[esyir]

Turns out doing it better influences people's preferences. The problem is fundamentally that the carmakers do such a shit job.

If infotainment systems matter at all to consumers, we'd expect to see GM take a hit for this, and get their market share eaten by competitors who don't do so.

[Xcelerate]

> we'd expect to see GM take a hit for this, and get their market share eaten by competitors who don't do so.

I think there’s a better chance of this happening than they believe. I bought a new Camry in 2017, right at the start of their 4 year upgrade cycle (i.e., the 2018 version). I chose a Camry due to their well-known reliability.

However, none of the new vehicle models that Toyota sold had CarPlay at that point, and it was unclear whether Toyota would ever offer it at all. After a few months of driving my new car and then getting the chance to use CarPlay in a rental car, I decided I would not buy another Toyota in the future because it was so annoying to be aware of the experience that could easily exist involving navigation, music, etc. but that did not.

Toyota eventually relented in 2018, and luckily my Camry had upgrade support to install CarPlay (so clearly it had been planned a while ago for this model). But they would have lost me as a customer otherwise, and I doubt my perspective on this is unique. It’s sort of curious that such a trivial-to-implement aspect of the car’s design can have such an outsized influence on a purchase decision.

[glenngillen]

My family wanted to buy a very capable 4x4 a couple of years ago. We wanted something capable of towing a large load and to take offroad in some challenging areas, which means most of the SUVs designed for road use are out of the question. At least locally, Toyota are usually considered among the best in this criteria. I was pretty shocked at how dated absolutely everything about it looked and felt. It was definitely a capable offroad vehicle, but it also seemed like it was stuck in the 90's design wise. And by the time it was fully optioned it was, IMO, far too expensive to justify how compromised it felt. It felt like they'd let their reputation stall out their design for a couple of decades.

We ended up buying something else that was much more comfortable and better designed (including CarPlay!) and haven't regretted it.

[nickthegreek]

Same. Longtime Toyota owner who keeps cars for around 10 years. When Toyota didn't offer carplay, there was no way I was gonna live in the 'oldentimes' for another decade and I chose a VW with carplay.

[mikestew]

I think there’s a better chance of this happening than they believe.

It’s already happening. When GM announced no more CarPlay, we took the $60K we were going to use on a new Blazer EV and gave it to Hyundai instead. (Good thing, too, or we’d still be waiting on that Blazer instead of driving our Ioniq 5 since April.)