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Ya that’s a good point. Wireless CarPlay would really only be feasible if the car came with a wireless charger. Which is also becoming more commonplace.

Not really. Use Wireless CarPlay for short trips, wired CarPlay for long ones. Wireless CarPlay solves the hassle of getting your phone out and plugging in when you want directions for something a few minutes away.
 
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Who here is actually a fan of UConnect at all...anyone? All I hear is crickets. My 2019 Jeep Cherokee has it and it is terrible. Slow to switch screens, CarPlay continuously crashes, never remembers the volume I set it to, etc...

And auto companies are terrible at security (I'm looking at you key fobs and your lack of industry standard encryption)...why would I trust them to build v5 on android?
 
I don't have a Fiat Chrysler, but on my Toyota Prius, I was able to download & install a software update for the audio system. Didn't add CarPlay, but fixed a lot of bugs I experienced. I don't know if Chrysler has a similar program.
Where did you find Toyota updates?
 
Assuming the form factor remains the same as previous UConnect gens (8.4"), it's disappointing that it will be limited to newer vehicles only.

The carplay updated UConnect 4 modules are fully compatible with previous year vehicles (speaking specifically about the Jeep Cherokee in this case) and can be purchased through third party sources.

Mazda did a great thing a year back by offering upgrades at the dealership for a few hundred bucks, and no matter how many times I tweeted at Jeep, they never responded on the subject of potentially offering this service. Kind of silly considering the money they're missing out on.
My 2017 Jeep Grand Cherokee has the older Uconnect system while other FCA vehicles got the newer one in 2016. Its really disappointing that they don’t upgrade infotainment systems for a cost.
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I wonder if Fiat Chrysler will offer an upgrade from Uconnect 4 to Uconnect 5 for my wife's 2018 Jeep Renegade? I found a Uconnect upgrade site here, but it appears to be only for obtaining minor updates, but not major upgrades.
I highly doubt it, probably has different hardware. I know for my 2017, I can upgrade to Uconnect 4 by buying a new head unit from eBay but not from FCA.
 
The last thing I want is to be radiated in my own car - especially given research that shows that EMF radiation gets bounced around and amplified within the vehicle. In some cars, I get a pain in my ear from it. Hopefully, the wi-fi component will be a removable module, and one can rip it out.
You believe low energy radio waves are causing physical pain?
Even although this sort of stuff has been debunked ad nauseam?

You’re not sitting next to a military radar dish, the energy and frequencies involved are never going to cause any physiological effects.
Pretty sure Bluetooth is measured in mW and WiFi is a maximum of a Watt and both are point sources so the little energy from them is quickly spread out, beam forming changes things a little but the point still stands.

Edit: I have an MSc in EEE.
 
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I've got a vent mount and a pre-run lightning cable that I plug in each time that tops off the battery in my iPhone as I drive. Due to the magnets in my case for the vent mount, I cannot wirelessly charge so would find wireless CarPlay not as convenient in that respect.

I'm sure you would still have a wired option though. Personally I use a Proclip mount that incorporates the lightning connector so I just plop my phone in whenever I get into the car. I've always dreamed of wireless carplay, specifically dreaming of not having to take my phone out of my pocket when driving. But in using wired carplay I've realized that will never be a full solution for all apps. Take Waze for example, you only get a limited amount of information on the vehicle carplay screen and to access stuff like traffic reports and a route list you still need to view the phone. Sure you can get away with Waze only using the carplay screen, but it's much more useful with the phone being open on my dashboard.
 
Where did you find Toyota updates?

You just have to go to the website on your computer, select your model & year, download the appropriate software to a usb drive, and connect the drive to your car. It upgrades the system fairly automatically.

Like I said, it didn't add CarPlay, but it did fix a few bugs I had. Like if I was listening to music from my phone, turning on/off the headlights would turn off the audio completely. Also, it added which track number I was on (eg 16/24), as well show album cover art over BlueTooth, when it only showed that when I plugged my phone into my car's USB before the update. Kinda weird, too, since the software on my car was version 1.x before the update, and went to 5.2. Just curious why the software wasn't updated during regular maintenance.
 
