First party operating systems always seem to be terrible.
Up to now, I believe, these systems were not first-party but built by the manufacturers of the infotainment systems. Now, Mercedes is taking this in-house to get it right and integrate it with the rest of the far more properly?
I don’t really have any more faith in Mercedes than I do with infotainment systems.
I don’t doubt that they have amazing org knowledge around integrating data systems, but how are they with… any of the myriad of other components of operating systems?
I worked for a German car company for a little bit, in a team responsible for a similar system: https://www.srcbeat.com/2023/08/sbt/
Will it collect data about my sexual activity?
They should bring better UX engineers into the boat.
The old M.B os and its touch interface (in combination with the physical touchpad) is a horror even for digital matured persons.
To me it felt like they dont want you to operate the cars system during driving and let everything taking care by the bullshit voice recognition.
Voice recognition is the most infuriating replacement for physical buttons.
Even with (more) UX engineers, it was incredibly difficult to get any development done. When I was in this space, management and contractors were incredibly entrenched playing political games to grow teams even bigger to get more funding. There was nobody with any authority using the thing end-to-end saying “this sucks”.
It has to be like this.
Most of the stuff I try out I often come back to ask myself, did those engineers ever use their developed shit on their own?
and then they’ll turn around and charge you $5 to turn your ac on