This Interview With GM’s Software Head Reveals The Fundamental Mistake GM Made By Rejecting CarPlay and Android Auto

We’ve talked about GM’s decision to reject the use of wildly popular mobile phone projection systems, like Apple’s CarPlay and Android Auto, on car infotainment systems before, and we thought it was a pretty terrible decision. But, since then, I’ve had the opportunity to read this in-depth interview between The Verge’s Decoder podcast and GM’s big man for software, Baris Cetinok, who has a title that feels downright royal in its length: Senior Vice President of Software and Services Product Management, Program Management and Design. After reading the interview and getting a bit more insight into Cetinok’s reasoning and GM’s stated goals and design philosophy, I realized I really should reconsider my position. I now think it’s a misguided and maybe a bit arrogant of a decision. I better explain.

First, I should note that I think Cetinok is an extremely accomplished person, and seems like an extremely intelligent person. There’s a reason he has the impressive position he does. He’s worked at Microsoft and Amazon and Apple – he spent about a decade at Apple. The man clearly knows his stuff. He came to GM a few months after they made their decision to reject the use of CarPlay and Android Auto, so we can’t pin that decision on him. This could be just the hand he was dealt, and he’s making the best of it.

That said, what I have a problem with is the reasoning used to justify why GM doesn’t want people to have, essentially, the software they actually want in cars. There’s an element of truth to the reasoning given, but I think that the approach to that core bit of insightful accuracy is being interpreted in precisely the opposite way that actually makes sense. Here’s what I mean; this is an excerpt from the interview, emphasis mine:

[Cetinok]: Because there was a belief and a hypothesis, which I genuinely believe in, that we are best positioned and owe it to our customers to create the most deeply integrated experience that you can create with the vehicle. We are not shipping devices with just monitors; we’re not a monitor company. We’re building beautifully designed, complete thoughts and complete convictions. We say, “This car is designed to do the following things awesomely.” This is Silverado, this is what it stands for and this is what it does. Let’s get to it.

When you want to create something so seamless, it’s hard to think about getting into a car and going, “Okay, so I’m doing highway trailering, but let me flip to a totally different user interface to pick my podcast. By the way, it’s a single app-obsessed interface — it’s still hard to believe. So I pick my podcast, flip back to trailering. Oh, now I can also do Super Cruise trailering. Let me manage that. Then, wait, we’re now getting into potentially Level 3, Level 4 autonomy levels that should be deeply integrated with talking to the map where the lanes lie. But wait a minute, the map that I’m using doesn’t really talk to my car.” 

As a product person, you’ll never do that to yourself because it’s literally like, “Oh my God, I made my life so hard to create amazingly seamless experiences.” At some point, you need to make that bold decision and say, “I am not going to try to accommodate and figure out how to make all of these work. I’m going to just burn the bridges and burn the ships and commit.” We are going to create a deeply vertical, harmonious experience that works across the vehicle that is optimized for my vehicle.

Okay, that’s a big chunk, but I think it’s all needed to see where Cerinok is coming from. There’s a couple of things I want to point out here, but the key part is this concept of “seamlessness.” Cerinok describes the process of using native car applications on the screen, like trailering, and then having to switch to, say, CarPlay to pick a podcast, and then switch back for other car-related functions. That’s not seamless. And seamlessness implies that one of these interfaces is the “interloper,” is the one breaking the seamlessness of the user experience. It’s clear that Cerinok believes that the car’s native UX is the baseline experience, and its CarPlay or Android Auto that’s interrupting.

The problem is he has this completely backwards.

A seamless experience is absolutely a good thing! The problem is that a car’s UX does not get to be the baseline of that seamless experience, because people live most of their lives outside of cars. There’s a bit of carmaker arrogance happening here in the assumption that the car experience is what needs to be seamless. It doesn’t. It’s just not important. What is important is keeping seamless the user experience the person driving the car has been experiencing all day: their phone.

On an average day, people spend, what, an hour or so in their cars? Two hours? Out of, say 16 plus hours of wakefulness? So why should the one-eighth of wakeful, interactive time be the one that gets to be the default interface? It shouldn’t, nobody wants that! People want to continue with the interface and experience they’ve been using all day long, seamlessly in their cars. If someone texted them an address, they want to be able to poke one finger at it and directions appear. They want to continue with the same music playlists they’ve been listening to all day. They want the same reminders to pop up or whatever else they’ve already gone through the trouble of putting in their phone. They just want their shit, displayed on the car’s screen. And that’s fine.

And when Cerinok says “By the way, it’s a single app-obsessed interface — it’s still hard to believe” I don’t get what his problem is there – does anyone want to be looking at multiple applications on their center-stack screen while driving? No, fuck no! And besides, it’s not really single-app based. There’s things running in the background: music plays while you’re looking at the map, reminders appear or text message notifications show up to be read. There’s multiple things going on, but you sure as hell don’t need to be looking at them all.

I also don’t really get the examples Cerinok picked when he described the issues of lack of seamlessness. A trailering app? Why would that need to be constantly on-screen while driving? Shouldn’t most of that software be working invisibly behind the scenes to keep the trailer stable? Same with Super Cruise and the autonomy levels he mentioned: what’s the on-screen UX for those? For the Level 4 autonomy he mentions there, the car is doing all of the work of driving (in a constrained area). So why not look at something else on that screen?

This is also a good reason to keep certain car controls, like lights and wipers and HVAC stuff and opening the damn glovebox, off of screens. Not everything needs to be crammed into a menu on a GUI.

Cerinok has the general right idea that people would prefer a seamless user experience overall. Of course they would. Nobody is really all that eager to learn a whole new interface when they already have a perfectly good one they’re already using all day long. GM – and every other carmaker – needs to accept that fundamentally, no one really gives a shit about a carmaker’s home-grown UX. They just want something simple and intuitive and for all of the stuff they already use their phone for – navigation, messaging, phone, music, podcasts, texting, email, whatever – they just want to keep using the same thing they use nonstop as it is.

I know there’s an ego kick there, the realization that no one really cares about the careful and beautiful car-specific UX that teams of talented designers and engineers have crafted, but that’s just how it is. I’m sorry. If there’s car-specific data that needs to be communicated to the driver, the best bet is to find a way to pass that data through the UX the people already are using. It can be done, but carmakers like GM first need to accept that when it comes to on-screen UX, no one cares about what they think.

So, seamlessness is great. It just that nobody wants GM or any other carmaker to be the ones to decide what that is.

Sorry about that! Best get used to it.

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