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.

Our first long journey in the Beemer

As you may have seen from my previous post I have now got a BMW i3 94Ah ReX as a replacement for the Renault Zoe EV.

I've been driving around in this for a couple of weeks now, following my usual driving pattern which comprises mostly local journeys in the region of 20-40 miles (incidentally, this is similar to most people's vehicle usage in the UK) but with no long journeys. Last weekend this changed as we decided to go and visit family in The Wirral, which is a couple of hundred miles drive.

In the past, I've tended to avoid long journeys in the EV because of the limited range. Part of this has been because of bad experiences in the past with charging stations not working, being busy, or not having the correct charging network accounts for them (something the industry needs to sort out). Note that some of these experiences are from nearly four years ago and, in many ways, the charging situation has improved in the UK since then.

With the lower range of my old Zoe, if you got to a motorway charging station and it couldn't be used (for any reason), your options for driving to another were often limited as you normally wouldn't have much range left. I've never actually run out of charge, but I've got very close on a couple of occasions.

The longer range of the i3 significantly reduces this "anxiety", and the ReX option pretty much removes it altogether: get to a motorway services and the charger is busy or out of action, you can just carry on to the next one. For those that don't know the ReX is a petrol-driven generator that feeds the battery and maintains the current charge level. It can be manually initiated but, normally, it automatically kicks in when the battery is getting very low.

Our journey was from Berkshire to Ellesmere Port which is approximately 200 miles. The nominal electrical range on the i3 94Ah is around 120-140 miles depending on driving style, speed, and other factors.

On the way up, we were very cautious. We were not in a hurry so we made more stops than we needed. Our first stop was at Oxford services mainly because bladders needed emptying. At that point, we had around 75% charge but we stuck it onto an Ecotricity charger for a bit anyway. That topped up to about 90% before we left.

Side note: Ecotricity chargers now use an app: you log in with the app and enter the ID of the charger that's printed on it, and then you can start charging and monitor the charging progress.

Our next planned stop was the IKEA in Wednesbury where we thought we would stop and have lunch and a look around the store whilst it was charging. At that point we still had about 40% charge remaining.

When we got to the charger another driver was just disconnecting. However, the Ecotricity app said that the "pump" was still in use. I plugged in and started it charging without the app, but was concerned that the other driver hadn't stopped the charging properly and I was using her remaining charge time. I couldn't monitor this with the Ecotricity app, so I kept checking the charge status BMW "Connected Services" app.

About 20 minutes into the charge, it appeared to have stopped, so I went back to the charger to see another driver disconnecting our car. He claimed the charging had stopped when he arrived, although I was not convinced.

The issue here is that the Ecotricity chargers sometimes lose contact with their central control system. In those cases, they seem to fall back to a mode where they work without the app (which is a good thing). The downside of this is that the charging is then fully controlled by the buttons on the front of the charger, which means anyone can stop your charging session. My suspicion is someone (likely the other driver) stopped the session early.

Anyway, at that point we had about 70% charge and, rather than get into an argument with the other driver, we decided to head up the motorway to another Ecotricity charger at Stafford services. We plugged in there and mooched around the services a bit until we had about 90% charge (about 20 mins), and then completed the journey to Ellesmere port.

I don't think the charge level dropped below about 40% at any time in the journey.

On the way back, we were feeling a lot more confident and decided to really test the range. I was planning to hit the M6 toll services, but the Ecotricity app showed the chargers there were out of service, so we deiced to go to Warwick services instead. It helped the range a bit that we were stuck in roadworks for some of the journey, so that limited the speed we could travel at. Where we could we would drive at 70 mph.

From Ellesmere Port to Warwick services was 122 miles. We started off full, but had been motorway driving all the way, and this reduces the range. When we got within 8 miles of Warwick services, we were almost empty with less than 5 miles range showing. When it got down to about 3 miles range, the ReX kicked in, although we hardly noticed; there was no noticeable noise and the only real indication was that the range gauge on the dashboard turned on. The range was then maintained at around 3 miles. We drove approximately 3 miles on the ReX power before reaching the services where we plugged in, grabbed something to eat and, after 45 mins, had a 95% charge which was more than enough to get us home. I reckon we used less than 0.1 lt of petrol.

