Infotainment system ranking

Lexus Remote Touchpad... Made by Toyota, and far worse than Entune. Humm, I wonder how bad the system is.

 

Yeah, I can live without audio, calls, and nav in my cars fine as long as it drives good.

 

they are rating their systems, but not against anything else. seems pretty subjective to me.

not that i'm defending entune

 

as i've said before... the entune system insist all THAT bad...


nice to see i was right all along

 

i just put the cc on, and know how fast i'm going. i guess i don't want to go too far back in technology

 

Need the phone function in states that mandate NO hand held electronics use by the driver.

 

Does that law apply even if a mounted smartphone is used as a hands-free speakerphone? If so, operating today's most cars built-in infotainment head unit is almost always equally distracting, IMHO.

 

No screen on our 2010, Bluetooth phone connect buttons on the steering wheel (can pair multiple phones, but only one is "active"), (useless) back up camera in the rear mirror.

Mounted a garmin in the little corner window, but don't use it much.

 

Entune would be decent enough if it would support Android Auto / Car Play. Toyota seems to have finally understood that they won't be able to compete with these eco systems with their internal Entune dev team. It's definitely coming.

And allegedly support for Car Play is going to be made available (for free) in May to all 2018 Entune 3.0 equipped cars:



I hope they add Android Auto and also backport that support for older Entune versions where the hardware unit is sufficient, such as the Prime. Especially for the higher trims with 11 inch screens that are hard to replace, it would be sad if they will be permanently stuck without it.

Mazda offered upgrades for 200$ for cars back to 2014. I'd be willing to pay that.

 

The ban is on "hand held", not "hand holdable" so yes if your car doesn't have built in ability to connect to phones for hands free use, you can buy a mount.

 

The Tesla owners' rose colored glasses are extra strong here. Having driven just about all of those on various rental cars, I would take the BMW iDrive and new MBUX system from Mercedes well before I took Tesla's approach. Wireless carplay/android auto is still better for me than the Tesla system as it offers the most direct link to my phone. I found the Tesla system pretty laggy in the Model 3/S compared to my phone.

What's evident is Toyota's narcissism finally biting itself in the butt. I think this and the associated tanking of car reviews on CR are effecting sales and thus we see CarPlay rollouts to past model year cars. I'm pretty sure Toyota and the dealer wouldn't have had to give me $8000 off MSRP to move my PP if it had good infotainment - even in the second SUV renaissance that we are living in for now.

 

Honestly, I just need a screen that can mirror whats on my phone. The only thing I use the touchscreen for is switching between my phone audio and the car radio.

 

The biggest plus for the touchscreen, for me, is the ability to zoom in/out on the map and do the report thing on Waze.

 

How are you getting your touchscreen to interface with Waze?