> And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally.

Also I wouldn’t want to disagree with you outright, there are still a few important German companies in the IT sector (or related): Siemens, Infineon, Deutsche Telekom, Bechtle, TeamViewer come to my mind.

What Siemens exemplifies is that the strength of German industry is not pure software, but high-tech machinery. While Siemens and most of its spin-offs are doing somewhat okay, the stocks of its spin-off Siemens Energy have risen by ~700 % in the last 3 years.

Not IT, but I think Leica has the best camera design. At around the Leica M6 they decided that the design was done, and every future M camera is essentially an M6 clone.

My 992.2 has AA/CarPlay, and an outstanding user interface, with a nice mix of configurable displays and physical buttons. Fairly certain it is a top 100 product in it's market.

> VW? "No one needs Apple Car or Android. We are the world wide Nr. 1 in car business, what does a computer company know about cars? hahaha"

VW was supporting CarPlay from launch and the VW MEB dash was on all pro material of Apple for ages.

Apple Car and Android Auto are on VW cars since a decade.

Comments about this dreadful UI/UX on german cars feels really decade old.

In any case I rent cars quite often, mostly get Korean, Japanese and German cars with few rare US ones, and I really don't see those differences across the board software wise.

They all suck, they are all slow, clunky and unintuitive.

BMW's latest infotainment despite being intimidating for first time users is quite decent and intuitive compared to the horrors I saw from other German car makers.

Actually... My 2016 Skoda Rapid let's me update the map for free through a user removable SD card. Pretty great UX compared to every other car I've ever had the displeasure of having to navigate with. Software is nothing special otherwise, but gets the job done. Car is 95% physical buttons through.

Also, my 2020 Mii Electric is 100% physical buttons. Pretty great.

Frankly, I am wary of anything but VWAG at this point.

VW? "No one needs Apple Car or Android. We are the world wide Nr. 1 in car business, what does a computer company know about cars? hahaha"

I have no idea what you are talking about. I think all recent VW cars (since 2018) support Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. CarPlay works great with our VW ID.3.

Also, since a refresh a few years ago, the in-car system has had great UX/UI. We are perfectly happy with it and this is after almost two decades of iOS + having tried the systems of various different cars (including NIO).

We do not have anything to complain about, except more physical buttons would be nice, but the latest generation is bringing them back (e.g. the new ID.3 NEO). We are considering upgrading to the ID.3 NEO soon (or maybe Hyundai).

Total nonsense you’re spewing here. Especially for it being very country-biased in a world where giants like Volkswagen and BMW are highly international.

https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/innovation/innovation-network/te...

For example, BMW tech offices exist in Silicon Valley and Shanghai, among other locations.

German cars have been very well-regarded in terms of their automotive interfaces by the automotive press and reviewers as well as customers.

Watch any Doug DeMuro [1] video and on the subject of infotainment systems and you’ll see that BMW and Mercedes are up toward the top in terms of usability and customization.

You’ll see brands with good technology reputations like Kia refuse to put a GPS map in the gauge cluster while the Germans have been doing it for a decade plus now.

I will also remind us all that Mercedes beat Tesla to market on level 3 autonomy.

The only companies beating the German brands on tech are EV startups in China and companies like Tesla, but of course those companies are doing so mainly because they are replacing physical buttons with that technology, and generally integrating a lot of gimmmicks that are low hanging fruit compared to the things they can’t replicate as well like driving platform dynamics.

[1] I choose Doug DeMuro for this because he’s somewhat “in the middle” on technology. He prefers touch screens over purist physical controls for many functions but isn’t wildly biased toward them or incredibly tech savvy like the kind of person who blindly embraces Teslafication. He’s the kind of reviewer that will miss the “but actually there’s a setting for that” solution for his nitpicks, effectively showing the car as an layperson who isn’t techbrained but also isn’t your dad who wishes the screen was gone entirely.

100% agreed. I think it's safe to say that good software UX is incompatible with the way German hardware companies are generally run.

It's the same old story about how hardware companies can't do software UX, except extra amplified because of the strong emphasis on hierarchy, formal degrees and their, errm, heavy processes.

Already happening, best example is worldwide grounding of Boeing 737 MAX. It was China who triggered it, not US authorities (protecting US corporation).

Similar thing with batteries on airplanes, tube trains, ferries and underground garages. China cares about fire hazard, other countries care about ideology.

It’s funny you say that because the China “anti regulatory effect” of the 90s-2000s also had a great impact on quality of life for the world in its own way

It seems cyclical. Maybe the people who stand up for good UX retire and it takes a few years for a company to realize that they're going in a bad direction.

Mazda used to have do the best most user friendly controls and bragged about it as a differentiator... but the new cx-5 is a touch screen-only monstrosity

Anyone exec wanting to move away from touchscreens and back to buttons would have flashbacks to Steve Balmer mocking the new iPhone and stabbing his fingers at the touch panel and making a fool of himself for eternity.

I have an Audi Q7 and a model X. Don't miss the physical controls of the Q7 at all. Given a choice between Tesla software and Android Auto, I'll take Tesla's.

Then again, I'm someone who likes the yoke steering, and invested a few weeks acclimating to the lack of steampunk turn stalks.

For physical controls, it always comes down to "What did you want to do?" There are very few that are actually needed.