The conclusion is that the BMW i3 is more than capable of doing this sort of extended journey without excessive stopping or anxiety, and with minimal use of fossil fuels.

It was also very comfortable to drive on the motorway and very quiet (the acoustic insulation against road/wind noise seems much better than the Zoe).

The regenerative braking on the accelerator pedal (you lift off to regeneratively brake, there is a standard foot brake as well) takes some getting used to, but is much better than the standard brake on the Zoe. It is clearly better at energy recovery as, by lifting off, it appears that you are optimally recovering energy. One the Zoe, the foot brake split braking between regeneration and traditional friction brakes and it was not possible for the driver to optimise this.

The one thing that I don't like about the BMW is the onboard navigation and entertainment system which, we both think, sucked. I'll probably write a separate blog post about that.

New car!

In my previous post Bye Bye Zoe, I talked about my last car, which was an electric car (a Renault Zoe) and how I had got it on a lease as an experiment to see how viable EVs were for me and to understand what it was like to own and use one.

That three-and-a-bit year long experiment came to a conclusion last week when the lease company came to take the Zoe back.

Since I posted it, I've had a few people ask me what I got to replace it. Did I go back to an ICE car?

The day my Zoe was taken away, my new car was delivered. I have it on a lease again for a number of reasons, but this will be the car I drive for the next 3 years or so.

And here it is, a shiny new BMW i3:

As you can see, it's another EV.

You see, three years of driving in the Zoe has made me realise how unpleasant and clunky ICE cars are. EVs are quiet, clean, and a pleasure to drive. And I really do not miss the visits to the petrol station.

So, why the BMW? The main reason was that the lease cost of the BMW, despite it being a more expensive car, was actually slightly cheaper than the Zoe. This is because lease costs are largely based on residual values of the vehicle at the end of the lease, and the BMW retains it's value more than the Zoe.

And, yes, I have it on a lease. The way I look at it, this stimulates EV usage. A huge number of the second hand cars on the road come are ex-fleet or lease cars. Most people don't get brand new cars and one of the complaints that I hear about EVs is that there are few "affordable" ones, by which people mean they can't get a second-hand one easily. People like me getting EVs on a lease eventually expands the pool of second-hand EVs in the long term.

Another point is EV technology is still in a relatively early phase of development. My new car has around twice the range of my old Zoe. In three years time, the battery technology is likely to improve significantly.

Plus it means I get a shiny new car every 3 years or so.

The BMW is a lovely car. I do miss the speed limiter that the Zoe had (the cruise control really isn't the same thing) and the passenger doors take a little getting used to, but in the week I've had it I'm very impressed so far.

The ride is comfortable and, if anything, it's even quieter than my Zoe was; I think the acoustic insulation against road/wind noise is superior. It's also a pocket-rocket! My Zoe was really responsive and quick-off-the-mark, but the i3 has noticeably better acceleration.

I also have the petrol range-extender. This is a onboard petrol generator, fed from a 9 litre tank, which kicks in when the battery is low to keep it charged. It can extend the range by around 70 miles and, of course, you can pop into a petrol station to refill it. I don't anticipate using it very much, but it's there if I need it. Again, the residual values factor meant the lease for the range-extender version was no more than the non-range-extender version.

One thing I love about the BMW is the remote control actually works!

The Zoe had the ability to check charge status and level, and to remotely set the preconditioning to heat or cool the car before a journey, but it never worked properly. The charge indicator worked, but it had an update resolution of about 20 minutes, which is useless when a charge may only take 30 mins. I could schedule or turn on preconditioning from the app, and it seemed to work, but the car never preconditioned.

