This is an interesting point—obviously car designers don’t intend this to be the case but a lot of car interfaces are truly awful, so they’re clearly not doing their jobs well. I wonder if there could be a set of benchmark tasks, for instance, that a set of average users in a simulator would have to complete within a certain amount of time and without missing various events happening outside the car. If scores on the benchmarks weren’t good enough, the design would have to be modified to match.
Back when there were a lot of rumors about Apple making its own car, the UI was something I was most interested in seeing. Apple is far from perfect, especially today, but at least the company pays a lot of attention to design.
Apple still testing a bunch of self driving cars out in the wild, so I think the not very secret Project Titan is still in drive. I keep reading stuff like this:
Yes, though I think the last public statements were that Apple was planning provide the technology to a carmaker rather than build their own, like Tesla did. (Not that Tesla necessarily gets points for design—putting most of the controls on the 17-inch screen is not the best approach for reducing distraction.)
I moved from a 1998 Subaru Legacy to a 2019 Subaru Impreza last December. I put a BluTooth radio in the Legacy at least a year beforehand.
I find CarPlay less distracting than what I had before. The screen is at a better height and having few controls with larger landing points helps. I can do many of the controls from the steering wheel such as skip tracks, change volume and switch between media (I accidentally switched from CarPlay to radio). Plus the adaptive cruise control makes driving so much nicer than my 1998 standard cruise control. I did spend a lot of time with the manuals.
Yes, though I think the last public statements were that Apple was planning provide the technology to a carmaker rather than build their own, like Tesla did. (Not that Tesla necessarily gets points for design—putting most of the controls on the 17-inch screen is not the best approach for reducing distraction.)
I think this is the best road for Apple, and there were rumors for years about Apple building smart television sets. And now Samsung, Sony, LG and other TV companies are running the Apple TV apps on their sets, and the app will include TV+ when it launches.
If a humongous screen made any sense in a car Apple would have designed an iPad App and a dashboard mount years ago. And Jony Ive would have done a outstanding job with the interface and hardware design. Safety, usability and privacy have been critical to the company’s successes, and I think they will be the backbone of whatever car systems they develop.