Because they don't have the hardware - wireless CarPlay requires Wi-Fi

What year is it that you can spend $20+K on a device and not have wifi? This is embarrassing for the auto companies that they won't spend the pennies to even slightly future proof their vehicles.

People have constantly accused Nintendo of being a bunch of luddites, but Nintendo has had wifi standard in their $150 budget devices for the last 15 years.

Wifi has been a standard feature of Tesla vehicles for all 13 years that Tesla has produced vehicles in. Tesla made the competition look like dinosaurs then and it's just getting increasingly absurd that the "competition" still hasn't adopted features that have been standard in literally every other industry for decades.

I woke up the other day and my car had learned how to send and receive text messages - no dealers or fees or haggling involved. A few months before that, it learned how to drive across a parking lot to pick me up in the rain - again, painless.
 
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What year is it that you can spend $20+K on a device and not have wifi?

A $20k diamond ring or $30k Rolex doesn't have Wi-Fi.

Wi-Fi in a car was a stupid idea that carmakers put in because they were too cheap to put in cellular. Ford did this years ago to compete against GM OnStar. As I recall, it did absoultely nothing. If you bought one specific LTE dongle, you could hook your smartphone up via Wi-Fi to... LTE.

I had Wi-Fi in a current MY Nissan rental. It does absolutely nothing again but upload spyware analytics data.

You don't have Wi-Fi when you're out driving, and when you're home you don't need to do stuff in your car.
 
Thanks, nothing listed for my 2015 Sienna. I have some bugs that I am surprised have not been addressed as well as artist photos that are totally wrong that I guess come from the Gracenote db. I asked about Entune/Gracenote updates last time it was serviced and they assured me that they always check, but I assume it is checked as often as yours was. ;)
 
@canonical I’m with you. Don’t hold your breath for anything removable though. Best thing we can hope for is a setting to disable it, and hope it really does disable it.
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Who here is actually a fan of UConnect at all...anyone? All I hear is crickets. My 2019 Jeep Cherokee has it and it is terrible.

I’ve got a 2019 Grand Cherokee. The interface is a big fat turd. I have thousands of music files on my iPhone from my music collection, and every time I plug my phone in and try to browse via the heady it, i see everything tripled. As in, 3 copies of everything. Its slow moving around from screen to screen. And the navigation is backwards as hell. I don’t know why it asks so many questions. Why can’t it just be like Apple or google maps?

I end up just finding it on my phone and sending it via Uconnect.
 
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Ya that’s a good point. Wireless CarPlay would really only be feasible if the car came with a wireless charger. Which is also becoming more commonplace.

My new car* (next month) will have wired CarPlay. But for many of the short journeys I take, I'm sure just keeping the phone in my short pocket would be far more convenient.

Toyota, dragging their heels as usual. At least they finally got on board and started accomodating CarPlay. But, boy, it's taken an age.
 
What year is it that you can spend $20+K on a device and not have wifi? This is embarrassing for the auto companies that they won't spend the pennies to even slightly future proof their vehicles.

People have constantly accused Nintendo of being a bunch of luddites, but Nintendo has had wifi standard in their $150 budget devices for the last 15 years.

Wifi has been a standard feature of Tesla vehicles for all 13 years that Tesla has produced vehicles in. Tesla made the competition look like dinosaurs then and it's just getting increasingly absurd that the "competition" still hasn't adopted features that have been standard in literally every other industry for decades.

I woke up the other day and my car had learned how to send and receive text messages - no dealers or fees or haggling involved. A few months before that, it learned how to drive across a parking lot to pick me up in the rain - again, painless.
It's odd to go on a rant about how great Tesla is in a thread about CarPlay, imo, since they still refuse to support it.

They didn't have WiFi chips because they had no reason to have WiFi - my microwave doesn't have bluetooth and I'm not all bent out of shape about it. Tesla's had WiFi from the beginning because that's how they download updates.
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Who here is actually a fan of UConnect at all...anyone? All I hear is crickets. My 2019 Jeep Cherokee has it and it is terrible. Slow to switch screens, CarPlay continuously crashes, never remembers the volume I set it to, etc...

