Monday 7 August 2017

Why the BMW In-car navigation and entertainment systems suck (AKA why BMW needs Android Auto)

I've had my BMW i3 for a few weeks now, after upgrading from a Renault Zoe. After a few weeks of use, I can say without doubt that the BMW i3 is a fantastic car in almost every respect, except one:

The BMW in-car navigation and entertainment systems are truly dreadful.

First of all, I should clarify I'm not saying that they aren't "fit for purpose" or that they don't work in a basic way. I'm saying that they are antiquated, clunky to use, and work poorly compared to modern systems. They are also possibly dangerous to use.

What do I mean by "modern systems"? I mean pretty much anything from this decade. The BMW systems are not from this decade in terms of design, capability or operation. They are very much a product of the early 2000's.

I am, of course, comparing against modern TomTom and Garmin standalone sat nav systems, not to mention smartphone apps like Google Maps and Waze. And I'm also, to an extent comparing against other cars that I've used like Renault, Peugeot, and Ford.

These are the benchmarks that modern consumers use. Unless they've been living in a cave they expect a certain capability and competence from satnav systems. They expect certain functionality from their car audio systems.

Part of this is to express my disappointment in BMW's relatively recent announcement that they weren't going to support Android Auto after a couple of years of saying they would. I believe that to be a major strategic error.

I also think it shows they don't care about their customers.

Why BMWs in-car navigation sucks

The very first satnav I had was an old Sony Nav-U system circa 2005. It was a touch-screen satnav system which did traffic reports. It's obsolete now, but it probably still works better in many ways than BMWs current one.

Now there will be BMW apologists who will say "well you shouldn't trust your Sat Nav completely" and there is a grain of truth to this. If the satnav seems to be taking you in completely the wrong direction, or you are driving a 44 tonne lorry and it tries to take you down a narrow country lane, you should take notice.

However, there's a basic level of trust that you expect from a sat nav: you expect it to know common addresses and POIs, and you expect it to be able to take sensible routes to get to those. If you don't trust your satnav to do those basic things well nearly 100% of the time, then your satnav is worthless and you may as well use a paper map.

Take Waze, for instance. I've used Waze a lot in the last couple of years and I've come to trust it to be correct even when the route it takes seems a bit weird. In 2 years it's never let me down. The BMW sat nav let me down within 2 days.

Data quality

First off, the BMW sat nav doesn't seem to be that up to date.

My car arrived last month, and the satnav data was still more out of date than the inbuilt TomTom in my old Renault which was probably a year out of date itself. There are points of interests which weren't in the BMW sat nav which were in my old Renault.

These are important POIs, like electric charging points.

I was travelling down from Liverpool the other day, and needed to stop to charge. If I had trusted the BMW's maps, I would have ended up going quite a long way out of my way to charge at the point on my journey when I needed to, or would have had to have made multiple stops instead of the single stop I needed.

Luckily I already knew there were charge points on my route, largely because I had already used them more than a year before, but also because I could see them on the excellent ZapMap application. But the BMW sat nav simply couldn't be trusted.

I should add that most smartphone sat nav apps don't currently have EV charge points or EV route planning on them yet. This is one thing that the BMW sat nav does better, not because it does this well, but just because it does do it. It's a matter of time before this appears on tools like Waze, and when it does those tools will do a far better job simple because it would be hard not to. At that point, the only possible reason to use sat navs as dreadful as the BMWs built-in one will go away.

User Interface

In general, I find the UI on the BMW sat nav to be painful to use:
  • Trying to find addresses and POIs on older generation satnav systems is not fun, and the BMW satnav is no exception. For some reason, the option to find POIs "along my route" often seems to be inaccessible.
  • The satnav has some options to select "fastest", or "Eco pro" and "Eco pro+" routes, the latter of which are usually slower, but shorter or use slower roads, but often I find I can't actually select these routes even on longer journeys where such routes do exist.
  • Selecting addresses is painful. I have to admit it was also quite painful on the TomTom system integrated into my old Renault Zoe, but BMW have bought it to new heights of unfriendliness, to the point that even my 2005 era Sony sat nav is easier.
  • When looking up addresses or points of interest, I find it often gets it badly wrong. For instance, I looked up B&Q and it directed me to one that was 30 minutes away rather than to the one that was 10 minutes away. The nearer one was in it's database but, for some reason, it didn't want me to know about it.
  • There's something "confusing" about the BMW satnav display, and I can't put my finger on it. It somehow comes across as quite busy but, at the same time, lacking in information. It has improved with familiarity, but it still feels a bit clunky. It's not just me: my wife hates it.
A note on the BMW input system: it uses a jog wheel and some buttons between the seats. The BMW delivery guy pitched this to me as better and safer than touchscreen systems. I'm really not so sure. At first I thought it was a good idea but, in practice, it's rather limiting and slower to use which means you spend more time fiddling with it. And you still need to look at the screen to see what's going on.

