Shoutout to the thing I got for my mom's Merc where it's a literal 10 second installation to have carplay in a 2011 vehicle. Swap the built-in navi box with a $75 Aliexpress plug - bam, CarPlay/AA all wirelessly on the main screen and controllable by the standard navigation knob.
Car companies have to worry about regulatory compliance, certification, approvals, as well as warranties; aftermarket manufacturers do not have such concerns (at least to the same degree).
It’s a box that forwards a carplay / android auto UI to an LCD, and snoops the cam bus for button press events.
The entire thing is $150, which is nothing compared to the rest of the warranty.
If regulatory compliance for a car stereo actually costs $1B in the US, then that seems like a bigger issue than “unfair” competition from China, and I’d like one of their $10K EVs, please.
If a stereo is defective, it might require a recall for replacement, which is very expensive. Additionally, anything which connects to the vehicle network has the potential to cause safety issues which can be even more expensive.
Thanks. Seems to be some kind of Audi-specific branding.
No wonder these clowns still can't put together a car radio that works reliably, let alone an automotive interconnect system; they're still using the term "multimedia." Welcome to CD-ROMs, circa 1994.
It think it’s a standard for “events happen on cam bus”, “there is a not-hdmi display in the dashboard”, and “there are analog amplified audio out jacks for the speakers”.
From the consumer end, it looks remarkably sane. Like “there’s a dev kit for the computer on github” levels of sane.
Someone should tell an automobile manufacturer. It’d save them ~ $1B.