Why are many cars’ screens slow and laggy when a $400 phone can have a smooth performance?
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Because tech development cycles. Car technology significantly lags behind smartphones. In general expect a 10 years old smartphone tech in cars in best case.
Automobile infotainment and telematic systems are largely proprietary, with less regard to usability and quality user experience design. Oftentimes, software is an afterthought for a car manufacturer.
Only recently has this been improved upon via Android Auto and Apple CarPlay becoming more common in newly built cars. But even then, you often need to navigate through the manufacturer proprietary software setup to reach that Android/Apple in-car experience.
As also mentioned here, cars stay in use for much much longer than consumer electronics and computers. A lot changes and is improved upon in 10 years.
Why can Tesla and Mercedes do it then ?
Separately, it must be frustrating to have to supply proprietary software for your vehicles when you know almost every owner will use Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. But on the off chance someone doesn’t you have to cater for them.
Tuning in to local radio stations might be more commonly used by more owners but even then most are available via apps.
usually devices like car screens, scan guns, small tablets you see in stores, etc. all operate on very small basic operating systems. much like windows or android or IOS these operating systems function to provide the processing for the screen touching or screen changes. the only issue is that these operating systems are not built well or by small independent companies without many resources. so they slap these crappy to begin with OS versions into the car because its cheap.
Source: i worked for a company that used Zebra brand warehouse scan guns that used Windows CE which is their mobile operating system that was filled with bugs and stopped being supported so we switched to android.
Simply put, many car manufacturers don’t care as much. They prioritize cost savings over outright performance and usability. It’s also not their core competency, so to speak. They don’t have teams of highly paid, talented software engineers, at least not at the scale that apple and google do.
Others have pointed out slower development cycles, and yes this does have an impact especially on the hardware. A 2023 model year car, even if it’s an all-new model, went into production a year ago, had parts sourced and spec’d a couple years ago, and was designed 3-5 years ago. So things like touchscreens and CPUs are already a good five years behind the latest technology. They can and do perform ota updates for software and firmware though, but some manufacturers do this better (and more often) than others.
That said, a five-year-old iPhone, still feels faster and more responsive than the latest car infotainment systems. That really goes back to the first point, that most car manufacturers simply don’t prioritize making them ultra responsive and fast. Some do pretty well though: Tesla and some of the higher-end luxury cars have pretty good systems.
They use cheaper cpu’s and graphics chips mostly. Most large cpu manufacturers are raving about their newest processors being on the smallest node possible at TSMC, Samsung, Global Foundries or wherever else can supply then their needed wafer. Cars dont really compete on their screen performance, so they have no issue using chips built on older technology, and are often very far behind in terms of node size, just to drive down costs.
Simple answer is cost and functionality.
Usually, car infotainment is sold as a bundle or kit to the car manufacturer – your phone consists of chips from various state of the art component manufacturers
When I worked at <big American car manufacturer> it took 3-4 years, at least, to make a new car model. Early in that development cycle a lot of the hardware decisions were made, and as cheap as possible. That meant that most of the tech used in cars were up to 10 years old (old and cheap already when the decision was made).
It’s not noticeable as much on a proprietary system because it’s *usually* made to made the performance of the components, it just looks aged instead, but if it’s running a third party system that constantly gets more power hungry (like Android) it’s an issue.
Some car manufacturers might care more than others.
Lots of reasons.
First most old car manufacturers build cars, not Software, not Computers. So A lot of processes is focused around building a car as cheap as possible, software is still new for those old car brands. So Software only comes second in the design process and by that you already have the hardware set.
Development time of a car is a couple of years, so they have to use parts available at that time, being a couple of years behind already.
Then you have reliability and durability, a car has a much wider range where it must work than a phone. Car standing in the sun can easily reach more than 100°C and standing in freezing weather can easily go below 0°C, but the car still needs to be able to be useable.
Your phone will rarely be in an environment that’s not around room temperature and just shuts down if it turns too hot. Can’t do that in a car.
Last step saying money, why make it faster and more expensive?
A phone is promoted with how fast it is, in a car it doesn’t really matter that much if it reacts after 1 or 2 seconds.
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