EDIT: After using it for several weeks now, it's definitely far more dangerous to use than a touch screen.

I feel this input method is a big barrier to making their systems easier and friendlier to use.

My suspicion is that BMW have committed to this system over early touchscreens, and haven't yet realised it's time to move on.

Navigation quality

This is where the BMW navigation system really sucks.

When you have a satnav you expect it to take sensible routes. If it has traffic reporting, you would expect it to know about them in a timely fashion and to navigate around things like heavy traffic or road closures in a sensible way. The BMW sat nav system mostly does none of these things.
As an example, I tried using the BMW navigation to navigate from one of the local schools to my home (of course I didn't need it, it was an experiment). Waze and Google maps both took me on the sensible route: 1.5 miles taking approximately 3 minutes. The BMW sat nav took me on a 6 mile, 10 minute journey around the area.

Now this isn't due to new road layouts or other changes. These roads have been unchanged for decades. My old Sony sat nav used to navigate them just fine more than a decade ago.
And this isn't a cherry-picked, isolated incident; In the few short weeks I've had the car I have found many different cases where the BMW sat nav has tried to take me on silly around-the-houses routes.
I should note, this is usually on smaller road. From what I can tell the BMW sat nav is heavily weighted to major roads. Some weighting is to be expected as more major roads are normally faster. 

But the BMW sat nav weighting seems over the top and crude to the extent it makes navigating in many areas unreliable.

Don't get me wrong, it will get you there, but it will often do so via a route that takes you miles out of your way and adds many minutes to your journey.

Added to this the traffic capability doesn't work that well. For instance, one of the "around-the-houses" routes it took me on had a traffic jam it didn't know about, and I would have ended up being stuck in traffic for an extra 10 minutes or so if I had taken it.

The granularity and resolution of the traffic reports simply seems to be poor. My 2005-era Sony sat nav with it's TMC based traffic reporting seemed almost as capable. It doesn't do a terrible job on motorways and long-term roadworks on major roads, but beyond that all bets are off.

For example, it recently tried to take me down a local road that has been closed for over a week.

Integration

One of the cool things I can do with Google Maps, for instance, is lookup my destination and plan my route on Google Maps on my PC. I can then push that route to my phone for navigation purposes.

Now BMW does have an integration option for this which is supposed to allow you to push a destination to your car, but it's never worked for me. I always get an error.

They also have their connected drive app which allows you to push destinations to the car. However, the app itself is clunky to use, and when you push a destination to the car it basically does through the ConnectedDrive messages. You then have to go into the messages on the car to find it and add it as a destination. It's not horrible, but it's far too many steps to be something I want to do often.

The reality is most people do their scheduling and planning on their smartphone using preferred calendar apps.

BMW seems to have recognised this as there is capability to connect the phone to the car via USB and run the connected drive app to push the route to the car. The connected drive app can integrate with your Google calendar and suggest planned routes for you which then get pushed to the car.

Again, this isn't horrible, but the BMW app feels alien to be doing this in. It seems like an unnecessary step that's only there because BMW want to reinforce their branding. Their app is also not a great app for route planning. It doesn't actually feel like a proper navigation app in itself, but more like an artificial bridge between the users phone apps and the in-car navigation system.

Compare this with, say Waze or Google Maps which integrate much more slickly and are actual navigation systems in their own right.

Why the BMW in-car Entertainment system sucks

Dreadful user interface

This is, in part, because of the job-wheel interface I talked about earlier. But also the way you select and navigate around the entertainment system is clunky and unintuitive. Even after a few weeks of use I still have trouble finding how to select a new radio station.

And the display gives very little information about what is playing when in other screens or menus.

On the entertainment system on my 3+ year old Renault, I worked out how to use the radio within minutes, and it gave a summary of the current playing track or station on every screen via an on-screen button which I could touch to jump to the "now playing" page.

