Today in our aviation class at MIT we are going to have a special talk by an expert from Avidyne about quality assurance and certification of software for avionics. To introduce the speaker I needed to create a sentence of the following form: “Look at this incredibly broken and failure-prone piece of software and contrast that with the near-bulletproof software behind your certified avionics.”
The best example turned out to be the Apple CarPlay system in our 2018 Honda Odyssey. It exhibits the following behavior:
- plug in phone: crash about 10 percent of the time
- arrive at the destination after navigating with Apple Maps: crash about 30 percent of the time
- phone calls: about 1 call out of 10, play sound through car speakers, but continue to rely on the microphone on the iPhone 7 Plus (result: person on other side cannot hear)
There are lots more quirks. Also plenty of design flaws, e.g., if you click on “phone” from the steering wheel controls it will say “no phone connected”. You can see that your iPhone is actually plugged into USB! What does this mean? That the iPhone is not connected to the legacy Bluetooth system, but only to the fancy new CarPlay system. If you want to make calls you need to use the center touch screen.
I’m not quite able to abandon CarPlay because (a) I like to listen to Audible books and there are strange skips in Bluetooth audio (worked nicely in the 2014 Odyssey), and (b) the car does not have its own navi system so I want to use Apple Maps (one sure way to develop greater appreciation for Google!).
I’m wondering if this works for readers. Who else has CarPlay? In a Honda? Does it work reliably?
The car can accept over-WiFi updates, but none have been made available in the past 6 weeks.
I’ve been using Car Play in a Honda for about 18 months (2017 Accord). It’s been a mostly flawless and pain free experience for me. I had issues with intermittent crashing for a couple of weeks over the summer but that issue was resolved by cleaning pocket lint that had wedged itself into the lightning port.
For most of my driving (I live in the Midwest), Apple Maps has been very reliable and improvements in real-time traffic and lane detection have been nice improvements. Google Maps still has an edge, but integration with Car Play causes me to use Apple Maps 98%+ of the time. That said, I’ve had issues with Apple Maps in the Boston area. Perhaps its most severe failings are localized?
I haven’t had the issues you report with phone calls and failing to switch to the in-car microphone. Perhaps the hardware integration has improved in the years since your Odyssey came out?
It seems like the best solution would be to simply have a “Aux in” audio port – and buy an iPad with a mount and a data-only SIM card. It would have to cost a fraction of what Honda charged for their solution, and a better overall experience. (My 2010 Odyssey has a simple Aux In audio port – which works flawlessly)
Sounds like a very interesting talk, hope it will be available on YouTube.
I have a 2018 Accord and it’s been flawless for me with an iPhone 7+. What did the dealer say to you?
I have CarPlay in a 2016 VW. It was really flaky at first; the dealer applied a firmware upgrade after I’d had the car for about six months and it got a lot less flaky. I’m on an iPhone 6. I haven’t driven as much in the past 6 months since moving to a new city where my commute is by train, so I’m not sure how upgrading to iOS 11 affected CarPlay behavior. Most of the time it works well enough for what I want it to work for, which is maps (Apple Maps itself sucks, but it’s no more or less sucky in its CarPlay mode vs. normal app mode). If I’m just listening to audio I tend to use BlueTooth.
I would be curious to know where CarPlay sits on the spectrum of “shrink-wrapped software” to “API that you have to write your software to conform to”.
I have it in a Volkswagen Jetta and my results are identical: It’s a tremendously frustrating source of friction, but such a big win I couldn’t give it up.
Tips:
Use a paracord lightning cable.
Plug it in with the phone unlocked and open, and wait for the car end to be done loading first.
The touch screen in my 2017 Honda Civic is grim. It takes multiple seconds to turn on, multiple seconds to respond to basic commands, and occasionally crashes (reboots to the home screen) when playing certain MP3 files. The controls and user interface are a disaster for non-music (podcast, audiobook) listening. It’s a black mark on an otherwise excellent automobile.
I have used Android Auto (Google’s version of Car Play) in it without trouble, but I dislike having to take my phone out, plug it in etc. every time I use the car.
I have no expectations for any improvements. Honda is a car company, not a software company, and the concepts of maintaining and updating software are alien to them. My only hope is they finally come to their senses, realize coding user interfaces is just not their thing, and hand it over to a real software company before I need to buy another car from them.
They (fortunately!) did let Garmin take over their navigation software. Garmin’s user interface and display is a huge improvement over the previous Honda-created navigation.
