So, to plan a trip accurately, I have to go sit in the car, because that’s the only source of truth for charger availability?
That would be rather stupid of them, especially in rural areas where their chosen carrier (AT&T) has no coverage. I assume in non-rural areas where AT&T isn’t even a carrier that’s available they roam the cars on GSM to whomever is there.
Noticed some other things too, like the fact that the WiFi in the cars will attach to your house and do vehicle updates via that. For rural users, almost every possible carrier is metered in some way either via bandwidth caps or directly, and their assumption that anyone even wants their car doing software updates through their house is questionable.
For me, I’d have to know exactly how much data they planned to use and when to make sure caps weren’t busted so I wouldn’t let the car attach to the house, and AT&T is zero coverage inside my garage with the metal doors down. Anywhere between here and the city, about a half hour away, is such poor coverage on any network other than Verizon, that the car had better have VERY good error handling and restart capabilities on downloads and all of its data connected apps, because most smart phone apps even though they give lip service to error handling, crash regularly going up and down the hills and in and out of coverage on iPhones, anyway.
Very very few software engineers today have any clue whatsoever how to code for network outages that happen every 60 seconds or so on mobile. They live in places where that doesn’t happen.
Hell, the phone itself can’t even keep up with them, and regularly gets confused and gives up trying to switch bands and modes to find a reasonable signal.
Verizon is mildly better with at least three solid “drop” points between home and town, including at the end of my driveway where my WiFi peters out, 3G only coverage three miles over the first hill, and a complete black hole where NO carrier signal reaches into near the place where my old friend made his off-airport landing earlier this year. That spot has zero GSM coverage from AT&T, T-Mobile, and zero CDMA style coverage from Sprint, and can only barely hold a 1G network call on Verizon. Then the next drop spot on all of them is a ten mile stretch of rolling hills where the only signal on any of them is while “hilltopping” and it comes and goes every 60 seconds or so. Verizon can barely hold a call through there. Nobody else can.
And frankly, the phones flat out lie in there. If you run continuous data tests or make an actual phone call you see and hear where the massive holes in coverage are. If you make no calls or use no data, the iPhone will happily lie to you and never once say “No service” except near the airplane site by the riverbed. In that location, Verizon will roam to rural carrier Viaero but all data will be 1XRTT speed or fail completely, and voice will kick you back off of the roaming network at the slightest peep of native Verizon signal being heard by the phone.
So yeah, another flipping “smart” device to manage and deal with it whining about data coming and going through that area of my commute daily would be intensely annoying. Let alone modern software coders just assuming data works everywhere all of the time and all their screwups can just be fixed every few days with another software push with little to no effort to actually write things correctly the first time.
In months where Apple or Microsoft push large multi-gig updates to every damn device in the house, the bandwidth costs jump in real dollars here. It also ties up the home bandwidth to the point where nothing else can get done unless you go turn WiFi off on all the bandwidth sucking devices. At least MSFT has their working, but ill-advised sharing tech that allows one machine to share downloads with other machines on the network. If one has proper WiFi client separation turned on, it doesn’t work, of course. All devices have to download their own copy.
Apple has always done that, other than their god-awful “Server” software that acts as a downloaded file proxy and also screws up the networking of any machine it’s loaded on. Not to mention the thing does absolutely nothing for iPhones.
Anyway. Mixing all of that lack of bandwidth rural reality with my CAR needing to phone home? No thanks. The last thing I need or want my car doing is downloading crap at home and squashing the bandwidth that’s barely able to handle a single compressed HD quality video stream.
I’ve seen numerous times where the iPhone cellular chipset is so confused about going in and out of coverage on the way to town, it simply gives up and never finds the network again, even when you pass the spot where LTE coverage is truly useable well into the city and doesn’t drop out anymore. Would be fun to see if the chipset is the culprit or crappy OS coding.
But definitely don’t want to mess with helping a car that’s confused about it all. It’s bad enough a native cellular phone device can’t figure it out.