And auto companies are terrible at security (I'm looking at you key fobs and your lack of industry standard encryption)...why would I trust them to build v5 on android?
Agreed, UConnect sucks - I pulled mine out and put in an Alpine. On Feb 29 in 2016 the one in my car would chain crash on startup until I changed the date because of some poor leap year handling code. It was pretty stupid, and I'm sure it would happen again this year if I still had it installed. Just one of the many examples of UConnect sucking.

I've never understood why Apple and Google or even Microsoft never got to write the OS in cars - seems like a perfect place for it - CarPlay/Android Auto are wonky stopgaps. Car companies are too controlling about that for some reason.
 
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U I looks just ok from pics. could be better
car infotainment u i 's have always needed improvement and still have a long way to go
"we have the technology..."
 
The Connect 8.4 on my 2019 Wrangler works flawlessly. Its very responsive and the graphics are crisp and they look appropriate for my car. CarPlay is OK, but the bluetooth interface for the music is actually nicer. I only use CarPlay for when I use Waze. I don't see how they could add a 12inch screen to it, but probably the hardware will be upgraded.
 
Based on android?

AcademicValidBarnowl-size_restricted.gif
 
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Now all FCA has to do is make their uConnect app on phone work with the vehicles and they are set... lol
I'd say they have a little more work to do than that. A couple important ones just off the top of my head:
1: Make cars that people actually want to buy.
2: Make cars that don't breakdown the second you drive them off the dealer lot.
3: Avoid bankruptcy.

Sadly, they've been failing on all three for generations.
 
I'd say they have a little more work to do than that. A couple important ones just off the top of my head:
1: Make cars that people actually want to buy.
2: Make cars that don't breakdown the second you drive them off the dealer lot.
3: Avoid bankruptcy.

Sadly, they've been failing on all three for generations.
I think maybe you should check out this generation of FCA, you’d be surprised.
 
I don't see why companies can't retro older cars. Mazda did a retro upgrade, but not wireless. If it has the hardware, why not program it and retro it? Sure maybe Uconnect 1 (if they had that numbering scheme) can't support it, but 3 or 4? I don't see how much wireless CarPlay can be that much more demanding than wired. Then again, they just want to sell you a new car.
For a lot of car companies, the calculation is, for every dozen (or some number of) customers who would like to upgrade the electronics and can't, there'll be one who is nudged into replacing their older car, and that's a big win for the company. And there's the cost of keeping yet more extra stuff in the their dealerships, and older hardware in cars may not be compatible or capable of being upgraded. In addition, car companies tend to have this snobbish, "no, only we know best what our customers want, we've designed the perfect dashboard", attitude, which is why some held out so long against CarPlay and similar for so long (while we suffered through their mediocre proprietary systems - my last car was very determined to present me with its own elaborate and mediocre voice menu system, wanting me to jump through many hoops to set up a phonebook in the car, rather than just being a conduit to let me talk to Siri - it was outdated thinking).

Sooner or later, some car company will figure out to put in an iPad-quality touchscreen in the dash, connected to a module under the dash that's designed from the start to be easily replaceable (with a nice box-shaped space with connections to power, antennas, speakers, the touchscreen, and the car's bus, and a well-defined protocol for what it can mess with), and then advertise it as a feature, that with their new system, you can come into the dealer and upgrade your "infotainment and control" system the same way you can get a new set of tires (with lesser prices for software upgrades and higher prices for swapping to a newer, more capable module - but it'd be plug-n-play for them to replace, rather than something that was hard-coded for a particular model/year). Presumably they can make a case for keeping the modules proprietary (or rigidly licensed) if it can use the car's bus to control other parts of the car (climate control and more). They'd need to be able to figure that they'd make more on selling a lot of upgrade modules every year than they'd lose on the handful of cars that a few people wouldn't be nudged into buying because of aging electronics in the current cars.

If one manufacturer does this, and achieves visible success with it, then others will folllow.
 
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The last thing I want is to be radiated in my own car - especially given research that shows that EMF radiation gets bounced around and amplified within the vehicle. In some cars, I get a pain in my ear from it. Hopefully, the wi-fi component will be a removable module, and one can rip it out.

This is news to me. Do you have any links to reputable sources validating this claim or is this just tinfoil hat paranoia?
 
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