Agency Record

Mercedes van Advert

karmcity:

jstn:

This is Mercedes’ new embedded car computer infotainment… thing. Look how fucking awful it is. Car companies are getting dragged kicking and screaming into a world where they have to pay enormous attention to software and user interface, and they’re blowing it in spectacular fashion. Even BMW, the “Apple” of automobile engineering, has an in-dash UI so terrible that I think it’s doing significant damage to their brand. Why do all of these things have a “command knob” surrounded by a zillion other anonymous buttons? Have none of these designers used a cell phone since 2007?

Nissan is at least trying with the Leaf, though it still looks a bit like a tumorous growth rather than something smoothly integrated with the rest of the machine. Seriously, is anyone else doing anything interesting with car UI?

Car software has three huge challenges most other devices can be forgiven on more readily: reliability, speed and integration.

Reliability
Car software needs to be bug-free, or darn close to it. A person can’t be driving down the road when suddenly their radio volume knob stops working, or their navigation system crashes. For this reason, auto manufacturers have a strong impulse to build in-house, where they have complete control of the end-to-end experience. Outsourcing, or investing in a startup is too high a risk (on paper) when it comes to driver safety. Could you imagine driving a car with version 1.0 of an Android-based system developed by a mature company, let alone a startup? I’d be terrified.

Speed and Integration
When you turn on your car, the software needs to be available immediately, or within a tenth of a second. No functionality can be locked behind any kind of “Loading…” screen. The radio needs to switch on right away and navigation needs to be available, at the touch of a button. For true performance, the UI and software for cars needs to be one step above hard-coded.

If a software company is focusing on modular software for cars, they would need to build software specifically designed for each manufacturer to be fast and integrated enough. In that scenario, there’s no business model that makes sense. Imagine setting out to reinvent Mercedes’ car computers. Now, imagine them agreeing to a deal with your company without seeing a flawless prototype. It’d never happen.

So, to answer the question posed above, existing as an external company providing software for cars is a pretty tough business model to pitch. The only way to yield a truly great UI is to hire amazing designers in-house. Since the software doesn’t necessarily sell the car (for most people), the company’s investment follows in kind. I, too, hope this changes in the future.

Random idea: Maybe an HTML5 UI would allow for re-use, despite a completely different low-level code base.

(via cshyu)