I like the idea of having light chats during driving. When google assistant was introduced, i could ask to android auto to tell me a joke or some interesting tidbit, right now if i ask "where's beijing?" it will reply to me "adding beijing, china to the route", which doesn't make any sense
Haha, nice. I didn't like that brand anyway. Keep getting rekt by Asian (e.g. Hyundai, Kia, Toyota, Nissan, Honda), French (e.g. Renault, Peugeot) and northern (e.g. Volvo) manufacturers. German automakers are so far behind everyone else that it's astonishing they still survive. Probably subsidies.
I literally never drove a German-made car made in the last 8 years and thought "wow, what a thoughtful infotainment and user experience". It's always laggy, complicated, hard to navigate and hard to use when driving.
I literally never drove a German-made car made in the last 8 years and thought "wow, what a thoughtful infotainment and user experience".
Did you, or did you not drive German made cars in the past 8 years? Because in my experience, currently driving a BMW 320e (2021), I can attest that it is by far the best system I have used in any car. In my experience, way better than the brands you mention above. Perhaps I am one of those people that ensures these brands survive, because they make great automobiles that fit my needs.
I loved my bmw wagon, but it was an absolute POS when it came to reliability or maintenance. Blew up with less that 120k miles. Never had a problem with any Honda or Toyota under 250k.
I unfortunately cannot attest to the reliability of BMWs. I have been driving BMWs for the last 6 years now, but these were all company cars, which I swapped every 2 years. So never done more than 130.000 km on any of these cars. What I can attest to is that in these 6 years, I never had any, seriously any, problem with these cars. The only thing I noticed was the maintenance cost, which I luckily didn't have to pay. For example, the brakes on these cars are awesome, but you must replace them often. Worst case I had was with a Mini, in the two years I drove it (~130.000 km total) I had to replace the front brakes 3x and rear 2x. When I asked the mechanic if this was normal, he said yes.
I didn't drive a BMW 320e (2021) but a BMW 320d Touring (2018). I could not get the navigation system to recognise my voice and the steering wheel buttons had a "lag" of at least 200-500ms before changing anything (e.g. picking up a call, ending a call, cycling through the speedometer menu). A friend of mine drives a recent M5 which seems to be better and to be fair, BMW is one of the better brands in terms of UX. But driving a recent VW id.3 really aggravated me to the point I drove back to the renting place and got another car.
Maybe it's just preference and I prefer the snappier, cleaner interfaces of Asian cars instead of the "space ship" touchscreens with submenus upon submenus with lots of confusing options. I also didn't drive those cars long enough to "get" them, but when I test drove a Hyundai Ioniq 5 before buying it I could just immediately… drive and use it, intuitively understanding all knobs and buttons. Maybe I have an Asian brain in a German body or something.
Toyota UX/UI is pretty good as far as car infotainment systems are designed (referring to the 2023 model year infotainment redesign). Pairing Bluetooth is pretty simple and doesn't require entering into multiple menus to do so. Android auto integration still got some bugs though.
And that is exactly where it is at, which makes me happy for the future. Android Auto and Apple CarPlay provide such much more connectivity than the native UX/UI in cars. I personally never used the built in navigation software of cars, since every time I try or need to use them, they are shit. I'd much rather have a car that doesn't have built in navigation or other "apps", but has a flawless CarPlay experience.
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