The BMW app actually works. The charge status is relatively up to date, and the preconditioning (and other controls) show you the status, including communication with the car, so if it fails you know. You can also GPS locate the car, which is useful if you have parked in a large car park.

The bluetooth also works well. The Zoe bluetooth used to cut off the first few seconds of audio. In the last few months I've been using Android Auto with my phone. The bluetooth issue on the Zoe made it tricky to use as you always lost the first second or two of the audio responses. The BMW doesn't have this flaw.

However, I am a bit pissed off that BMW have withdrawn their plans to natively support Android Auto. Apparently it's because they want to "control the whole experience". What this actually means is they have committed themselves to a path of legacy, out of date infotainment systems. It's a shame as I would have happily paid them for an Android Auto add-on application.

One nice thing is that, when I have my phone connected, the voice control button activates Android Auto voice search, so I don't need to shout "OK Google" at it.

I will continue to use Android Auto on my phone and relegate the BMW infotainment system to being a bluetooth receiver.

Bye bye Zoe

Last week they came to collect my Renault Zoe electric car. The lease period ended a few months ago, and I had extended it for a few months until I had arranged the replacement.

I got the Zoe as a bit of an experiment, at a time when EVs were a bit of an unknown. I wasn't doing much mileage and we had another ICE car to use. I wanted to see if living with an EV was possible and sensible (for me) and also to gain an understanding of the issues and what is involved in EV ownership.

I'm glad I did it. I learned a lot.

In the last 3 1/2 years I did approximately 24.5k electric miles. Most of these miles were journeys of 20 miles or less. I probably did no more than 5 or 6 journeys of more than 100 miles in the car in that time. Partly because on the occasions we had longer journeys we used the ICE car. But those occasions were few and far between.

I've come to understand that "range anxiety" is hugely mitigated by home charging. Basically, despite having a limited range, my car was almost always full without me having to search out a fuel station. In fact, I remember having "range anxiety" far more often and regularly with my old ICE car.

I also got out of the habit of getting fuel for an ICE car, so on the few occasions in the last 3 1/2 years I've had to fill up an ICE vehicle, I found it was no longer something I could do without thinking about it. In fact I had to think quite hard to remember what to do. It all felt quite alien.

Charging an EV can vary from very straightforward to a complete ballache. Most of the time it is the easy, but when you are on a long journey and desperately need a mid-journey charge, and the chargers are all out of action, or are in use or, worse for a different charging network it can be very painful.

The biggest issue is the charging networks. Imagine all the parking lots required you to pre-register and receive a parking card by post before you could use them. You could drive to a new town and find nowhere to park even if you had registered with half a dozen major parking companies. That's what charging is often like. And it's ridiculous!

Why is it EV chargers don't have any way to pay at the charger, even if it's by installing an app and registering a payment card? If I can do that at a random car park, why can't I do it for a charging point?

The other issue is that none of the charging networks have 24x7 support. So if you find yourself stranded at a broken charger at 9pm on a Saturday night, you'll be on your own.

Whilst the charging network in the UK is now massively better than it was 3 1/2 years ago, there's still a long way to go.

On the positive side, I have learned how smelly and uncomfortable ICE cars are in comparison. When you drive an ICE car you get used to the vibrations, and accompanying slight rattles. You stop noticing the subtle, but pungent smells of petrol, oil, antifreeze, etc.  You get used to the noise of the engine. But these are all noticeable and, to me, distinctly unpleasant, to an EV driver after a few months of using an EV.

The drive quality in EVs is also noticeably smoother and more responsive. When I put my foot down to pull away from traffic lights in my Zoe, it responded immediately. I never noticed until now that even relatively high-performance ICE cars have a slight lag before they respond. The torque and acceleration at lower speeds (under 50 mph) were extremely good also, rivalling most other cars on the road

It was a little sluggish at higher speeds but, frankly, great acceleration at 60 mph is a nice to have. I know people say it's important at higher speeds "to get you out of trouble" but, if they really mean that, they are just admitting they are terrible drivers. In reality, how many accidents are caused by a car not being pokey enough at higher speed? I've never heard of one in all the years I have been a driver.

