Beijing 2016: BYD’s CarPad is a big smartphone mirror
New in-car tech really does bring the smartphone experience into the car
If you were to ask me to name two of the biggest influences on in-car HMI of recent times I’d say the Tesla Model S and its 17-inch touchscreen would certainly be one, while consumer desire for ‘an experience like my smartphone’ is the other.
That latter one has caused all kinds of problems as marketing teams have pushed through the need for a touchscreen, which engineers and design teams have then flooded with content and menus as they’ve stripped out physical controls.
Many in-car touchscreens give you a bad, second-rate smartphone experience today, which is perhaps why customers clamour to simply have their smartphone screen mirrored in the car, and the opportunity to offer something better seems there for Apple and Google’s taking.
But BYD’s next generation of ‘CarPad’ interface shown in on-stand demonstrators at Beijing unashamedly takes the smartphone mirroring concept to an extreme — using an Android device, and throwing content at a vast, portrait-format screen that’s about an iPad Pro-sized 13-inches in size.
It works well — the size of the screen is used intelligently, buttons and apps come across in large, easy-to-press sizes and in high fidelity. It’s far from the last word in the future of in-car HMI, but it does serve to show that here too, the Chinese brands are moving forward in leaps and bounds.
With leading electronics brands Huawei, Xiaomi and Lenovo impressing in the consumer electronics sector, perhaps the established auto industry needs not only to be watching Silicon Valley, but also China when it comes to the future of in-car tech.