Why are many cars’ screens slow and laggy when a $400 phone can have a smooth performance?
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So, if you have a tesla it is not. Even my mcu 2 now 5 year model 3 lr is smooth and performant when interacting with it. It is a 1920×1200 15” lg display panel mated to the mci 2 computer with is an intel atom e8000 which it fast per say but it’s apparently adequate.
I used to work at a semiconductor plant largely focused on automotive customers. They bought the older chips because they were reliable and output was consistent. They also audited us and our processes rigorously.
Basically, putting a chip anywhere near a multi-ton death machine is a risky thing. I’d rather them be safe (and slow) than sorry.
Another thing to consider is that car screens/computers are built for reliability in heat, cold, bouncing down the road and still working in 10 years. Those are all design trade offs that I’m willing to make
Apple CarPlay (and I think android) allow the manufacturer to just display a video stream from the phone and not try to be a super computer, just be a dumb screen (like a TV nowadays). I use external boxes (PS5, Switch, AppleTV) plugged into the TV and the TV just displays what the powerful external box wants it to. This is what CarPlay does for your infotainment, and you can upgrade your phone every couple years for a faster and better experience and not worry about the car’s built in system being slow/laggy/old.
Car screens are literally just the cheapest tablets that money can buy.
Unless you are in an expensive and new car, they’ll be shit by default.
I am going to go against the grain: Better tech is new, until the next generation. A reliable and scalable tech is harder to do. So in order to save costs for you and themselfs the car companies will gfo with reliable and tested true tech until such time as the stuff available becomes cheap and reliable enough, or its so much better it needs to be implemented.
I will give the example of cruise control. Now it will recognise speed signs as well as other cars, before it just set a throttle by wire at a set speed and leave it there.
Touch screens were bad, now they are good. Whilst it took a while to get the good screens into cars. Many of these cars will last 10+ years. We went from lcd to oled foldables in 10 years…. Its all well and good to say, just keep up with the times, but reality is that some tech fads come and go. But cars need to for the most part, be able to provide the same experience for most of their lifetime.
And like others have said this is also partly because it takes a few years and a few models to make back the costs of investing into changing all the manufacturing for some new part.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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