What a low value piece of writing. I had to hunt around the episode to find if he describes why, etc, but couldn't be arsed wasting more than a minute of my time.
But, "AI in cars" is interesting. I guess it's already possible to build a clone of the KITT computer from the Knight Rider using LLM. (Is this a millennial reference, or a boomer one?). Although I wonder what features would make it more than a gimmick. Something like, "Michael, that Tesla has been following us for more than 15 miles. I ran the plates and it's..."
For electric carmakers that are willing to spend the money on making their built-in system great, I think it's the right decision. The integration with charging status and locations isn't something that Apple or Android offers. Because charging is a different beast than pumping gasoline, it needs to be integrated into the driving experience. Apple Maps doesn't have the vertical integration to know that the Rivan's battery's level of charge and to tell it to start preconditioning the battery to be charged when the vehicle arrives at the charging station, or to even tell the user that they need to charge in order to reach their destination or where the chargers along the way are.
This is long term the right choice. Tesla has the best software competency of any manufacture and if you want to compete with them you can't offload major bits of functionality to a third party. At this point in our software journey in cars, user experience is everything. If I can't have a car that I walk up to with my phone in my pocket and get in and drive, with automatic doors unlocking, and all my settings automatically set to me, then its a net loss.
I can barely get my phone to reliably pair with my Ford, but my Tesla always picks up me as the driver and just does everything correctly. Rivian needs to offer me that same level of polish to be competitive.
Spotify is the devil. I stream music from my NAS by a Subsonic-compatible server via Wireguard. I'm not going back years in time to connect my phone and control playback via basic Bluetooth like some troglodyte.
Shame Rivian won't be on my list of cars to try due to the lack of Android Auto.
Now, I hope VAG won't carry over the same mistake (actually, I think them trying to use Rivian's software is going to fail spectacularly, and we won't see it happening, but that's for a different discussion).
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 24.0 ms ] threadBut, "AI in cars" is interesting. I guess it's already possible to build a clone of the KITT computer from the Knight Rider using LLM. (Is this a millennial reference, or a boomer one?). Although I wonder what features would make it more than a gimmick. Something like, "Michael, that Tesla has been following us for more than 15 miles. I ran the plates and it's..."
Just offer it and if the customer doesn't want to use it, they will not.
I can barely get my phone to reliably pair with my Ford, but my Tesla always picks up me as the driver and just does everything correctly. Rivian needs to offer me that same level of polish to be competitive.
Shame Rivian won't be on my list of cars to try due to the lack of Android Auto.
Now, I hope VAG won't carry over the same mistake (actually, I think them trying to use Rivian's software is going to fail spectacularly, and we won't see it happening, but that's for a different discussion).