Car mfrs rarely update anything, unless the house is on fire. If the car can be hacked remotely, you might get an update.

By divorcing infotainment from being locked in the headunit to being run by the phone with the headunit as a remote display and touch input, every time the phone gets an update, the infotainment system gets improved. This is huge. And it happens because car mfrs were on a four to ten year cycle, and tech changes much more quickly than that.

AA is not grid-based. It’s got one strip to toggle views (maps, phone, home, music) and voice input in the upper right. Home is sort of an android notifications screen with the next nav instruction writ large, and incoming messages notifications below it.

CarPlay is grid-based, but in practice you don’t touch it more than once a drive (to set the music source) – a heat map would show that you use three icons on the side strip to toggle between maps, music or messages/phone, or the top of screen for notifications. You don’t need to do this, because maps directions are still read aloud when off the maps view, and any messages come in as notifications read aloud. In both cases, they’re strongly voice-driven. Especially if you map the Siri button to a steering wheel button at time of install as OEMs have done.

I’ve had the Alpine, Kenwood and Pioneer units of each (Alpine’s are CarPlay only, where the others are dual systems) and in all cases, interaction with the touch interface is either on par with OEM infotainment or much reduced – some of it comes down to user, but the designers of these systems clearly set out to reduce the need for touch input.

They’re voice driven, and the best in-car experiences we’ve seen yet. Ford is set to put Amazon Alexa in car, but we don’t really know how that will work out – so far, Alexa has been pretty good at music, but how it will fare for nav and notifications remains to be seen.

However, I think that they too have a poor user experience. The use case in the car is different and I dont think that a touch based Icon grid cuts it.. something else is needed probably involvng voice somehow.

This is precisely the point of Android Auto and Apple CarPlay – that the OEM car manufacturer infotainment system has a horrible interface, and is years out of date. When equipped with a system that supports either AA or CarPlay, it acts as the primary screen using the smartphone as the computer. Car infotainment is as up to date as the user’s connected phone.

Neither of these would ever have been developed, had car makers not fumbled so badly.

“The result is that they can be outperformed by a $150 Android device.”

The benefit of running the smartphone connected to CarPlay or Android Auto is that you get a car appropriate interface, handsfree, at the dashboard rather than on the small screen. It’s run by voice, rather than tapping on the small screen. Android Auto solves for this when you don’t have the headunit in dash by showing a large car appropriate display on the phone and locking out much of keyboard use. In iOS11, Apple blanks the screen and pushes everything through CarPlay. (passengers can unlock the display if they wish.)

Almost all of the features mentioned in the survey, traffic, infotainment, weather alerts, and so on – are already in the $150 Android smartphone’s reach. The user is STILL better using that, in terms of deciding who gets their data.

When it comes to technology in car, it’s not optional, and certainly not options expected to be paid for – the consumer expects it comes standard.

When it comes to communications, the FCC determined that AT&T couldn’t give subscribers discounted service on the premise that AT&T would snoop their traffic and data in order to give targeted adverts. Those FCC rules have since been rolled back, but as a car manufacturer, you wouldn’t want to be out the discount if the pendulum swung back again; you’d want to charge regular pricing AND sell the data.