| As a Tesla owner, I find the software to be buggy with a poor UX. I much prefer the CarPlay experience and wish all manufacturers just stopped trying to push software we don’t need. 1. Opinionated “clean” UX has no place in a car. The important buttons need to be bigger and the alerts clearer. Colors need to be employed to draw attention. 2. A shocking number of bugs get released on stable that they fix in the next release. It seems the car prompts you about an update almost every time you drive. 3. It’s annoying to have to rely on two data plans that provide the same functionality - let me use my phone data instead of upselling me on a data plan that I need to have a good experience. 4. It’s super annoying to rely on their Spotify player which keeps getting worse (ie hiding the shuffle button below two levels of tiny arrows - what??) 5. Their voice recognition is awful - worse than Siri. It’s starting to feel extremely antiquated. The fact I can rarely call up the right name to send a message and then have to make several attempts to speak a message - bleh. Will this ever be an enough of a priority for them to compete with google? No, but it’s critical for car software and the gap between their walled garden and state of the art will get worse and worse. 6. They dedicate almost the entire screen to a worthless animation of what the car thinks it sees. Sure it’s “cool” but it’s a waste of precious screen real estate and frankly shows their hand on how bad their camera recognition really is. The whole thing seems super arrogant to me. Maybe before the age of CarPlay and android auto it made sense to build software as a car company and was a differentiator, but not today - my next car definitely won’t be a Tesla for precisely this reason. |
CarPlay just seems like a bandaid on bad car software, which still isn't well tied into the car's climate controls or other settings anyway so you have this weird half and half experience.