The BMW does have a "Radio" and "Media" physical button on the console next to the jog wheel but the behaviour doesn't seem consistent and, more often than not, it takes me to some menu rather than to the currently playing screen.

Lack of apps

Modern smartphones have dozens of music apps that people want to use: Spotify, Google Music, Apple Music, Deezer, Napster, TuneIn, Stitcher, etc. My Sonos system at home supports over 30 such services. People not only want choice, but they already have choice, and they want that choice in their car.

Now, to BMW's credit, they have developed an Integration with Spotify. But that's about it. And, frankly, that integration is quite clunky. Part of this is because it's limited by the BMW jog-wheel user interface, and partly because setting it up each time is fiddly.

But BMW haven't (and probably never will) develop integrations for the applications I want and actually use.

And, meanwhile, other more enlightened car manufacturers are integrating Android Auto and are even working with app manufacturers like Waze.

Lack of basic functionality

So, you might say, just use your smartphone and stream via bluetooth. That is, for the most part, exactly what I'm doing. I've also given up on the BMW satnav and now use Waze or Google Maps with the audio piped through bluetooth for a far more functional, trustworthy, and reliable satnav and entertainment experience.

The one problem with this approach is that the BMW media display and controls don't work properly. 
On my old Renault (with the same phone) and on my wife's Peugeot, the display shows the current playing track and allows me to skip forwards and backwards, and to pause or mute. There's even controls on the steering wheel/column for this.

On the BMW, the current track playing is shown, but only when you have selected the now playing screen in the media menus. Only then can you control it, and that is limited to skip forwards/backwards. There is no mute or pause control. There is a skip roller on the steering wheel but, for some unknown reason, it doesn't do anything except report "Not Possible" on the display.

I've not tried these controls with Spotify because, frankly, I'm not interested in Spotify. I don't use it and see no reason why I should just because it seems to be BMWs preferred service.

There's an easy solution, but BMW don't want to use it

The root of the problem is that in-car systems are always outdated by definition. This is because they are closed platforms with slow development processes under the control of conservative vendors for whom these systems are a bit of an afterthought. Car makers have pretty much always been spectacularly bad at in-car navigation and entertainment systems, which is why there is such a huge number of after-market add-ons.

This has become even more painfully obvious with the rise of smartphones and online navigation systems like Waze and Google Maps. These systems are up-to-the-minute accurate with map updates and traffic reports, and are excellent at navigation. They also have great user interfaces and are convenient to use. And they are free.

The other factor is the manufacturer-supplied systems are baked into cars and don't get major updates for, typically, a decade or more of their lifetimes. Even by the time a new car is delivered, the in-car systems are likely to be a few years old and, very likely, starting to show their age. Where software/map updates are made, they are few and far between and usually require a fairly complex manual process by the car owner. They also usually require a paid subscription.

Smartphone apps, on the other hand, are updated regularly and with almost zero effort on behalf of the user. Map updates on Google Maps and Waze are real-time. And the hardware can be updated at any point by the owner, often for less than the cost of a BMW map update subscription. 

BMW like to think they are different, and that they can compete. They are wrong. Deeply, spectacularly wrong!

The answer to this is systems like Android Audio, Apple Carplay, and Miralink which allow the smartphone applications to be displayed and controlled on the in-car systems. This allows modern navigation apps to be used. It allows music service apps to integrate without getting the permission from, or forging a partnership with, the car maker.

In other words, it moves the development of these applications away from the car manufacturer, leaving them to concentrate on the rest of the car's software and control systems.

It allows the applications to use the full capabilities of the smartphone, such as a 4G connection with a generous usage allowance, to enable features such as real-time traffic and map updates. It allows bugs to be fixed and features to be updated in sensible timescales.

BMW have paid some lip-service to this idea: they have implemented Apple Carplay. They did originally make a lot of noise about implementing Android Auto as well. They've now withdrawn from that and have decided to stick with their legacy systems. Apple Carplay is still an option, but I have heard the implementation isn't that good and BMW have shown no signs of improving it.

They've issued some mumbly marketing-speak about "controlling the experience" to justify this strategy, but what they are really saying is they don't care about what their customers want, or about giving them the best capabilities. They are saying they want to continue holding their customers to ransom with old, antiquated, and expensive systems that require overpriced subscriptions.

So in my personal view, by withdrawing from the Android Auto programme, BMW have just issued a huge "Fuck you" to it's customers.