What aspects of car ownership do you find most annoying that better software could potentially solve? Are there problems with maintenance tracking, diagnostics, dealer relationships, or the in-car interface itself?
I'm curious if others share similar frustrations or have found clever solutions. For those who've built their own tools or workarounds, what motivated you and how did you approach it?
My personal pain point has been the fragmentation - having to use one app for the manufacturer, another for service history, something else for fuel tracking, etc. It feels like there must be a better way.
Essentially someone else's computers. Not yours.
That's the root problem.
Modern vehicles certainly could include a maintenance and fuel log and essentially a built in code reader, but unless a manufacturer decides that's a priority, it's not going to happen.
From a driver's perspective, the less software I need to be aware of, the better. My ancient vehicle has electronic fuel injection, but that pretty much just works; otherwise, there's no software. Modern cars have so much software, and some of it is just there and just works and often improves the driving experience, but the software that is in your face is often a negative. My last nice car would detect which keyfob was on the person who opened the driver's door and set the memory seat for them; my current nice car wants you to login to the center console and tries to figure out who is opening the driver's door and login as them, but sometimes it gets confused and it's a lot of button presses to fix it, and you have to do it with the car in park. More advanced features, but less useful because it's more intrusive.
Navigation is about the only useful intrusive feature. Unfortunately, integrated navigation tends to require map updates for money. Pushing to Android Auto avoids the costs, but then you get things like weirdness with intermittent connections, and inconsistency between phones --- the spouse's phone has a nice button to quickly get to the car ui, but for mine, I have to go to 'all apps' and then select the car ui app --- no way to put that on the launcher either.
When the day comes that I have to replace my 1999 Camry, I will be sure to buy a car without software with this capability. I consider any software that permits ads to be irreparably broken beyond repair.
If I can't obtain such a car, then my clever solution will be to smash the infotainment system with a hammer. If that renders the car undriveable, I will start walking everywhere.
Anything subscription based.
The fact that my car does not act as a wifi hotspot.
The move to require my phone to provide services to my car like navigation.
It works fine and uses my phone. Give me knobs for ac and other controls, and just give a screen that can show apple car play.
I'll take my older truck with proper in car navigation rather than my new commuter car that requires pairing with ever driver in my family.
If you want to give your car access to your phone, power to you.
I mean, service your car every 5-6K miles, by taking it to someone you trust or have a good relationship with. They usually put a sticker on your window telling you when the next service is due. If you take it to a dealership, they usually update Carfax with your services. In my experience of owning cars, service history doesn't matter much to anyone but you, but that's easy to track.
Unless you drive full time for a living, I don't see the point of fuel. The only time I care about mileage tracking is when I made the mistake of leasing a car.