Car Audio Interfaces: A Nightmare

Car Audio Interfaces: A Nightmare

WHY ARE SO many car in­terfaces so darn bad?

I'm not referring to the basic driving components. I'm talking about all the bells and whistles: the navi­gation systems and multi CD-changer/satellite radio/media interface/DVD-player entertainment centers.

Sit down in a rental, a Zip-car, or a friend's vehicle, and typically you're confronted by an obtuse set of dials, knobs, sliders, and worst of all a touchscreen.

The poor usability of the electronics and media sys­tem in my new Volkswagen GTI stand in stark contrast to the rest of the car, which is otherwise well designed. But the audio system lacks the same level of quality.

Fair warning: This article is based on my personal expe­riences, largely with my GTI.

Bad Touch

I firmly believe that whoever first thought it was a good idea to put a touchscreen in a car should be plopped behind the wheel and forced to try using such a thing.

Sure, we're used to touch­screens: Our phones and tablets have them, as do air­port ticket kiosks, ATMs, and even some mall directories.

But a touchscreen is an interface that requires you, the driver, to take your eyes off the road to use it.

It’s Interference

Touchscreens are only part of the problem.

Satellite imagery: This button will cease to be

useful three months after I bought the car. 

But it will never go away.

For example, we've all used shuffle mode since time immemorial. Your play­er shuffles your library into a randomized playlist. If you press Next Track, you hear a new song at random; but you can also go in reverse to hear the previous song.

The audio unit in my Volks­wagen doesn't do that pressing Previous takes me back to a different random song. Each song is an island in a sea of randomness.

The interface isn't much better when I want to select songs to play. It offers op­tions for browsing playlists, albums, artists, and songs, but it forces you to navigate the lists with a touchscreen scrollbar possibly the worst way to allow a driver to choose a song from a large library. And you can't select music with the non­touchscreen controls.

Softwhere?

The most egregious problem with the car stereo, however, can be laid at the feet of the garden-variety software bug. Similar to many Volkswagen models, the GTI sports a physical media connector and Bluetooth streaming. Sounds nice, right? It did to me, until on day one of driv­ing the car I heard The Who's classic “Baba O'Riley" come on and I realized, in puzzlement, that I wasn’t hearing the whole song: It wasn’t in full stereo.

I determined that the ste­reo was playing only the right channel of the audio, and I concluded that the Bluetooth streaming of the car stereo was at fault.

Searching on Google, I saw that I was not alone: Many other owners of the 2012 GTI and Passat said their cars suffered from this dreaded condition. So I went back to my dealer, and the salesperson checked with the service department about a software update.

Button, button: At least the steering wheel

still has tac­tile buttons. For now.

Here we come to the crux of the problem. In car soft­ware, we seem to be back in a predigital age. I had two options: Use Bluetooth streaming in mono mode, which provided the full audio albeit at crappier quality, or stick with the wired connec­tion. For now I’ve chosen the latter, but a forthcoming software update may fix the Bluetooth problem. That should leave me with 724 other issues to gripe about.

The lesson for carmakers is simple: If your software will be hard to upgrade, get it right and make it bulletproof.

Vox Populi

I’ve considered attempting to bypass many of the inter­face problems by using an alternative method of user interaction such as the iPhone 4S's voice-controlled virtual assistant, Siri.

Unfortunately, I have no easy way to trigger Siri while driving without pressing and holding the iPhone's home button. And due to the afore­mentioned Bluetooth bug, I have to connect my phone via the car’s media cable.

Help may be on the way, though perhaps not for me. Apple, I hear, is working with carmakers to add a button, for triggering Siri, to the steering wheel of many forthcoming models.

Of course, I could always use Volkswagen's own built- in voice-recognition system if I wanted to torture myself repeatedly. It’s slow, Limited in its functionality, and in­credibly inaccurate, pretty much like the rest of the electronics in this car.

The Whole Widget

“People who are really seri­ous about software should make their own hardware,” programmer Alan Kay once said. I'm starting to think that the reverse of this is true, too. All the great hard­ware in the world isn’t worth much unless it has great software to go with it.

Most car manufacturers still seem to think that the best way to build in electron­ics is by working with part­ners, and apparently most of those partners know as much about how their soft­ware works in an automobile environment as the car man­ufacturers know about how to build good electronics.

Improving this situation will require a kick in the pants from a company that is truly serious about build­ing a great automobile media experience. Any takers?

Posted in: Car Audio Interfaces