go into USB-mode as soon as you attach a phone--almost 100% of the time they just want to charge their phone and already have things set up via Bluetooth or the radio. iPhones won't let you play through the phone if you have an attached audio device. Some cars seem to be able to do album art and track progress via Bluetooth--most will do it via USB but not via Bluetooth, which confuses people. Few cars seem to have a play/pause button. My most recent car would crash the infotainment system when I tried to use Siri. The only way to reset things were to turn off the car--bummer for road trips.
I get why car tech lags a few years in cars, but I'm constantly surprised by how terrible it is even in high price ranges. Since stereos are no longer swappable modules in the dash, the buttons have sprawled around the console. I was driving an in-law's Mercedes over Christmas and couldn't figure out how to turn on the stereo. When I did, I couldn't tell which buttons were for the stereo, climate control, or other, more core car functions.
> I'm constantly surprised by how terrible it is even in high price ranges.
Car makers don't really care. They want features on a list to check off and don't care how well they work. You can't return. The car easily after a month of frustration and realization that the car is the problem not you or your phone trying to interface with them.
That's odd because you know they spend a lot of time/money on interiors. I remember a 2001 German car I owned had terrible cupholders that broke easily(I noticed that is a lower priority for foreign cars). The next model year changed to a more sturdy design. But on the flip side, I've greatly preferred the tactile buttons on the low-end over the touch screens and menus on the high-end.
I'm confident most people care a lot about the infotainment systems. Even 10 years ago, the Millennials cared about getting their iPods to work. I had modded so many friend's cars or upgraded their head units. Their parents, boomers, just assume it's too complicated (which it is) for audio and navigation. I feel like after literally a decade they've all just given up on everything except basic Bluetooth audio (when it works out of the box).
I've ended up renting, borrowing, and test-driving (and buying) a surprising number of cars over the past 5 years and it's pretty uniformly terrible. I remember being sheepish a couple years ago when the most important thing in a new car was phone compatibility. I would have happily preached and bought something that just worked well.
> I remember a 2001 German car I owned had terrible cupholders that broke easily(I noticed that is a lower priority for foreign cars). The next model year changed to a more sturdy design.
Yep! A plastic coke bottle was just big enough to fit. When the bottle warmed and expanded, it was slightly too big and would break the flimsy cup holder. After replacing it once and having it break twice I gave up. I remember later seeing a different model year (I'm pretty sure with the same body style) where they had replaced it with a more normal cup holder.
I would also have the mirror adjustment knob on the door snag on my clothes and snap off.
I have a 2017 Mini and I have all these problems. The audio clips and has other issues when played over USB, but not Bluetooth. So I have to choose between good audio and charging my phone. I’m about to buy a USB adapter that plugs into the cigarette lighter just to fix this problem.
Just as you describe, the entertainment system UI is god awful too.
In most cases you can use the car port and just make a custom cable that bridges the two data pins together which tells the phone to use high current charging. The car’s port’s overcurrent protection will kick in if it’s an issue but I’ve got such a cable and so far I have yet to see any issues and I’ve used it for years with hundreds of different devices. No fire yet.
You can cut the data lines in a cable and it should solve some of the issues with unwanted behaviour.
The album art and track progress I don't really care about (eyes on the road!) but via Bluetooth that's AVRCP and there's a stack of standards for people to butcher there, too.
I was wiring in a charge only USB port in my car today and found out that cutting the data lines limits the charge rate to a uselessly low rate. You need to tie the data lines together to put it in usb bc1.2 mode. Or 2.7 v on each line for 2.4 a iPhone charge or other modes. It isn’t simple. Simpler than Bluetooth, but not “hook up ground and 5v” simple.
iOS devices will outright not charge if there’s just 5V on the port. Even the lowest charging current requires some sort of resistor arrangement.
Fortunately it seems like bridging the two data lines (essentially a 0 ohm resistor) is what’s needed to allow high-current charging (I think it’s 2 amps), so as long as your supply can withstand it (which pretty much every single device can, given that it’s tied to its own 5V rail which can supply many amps) you can just bridge the two pins together. Worst case scenario the overcurrent protection on the port will protect the source device.
A few weeks ago, I asked for a compact rental car, but was given a 2018 or 2019 Chevrolet Equinox. It had an USB-A as well as an USB-C port. I already had Android Auto on my Pixel, so I was up and running in a few instants. I did NOT miss setting up Bluetooth or Ford's Sync thingie. Maybe there's hope at the end of the tunnel.
Often in cars (especially when traveling and there's no dock) I get a poor wired connection. I suspect it's just lint caught in the connector, but it makes wired CarPlay or USB audio very frustrating because if anyone bumps the wire the connection stops and you have to wait for the handshake to continue. It's much less of an issue with charging.
My Ford has Android Auto and CarPlay. And it never messes up Bluetooth if I don’t plug in ️. My WRX is kind of a hot mess. Plugging in never worked. It does fine with Bluetooth, usually, but when it gets confused it really shits the bed. Does not have AA or CarPlay. Is a newer car.
I had hoped that was the case in the car I was borrowing, but all of them were data connectors (not sure what happens if you attached multiple devices).
