Some keyboards also come with software that lets you disable or remap keys. I turned Caps Lock into something more useful to me, for instance.

They and Tesla are the holdouts. GM only recently killed phone mirroring but those two never had it.

I will not buy from any of them.

That doesn’t really make sense considering it’s a charging standard and the entire point of a standard is to avoid problems like this. Hopefully it just means I need a software update for the car.

Which VW has been very silent about. I’d feel better if they explained what the issue is and what needs to be done to fix it, even if they say it will take time to fix.

It doesn’t work right. I have an ID.4 and even though my local charger is listed on the Tesla site as being CCS compatible with an adapter, selecting my car and claiming I have an adapter still fails to make the site show up in the listings.

The car has a CCS port and has been tested to work with the magic dock by testers, so it’s compatible. The app needs work.

VW is strangely silent on this, which is making me think that my next car will not be a VW. That, and Ford got Apple Maps EV routing working and I still can’t get it to see my car.

This is how I did it, using my Mac laptop. You can’t do it with the phone app, but a Mac or Windows computer can.

https://gist.github.com/gboudreau/94bb0c11a6209c82418d01a59d958c93

Honda’s sensing system will read shadows from bridges as obstructions in the road that it needs to brake for. It’s easy enough to accelerate out of the slowdown, but I was surprised to find that there is apparently no radar check to see if the obstruction is real.

My current vehicle doesn’t have that issue, so either the programming has been improved or the vendor for the sensing systems is a different one (different vehicle make, so it’s entirely possible).

It was bad, yes. Not debating that, and I’m glad that the design was changed and existing owners could get the shifter replaced at no cost to them.

However, it’s frustrating to see that people so often ignore recalls and then are injured or killed in a way that would have been avoided had they done the free recall. I usually feel sad when I think of deaths like that because the death is just so final and was easy to avoid.

People have recently died to exploding airbag inflators, even though the Takata recall has been in the news for years, and even if a vehicle has had multiple owners, the publicity means that chances are that the current owner has seen at least a headline about it. Yet clearly people aren’t getting the recall work done, and they’re dying because of it.

Is it a hassle to take a car in for repair? Yep. Had to have mine serviced due to a recall for something that hadn’t manifested on my car in my own use. But given that the alternative could have been very bad (the car’s software was updated to ensure that it would shift into park more reliably when there was a rollaway risk, if the driver didn’t do so manually), I dealt with having a loaner for a day when the update took longer than expected.

Designers sometimes make bad choices. Regulations are written in blood, it’s said, because it’s often tragedy that leads to changes. But I don’t think it very likely that shifters like that will make it past design reviews again. It’ll be some other bad decision that causes the next big recall.

Both of those things have been acknowledged and will be changed. Cars have very long design cycles, though.

The ID.7 has the new sliders as does the facelift of the ID.4.

Yes, there’s other problems, but this one is already on the way out.

That vehicle had a recall out to replace the badly-designed shifter. It was ignored.

The fix would have been free.

Neither company has a monopoly anywhere but the mix of Android and iOS varies greatly by region.

Thankfully, most cars that support phone projection support both, probably because of that fact. Easier to develop a single configuration that works for everyone.

Android Automotive (the car OS) does support phone projection (Android Auto and CarPlay).

From what I’ve seen in reviews of cars that have it, Automotive is pretty solid, and I’d take an EV that had it as long as CarPlay were an option. (So no GM for me).

They can’t gather data from my use of the built-in apps if I don’t use them.

I love my 2022. Wish there were an actual control for the wheel heater (added for 2024) but I’ve memorised the tap sequence to toggle it and have it set to turn on automatically, along with the seat heater, when it’s cold enough.

It’ll drive the same but have less range, like all EVs do. Batteries lose efficiency when they’re cold. Precondition the cabin before you unplug for the day, and that will help some.

World of Warcraft would benefit from this. Local processing power is quite up to the task these days, and it’s jarring to see your name on the screen but the audio says “champion” or something similar.

Maybe in 11.0…

This is one of two options if you like Ultium (GM) but want to use phone mirroring. Honda has refused to pull CarPlay and Android Auto like GM is doing.

The other is the Acura variant of this same vehicle, though of course it has Acura design cues.

I like both, though for now we already have an AWD ID.4 that we love. I’ll be looking at these, though, for the future if we need to replace the VW. Hopefully they’ll have amber rear signals (the VW doesn’t) and allow temperature display in Celsius (my past Honda didn’t).

I feel like I have it easy as a WoW player — we’ve got wowhead, which is partially datamining and partially crowdsourced (and has its own newsgathering staff) and it’s always been very helpful when trying to figure something out that isn’t self-evident (quests with erroneous instructions that weren’t corrected during beta testing, stuff like that).

I think they still do that. They’ll probably have in-depth reviews of iOS 17 (and its watch and iPad counterparts) on Monday or Tuesday and Sonoma coverage a week after that, so we’ll know for sure soon.