I have worked on several avionics certification efforts. The principles of making avionics software robust could be applied to any kind of software engineering, but it would take more people and more time. After requirements capture, requirements review, code changes, code review, test changes, test review, dry run testing, for-score testing, etc., it would not be unusual for a small software change to take a year to eventually make its way to an end user. Do we really want to incur that kind of expense and schedule for web applications and iPhone games? It would likely make any kind of software higher quality, but is it worth it?
I’m surprised, though, that better engineering didn’t go into the 2018 Honda audio system. My 2014 Honda works … mostly fine in this regard.
Waze is the best app for driving navigation, according to my two-hour-a-day commuting friend. My personal experience is that it works fine, as long as the driver can ignore it.
I find a brief acquaintance with the maps of the route to a new location, done before driving, is essential to a good drive. I can keep a route in my head, and it makes the driving much easier. Continual use of machines to aid our cognitive efforts atrophies our natural ability to navigate unassisted.
Any printed road atlases or maps, perused at leisure, can help make any sufficiently intelligent person adept at getting where they need to go, with an efficiency and enjoyment that far outweighs the efforts of the navigationally handicapped.
I also cheat and keep an offline map of my local area on my phone. This is an alternative source of maps when printed maps are unavailable. If a human navigator is available, they may use what methods they prefer to direct my driving, but I expect they will have a familiarity with the whole route before we begin.
The Japanese camera companies are terrible at software (cough*Nikon*cough), so why would the Japanese car companies be better?
Near-bulletproof software like that described in this B737 First Officer’s report in today’s ASRS Callback?
“It would be nice to have better software—the aircraft constantly goes out of VNAV PATH and into VNAV SPEED for no reason, and sometimes the VNAV disconnects for no reason, like it did to us today.”
— https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/publications/callback/cb_456.html
I wish I’d seen this posted earlier; I would’ve asked you to record the presentation. I use Avidyne avionics in my airplane and love them.
As to CarPlay: I have it in a 2014 Kia and it works flawlessly about 90% of the time. The 10% of the time when it does not work there are two primary failure modes: something in the Spotify app will quit working properly (which I blame on Spotify and not on apple or Kia) or the head unit will fail to recognize the presence of the plug in iPhone. I cannot diagnose whether this is a problem with the phone or the head unit, but is rare enough that I have not bothered. I will generally note that in terms of user interface, functionality, and stability, telematics in Honda vehicles has never been very good compared to their competitors.
“The car can accept over-WiFi updates, but none have been made available in the past 6 weeks.”
6 weeks – are you kidding? My 2016 Hyundai Genesis has received 1 free software update (to add Car Play/Android Auto in TWO YEARS. If you want the maps updated, it’s $169 a pop. The voice recognition is on par with a 5 year old phone and is never going to get better. It’s already marginal in a 2 year old car – 5 or 10 years from now it will be a joke.
The car actually has its own cell connection and the ability to download additional apps but they only made 1 or 2 available – they just don’t support the platform. As far as a car maker is concerned, once the car goes out the door they are done with it unless the government forces a recall or unless you pay them dearly for it. The idea of giving you free ANYTHING once you have bought the car is alien to their business model.
The car makers should just give you a USB port and the ability to mirror your phone over to the dash screen and be done with it.
Jack: It is sufficiently broken that it seems like it will take at least several attempts to fix! What’s Honda’s incentive to do this? They can’t leave this level of brokenness hanging out there unless they can be certain that no prospective car purchaser will ever ride in the passenger seat. Domestic Senior Management already decided that she didn’t want to lease a new Accord or Clarity based on what she’s seen of this Charlie-Foxtrot in the center of the Odyssey dashboard. If Honda loses a sale for every person that rides in our Odyssey and sees the software fail, that’s not great business, is it?
You’re killing my lust for an Accord,, so chalk one up who didn’t even take a ride in the van.
Just got a 2018 Clarity and the Car Play with an iPhone 8 Plus has been working with no problems since I got it 3 days ago. I did have an issue with the nav volume until Google told me that there is a separate volume level for Nav and you have to adjust it while the nav is talking.
Some comments on the other features:
The adaptive cruise control with low speed following works great. It takes a bit to get used to no analog speed indication. Actually it is easier to just use the ACC instead of the accelerator and brake pedal to maintain a particular speed. Steering is almost optional with the lane keeping assist on a well marked road.