It's great to get your perspective on this. Aside from the GPS/navigation features, aren't car infotainment systems extremely basic?
We've been controlling heating, cooling, audio source, and audio volume since the dawn of time.
How are technical requirements related to these basic functions changing such that their UIs haven't been absolutely perfected by now? Is the entire infotainment code being rewritten all the time so there's no chance to iterate and improve on the previous versions work?
Yes. The infotainment code is rewritten every time. By different devs. Because that is how automotive industry works. This time BMW wants infotainment and a third party wins the contract (because it's the cheapest usually). For the next BMW car another company wins the contract. Everything is rebuilt from scratch.
The components that make up the infotainment a lot of times are actually developed by different companies. So navigation is one company, media player another etc.
Also, the deadlines usually make no sense and there is zero time for any optimization work. It's not the devs, it's the way the automotive industry works outsourcing every little button on the dash to another (cheapest) company. They just don't understand that that mentality doesn't work with software. Most of them are mechanical engineers not software people.
I'm currently going through a quote cycle and one of my requirements for the component is a sub 8min boot, which the tier 1/2s are pushing back on as unreasonable. The insanity is real.
That can include booting after an update and self tests, but yes, nothing about the component should take that anywhere near that long. We just needed a number to design the manufacturing workflow and assumed it was a reasonable ceiling. They simply don't want to do the (potential) optimization work as part of their initial contract if they somehow manage to exceed it.
> Because that is how automotive industry works. This time BMW wants infotainment and a third party wins the contract (because it's the cheapest usually). For the next BMW car another company wins the contract. Everything is rebuilt from scratch.
Yeah, that's how the automotive industry works. For each car BMW will change the third parties manufacturing each piece and every model is completely rebuilt from scratch. They literally reinvent the wheels all the time.
You shoudn't read too much into the fact that you have a dozen or two of models listed under each version in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_iDrive because it's just a concidence that starting each time from scratch they arrived at the same thing.
I've never understood why that is happening. Are they trying to make sure there is no knowledge accumulation at a single tier 1 supplier? Kind of make sure nobody can create a competing product and just sell it to different OEMs?
I actually know for a fact that a new iDrive version was reimplemented from scratch even though it was just an upgrade from the previous version and there would have been enough code to reuse. Maybe he was sarcastic but this actually happens a lot.
That's very different from "This time BMW wants infotainment and a third party wins the contract [...] For the next BMW car another company wins the contract. Everything is rebuilt from scratch."
(And "code being rewritten" is very different from "no chance to iterate and improve on the previous version" when it comes to perfecting the UI - but it wasn't you who introduced that confusion. Rewriting the code could actually facilitate incremental improvements to the interface - and arguably that's what BMW tries to do.)
No. It's not "very different". You're just trying to be contrarian. 3 series and M3 has 90% the same infotainment. But 5 series and M5 competition is being developed by a completely different company. Even if they are 95% the same. Nobody is iterating on anything. The same climate control is implemented 20 times by different companies. It's just that the 4 variants of the 3 series usually are made by the same company.
"For the next BMW car everything is rebuilt from scratch" does sound very different to me from "the system is developed by a different company in each multi-year cycle that covers dozens of models".
Maybe you're trying to tell me that I should have understood that you couldn't really mean what you wrote because that's just absurd? In that case you may be right.
I guess that when you say "nobody is iterating on anything" you cannot really mean that either - because it's just equally absurd to think that completely independent systems were designed from scratch multiple times without any reference to the previous ones and it's just by chance that the first version had a dial only, the next "non-iteration" a similar dial and two buttons, later more buttons appeared, etc.
For what it's worth, at least in German auto companies it's becoming the norm to demand source code and build tooling, precisely to avoid lock-in and constant reinventing of the wheel.
>Most of them are mechanical engineers not software people
Ah yes, the trillion dollar industry (that's been writing software in many forms for decades) just doesn't have people that understand software.
Meanwhile, you have the "software" people at, say, Tesla, who has the worst driving interface of all and the iPads were melting out of the dash in the summer time. But at least the latency was low!
We've been controlling heating, cooling, audio source, and audio volume since the dawn of time.
How are technical requirements related to these basic functions changing such that their UIs haven't been absolutely perfected by now? Is the entire infotainment code being rewritten all the time so there's no chance to iterate and improve on the previous versions work?