There's also the problem of wireless tech UX being difficult in general.
For example, people want the experience of turning on their devices and auto-pairing with their other devices. But headphones, for example, don't have much of a UI to manage this.
There's the hellish scenario of everyone in your car hearing the conversation you thought you were having on your back patio in private just because you walked too close to the car (happened to me). But it's not obvious how to prevent that while offering the seamless phone-to-car handoff that people may also expect.
Imagine if you connected this way: 1. turn on peripheral, 2. choose it from a UI on the device and get connected. That is easy, it is the auto-pairing bullshit that forces the software to guess using a heuristic, which guarantees it will get it wrong a non-zero amount of the time. Now that we all have N devices it will get it right 1 out of N times.
This is just terrible UX, the choice reality gave us was between auto-pairing that is frequently wrong or having to make one UI interaction. Guess which one they chose?
It is a valuable lesson, never let designers hand-wave away reality because they have a delusional vision of a magic device. Acknowledge reality and design around it instead or you will build crap.
There is that one Logitech keyboard that does this. It has a selector dial on the left where you pick which one of 3 possible devices to connect it to.
There is still the design problem there however. You kind of have to guess which one 1, 2, or 3 is. And you need the recipient device to actually be on and maintain the connection when you make the switch. So it's not just 1 UI interaction. Depending on your situation, there can be at least 3 and they're spread across multiple devices.
Ideally we'd have a standardized overlay or display on any bluetooth device to indicate its connection status and what it's paired to. But that would be its own headache and would seriously constrain how devices can look or be shaped. How much UI can you really fit on a pair of headphones that are meant to be small?
Couldn't NFC or some other proximity-sensing tech largely solve these issues? For instance, AirPods will offer to pair with a new iPhone when they're within some fairly short range (I think around 5ft, but I don't know the specific distance) - theoretically, car stereos (and a slew of other devices, for that matter) could use a similar approach, possibly combined with NFC for pairing-on-contact.
That may very well be a good approach, though another technology has been roped into the mix.
And there's also the case where I indeed do want my headphones to pair with my iPhone that's 15m away in another room instead of the Macbook in front of me. And not my car that my girlfriend just started on the driveway 10m away. And I want to manage this from my headphones which only has two buttons and some multi-tap gestures.
The trade-offs get complex. Also, your tether idea is still something implemented per device rather than something Bluetooth as a technology can solve with some simple tweak.
In the presence of conflicts, the phone could prompt the user for audio source, then persist it in software until the next time they have a new conflict. It really seems to be an issue when you go from no streaming audio to streaming audio, from the UX perspective, so that should minimize the number of times that prompt appears. Could also solve it by the same way we solve SSID preferences: a static list of paired devices with priority orders and an accessible menu to select a specific one, and then persist that until you change your streaming state again.
Same here. My wife starts her car in our driveway, and my phone connects to it. Which leads to two issues - she has to fiddle with controls to connect to her phone, and then any audio/phone call that I was having at the time is completely lost for me until I can change it back.
And then Bluetooth is just hot garbage in environments with lots of interference - I work at a games studio so we have loads of devkits with controllers lying around, and my pretty expensive Sony Bluetooth headphones stutter like crazy unless my phone is within a foot of them.
The problem has gone on for years now, to the extent that it has seriously impacted customer satisfaction ratings and JD Power New-Vehicle Initial Quality scores. You would think that the automakers and tier-1 suppliers would devote some serious engineering resources to working with the Bluetooth SIG and mobile device manufacturers in order to improve the situation. But it seems like they don't really care. I don't get it.
I rented a car from National and drove cross country last week.
I don’t know if it was for the reason you mention (to mitigate complaints?) or just to upsell it being bundled with the satellite radio/ gps package, but I was surprised to find that Bluetooth on the infotainment console of the 2018 Camry had been completely disabled.
As in there, but all options grayed out.
An aux connection worked, but I was more frustrated by the idea of disabling basic functionality than anything.
Would they charge to use turn signals if they could?
Maybe National was tired of costumers calling them for support to fix the bluetooth link or wrecking the company ranking on review sites becouse bluetooth problems.
I dislike bluetooth. It's so much problems. But atleast it has got better since it was introduced in the late 90s(?) when I first tried it with a Ericsson headset.
It's the same UI-less problem as I experience with Chromecast. When the magic box doesnt magically work, you are stranded with no clue what to do other then reseting stuff in random order.
I had a 2012 VW Golf TDI. Before VW bought it back for making asthma great again, it had bluetooth issues. Out of the factory it would only play mono, the right channel specifically.
VW issued a TSB for it and the radio firmware could be updated by the dealership but it was a 3 hour process. I did it, dealership went in thinking it was 1 hour billable and were pissed that I only agreed to pay 1 hour!
They got to charge me because it's labor and I had the car over a year (trim warranty).
They did not get to charge me when the DPF cracked a few thousand miles out of federal emissions warranty because dieselgate scandal already broke and I said "If you can program it to cheat, you can program it to fail"
I don't have a public source, but for some vehicles bluetooth problems are the number one complain OVERALL.