Talking of speed, one of the things the Zoe had, and which I will really miss, is the speed limiter. I could set set the limiter to, say, 30 mph in a built-up area, and know that I didn't have to worry about speeding. It was interesting how many people would tailgate me when I used the speed limiter, trying to bully me into going faster than the legal speed limit.

I had a bit of a love/hate relationship with the Zoe in-car navigation and entertainment system. It had no DAB (which for a car of it's era is strange) and the navigation system was a Tomtom variant, which worked OK, but was nowhere near as good as Waze or even simple Google Maps navigation. I find Tomtom to have a really clunky user-interface which requires far too many keypresses on a sluggish screen to be anything but frustrating to anyone who has used a modern sat nav system. It's also, IMO, dangerous to use when driving. Arguably, of course, you shouldn't mess with any sat nav when driving, and the Zoe Tomtom does give you warnings to not use it unless parked, but there are times when you really need to reroute, or do some other small route tweak, and the Tomtom really requires far too many focussed key presses.

But overall, I loved my little Zoe. It was a joy to drive, cheap to run, and I never tired of getting into it, even after more than 3 years. The experiment was mostly a huge success, and I'm not sorry I gave it a go.

But now the Zoe has to go back and it's time for a new car. I will miss it.

C'mon Google, it's time for a Gsuite Family plan

+Google  recently announced a new family plan covering Google Calendar, Keep, and Youtube. This is a fine idea except that it's only available to gmail users (that is, users whose email address ends in @gmail.com).

This makes it unavailable to many Google users, especially to those who are paying customers rather than using the free tier. This includes me and my family who are on a mixture of Gsuite paid and legacy "Apps for Domains" accounts.

Now I'm sure Google would want me and my family to switch over to using an @gmail.com account, but that ain't going to happen. On the other hand, I might just stop using Google for my private email altogether if we continue to be treated as second-class users.

You see the reason people like me have our own domains is that we want to keep it for life. We don't want to be held ransom by an ISP because they own our email address. Although Gmail is ISP agnostic, the same principle applies: I don't want to have to use Gmail just because I don't want to lose my email address. I want to use it because it's the best choice for me. When it stops being the best choice, I will move somewhere else and not have to worry about losing my email address.

I've had the same email address for more than 15 years and across several email service providers. That's not changing any time soon just because Google's product development are too inept to realise that shutting out these users is poor business. This is the same lack of clue that contributed strongly to the spectacular failure of Google Spaces.

Now I do realise that Google have shifted Google Apps from being a primarily consumer-centric tool to being a business and Enterprise tool, now rebranded as Gsuite. I am a paying Gsuite customer for my own business, and work with may others who have adopted GSuite for their business IT. It's a great service. I do also appreciate that the old "Apps for Domains" is, potentially, a competitor to this; a way for businesses to get access to hosted email on their domain without paying for the GSuite service.

However, I do believe there is a missed opportunity here, and that is a family oriented Gsuite plan. When I look at GSuite pricing I see this:

These are now my only options if I want to host my own domain email with Google. As a business I can see the benefit. As a personal user, that's simply not going to happen. To host my family's email with Google would cost me $25 per month. No Way!!!

Surely there has to be a way for Google to offer a more reasonably priced plan for families who wish to use their own domain. These are going to be customers who aren't going to accept an @gmail.com email address, and will go elsewhere if you don't give them a good option. And it's something they could upsell to existing free tier users to move them to becoming paying customers.

I think many families would be happy to pay somewhere between $5 and $10 per month to have a domain hosted email for their whole family (perhaps $5 per 5 users with a maximum limit).

Of course, the challenge is to prevent erosion of the business Gsuite business to people misusing the family plan deals for their business. There may be several approaches to this, including limiting the SLA's, and restricting some of the features (such as having a very limited Admin capability). Another option would be to limit the invoicing and subscription payment options (for instance, making it so subscription payments can only be done via Google Play).

Of course, some small business users will use it anyway, but these are probably the sorts of very small businesses or organisations who wouldn't pay $5 per month for the business grade GSuite anyway, so it could act as a gateway into GSuite for these users.

Pointless home automation

I've played around with Home Automation for more than 2 decades now, and have many automation systems in my home including lights, heating, curtains, blinds, CCTV, and integrated security alarm and have Sonos around my home for music. I have over 20 motion sensors around my home connected to my home automation systems and I've experimented with many technologies, systems, and applications in my time, and have a good idea of what is practical and what isn't.

One of the common things I come across is people saying "wouldn't automated control of your home based on motion be cool". Often some of the ideas are wacky or just half-baked. Mostly they are from people who think it sounds "cool" and haven't thought it through past the initial concept.

Recently I was pointed towards this Kickstarter project which takes a half-baked idea and tries to sell it to the sort of gullible people who are more interested in "cool" than practical or useful.

Firstly, I should state there is nothing new or innovative about what they are doing. Systems for home automation based on motion sensors have been around for two decades. I've had one in my home for over 17 years. I can use motion to control my lights, curtains, blinds, heating, and even the vents in my conservatory. I could also use it to control my music.

I haven't done most of these things because the concept is fundamentally broken in most of these cases.

I should point out I have tried most of these things, but I found they really didn't work. I stall have motion based automation, but it is restricted to heating and, to a limited extent, to lighting.

I will reiterate that this is not new. You can get motion based home automation based control systems from many, many vendors. Here are some: Cytech, LightwaveRF, Genius Hub, Owl, X10, Fibaro, Vera, Honeywell, Tado, and many others. To get a flavour, look at a typical Home Automation website like Vesternet. Many of these systems are inexpensive and extensible (and a lot more practical than a platform based solely on motion sensing, like Trajectio).

But more importantly, what they are proposing is largely impractical, or of limited practical value. In my experience motion-controlled home automation only works in a limited subset of applications. Here's my explanation of what works and what doesn't, and why:

Heating/HVAC
Heating/HVAC is a great application of motion based control in many ways as it's a high-hysteresis, low-information, high-predictability system.

By "high-hysteresis" I mean by that is that it takes a long time for a room to heat up and cool down so you generally don't want it turning on and off every few minutes. It's more sensible for heating to turn on for longer periods of time. It's also sensible to delay turning on heat until a number of minutes of motion has been detected: you don't want to turn the heating on for an hour in a room because someone popped in to grab their keys off the table. Delaying the heating start isn't also going to make much difference to people's comfort.

By "low-information" I mean that the heating system really has two states for a given room: on or off. Of course it can have a temperature, but that is usually set in advance for the room. In fact my heating system automatically adjusts based on preset separate temperatures for "occupied", "unoccupied" and "night".

By "high-predictability" I mean it's relatively easy to assess the required outcome based on the input: if people are occupying a room for a given period of time, they will want it heated (or cooled).

Of course, it depends on the room and people's movements, and I have found, in practice, you have to "fine tune" these timings to get close to the ideal. My heating system also learns over time, so if it sees motion in a room at the same time every day, it will start to pre-empt that and turn the heating on before time.

Also the outcome is not specific to the person who occupies the room: in general the heating is required to be turned on regardless of who is in the room.

Lighting
Lighting is less easy. It is a zero-hysteresis, low-information, low-predictability, moderate personalisation system.

"Zero-hysteresis" because lights go on and off instantly
"Low-information" because, in general, lights are on or off, but in some case you can also have dim levels

"Low-predictability" because it's not easy to know what is the best action to take based on the input. I quite often walk into neighbouring rooms and don't turn the light on because I'm just grabbing something from the side. It wouldn't be terrible if the system turned the light on for me, but it would be a waste of energy if it then kept the lights on for (say) another 10 minutes every time I went into a room for 30 seconds. In fact, I originally tried automating the lighting for most of my downstairs rooms and found that a lot of my lights would actually be on most of the time due to transient traffic from people and pets. I also found that, even when I spent a significant time in a room, the lights would turn off at random intervals because I wasn't moving enough to keep the motion sensor happy. And, unlike heating, you can't sensibly delay it turning on.

Trying to strike a balance between keeping lights on too long, and not enough is a far hard problem than the heating one, largely due to the difference in hysteresis and user expectations between the two systems

And different people have different expectations and requirements. If I come down for a drink at 4am, I don't want to be dazzled/surprised by lights coming on automatically. My daughter would probably injure herself if she didn't turn on at least one or two lights. When my wife goes into the room, she likes every possible light turned on. I often prefer just one.

Music
Music is close to impossible to do except in very simplistic cases (small houses with only one or two people with inflexible routines). It is a zero hysteresis, high-information, almost zero-predictability system.

"Zero hysteresis" because, with a system like Sonos, playback is pretty much instant.

"High information" because there are almost infinite choices of what the system could play when you factor in radio stations, playlists, and music services.

"Almost zero-predictability" because it's pretty much impossible to know whether the input even means that music should be played, yet alone what source to play, which playlist, etc. even in a home with only one person. With multiple occupants, it is literally impossible to predict whether, what, where, how loud, and how long to play music with any degree of accuracy.

Even if you take the view that you only "follow" occupancy around when music has been chosen and started, this is still highly unpredictable: if I'm at home alone, I might be quite happy to start music in the kitchen and have it follow me into the living room. When my wife is at home watching TV, I don't want that at all. Especially as the system cannot distinguish between occupants, so my wife shifting position on the sofa would, in many cases, be treated the same as me walking into that room.

Frankly the number of cases where music following occupancy would break and remedial action would be needed are enough that it's less effort to just manually group zones where needed. When I looked at whether I could, meaningfully, trigger Sonos using motion I found pretty much every predictable scenario I had was better implemented using alarms.

Summary
Save your money, don't invest in this nonsense. It's not new, it's not innovative, and some of the concepts are fundamentally impractical.

Google Spaces - nice idea but Dead On Arrival

At Google I/O last week, amongst a slew of other products Google announced Spaces which is a sort of lightweight social sharing tool which shares some synergy with tools like Slack by allowing sharing and interaction without being a full social network.
To understand it fully, you need to spend some time playing with it, but this article from Mike Elgin does a pretty good job of explaining what it is and how it works.

The problem is, the product is likely to be Dead on Arrival.

Why?

Not because the functionality is lacking, or the user-interface is poor, etc.

It's also not because people don't want to use it: most of the people I know who have heard of it want to try it out at least.

The problem is that Google are actually preventing a lot of their customers from using it.

Specifically, you need a gmail account to use it. If you are a Google for Work user, one of the original Google Apps for Domains users, or you simply have signed up for a Google account against your own email address (running on a non-Google email system) then you cannot access Spaces.

Now Google have a nasty habit of locking out non-gmail users from their new products, which is pretty insidious when you consider that many of these users are paying Google for their account. That is annoying enough when you find that a service like Inbox isn't available to you until several months after launch. But that only stops you, personally, from using the service.

But Spaces is a social product. It relies on network effect and the ability to be inclusive. The chances are that, even if you have a gmail account, one or more of your friends or family have a non-gmail Google account which means you can't include them in a space. Network effects mean that prohibiting some users from accessing it effectively stops most users from being able to use it.

As an example, I tried to create a family space. All of the family I wanted to invite had a Google account, but more than half had a non-gmail account.

This limits the scope of Spaces and, as soon as people realise they cannot use it themselves, or cannot invite the people they know, they will abandon it. As I have.

Now, I'm sure Google will, eventually, enable access to non-gmail users, but that is likely to be several months away. By which time, it will be too late.

People will have moved on and Spaces will be a distant memory of yet another Google product that failed due to lack of execution.