Cheap CarPlay Head Units Are Some Of The Weirdest Things You Can Buy For Your Car

We live in weird times. I know there are so many ways to back up this bold statement – cultural, political, environmental, whatever – but I’m saying that specifically about the state of aftermarket car tech. And, even more specifically, aftermarket car audio/infotainment tech. Want to get even more specific? Sure you do, it’s fun! In that case, I’m talking about cheap aftermarket infotainment systems.

In some ways, we’re sort of in a golden age of this sort of crap, and I kind of mean that literally. Well, not the golden part, the crap part, and even that I suppose is metaphorical over literal crap, but I think you see where I’m going. We live in an age of cheap, plentiful options for head units, and those cheap units are, objectively, deeply strange machines, unique and interesting and kind of baffling artifacts of this very specific time and place, and I think they’re worth talking about.

I started thinking about all of this because I was replacing the head unit in my wife’s 2010 Volkswagen Tiguan, which I talked about yesterday regarding the reverse camera issues and my beef with VW’s taillight bulb access. It was positively riveting, you should read it.

Anyway, I was given two demands for this new head unit: it should be able to use Apple CarPlay and have a working backup camera. And, this thing I got satisfied both of those requirements! But it also does so very much more, and I’m pretty certain absolutely none of the other things it does makes any sense whatsoever, which is why I’m so fascinated.

Okay, What Is This Thing?

It’s this unit for sale on Amazon: one of the cheaper head units I found that does CarPlay and is a direct fit replacement for the factory head unit VW supplied way back in the Obama administration. It was about $110. That’s dirt cheap, really.

Installation was easier than I thought it would be, and the new unit is dramatically smaller than the old one, partially because it doesn’t need all of the space or mechanical parts required for the old unit’s CD/DVD player. This frees up a nice little cube of space I can use for smuggling something, like a fat wad of saffron or some black-market eyeballs.

It’s a nice, dark, enclosed space; maybe I can grow hallucinogenic mushrooms in there?

The overall fit of the assembly is great, and looks pretty damn close to stock, so no complaints there. The knobs and buttons feel pretty decent, too.

The unit came with two different wiring harnesses, one with an adapter to connect right into the car’s CAN bus, which made things a lot easier. Strangely, the built-in back-up camera was not part of this harness, and the new unit did not have a connector that would fit the existing camera, as I discussed in that other post.

It did, however, come with its own camera, which uses a standard composite interface, and that was fine, though it annoyingly displays it’s own parking guide lines despite the fact that the head unit superimposes its own parking guides, making a confusing mess, as you can see above, over my face.

And yes, I’ve combed through the preferences and have yet to find a way to turn off either of those guide lines. I guess I got what I paid for.

That said, the use of a regular, bog-standard composite input opens up all kinds of possibilities! Like this:

That’s right! Old-school, 8-bit-era computers tended to use composite video output, so why settle for some boring view of what’s behind you – which is in the past, baby – when you can have real excitement like this:

Remember Pitstop II? Great game. Why not give it a go when you shift into R, for Race?

 

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It doesn’t have to be some old 8-bit Commodore computer, though; any composite signal would work. You could have a DVD player set to repeat, and every time you go into reverse, you’re treated to a random scene from Heartbeeps.

Good times! Sure, this composite-only camera input required me to run a wire all the way from the front of the car to the rear, but whatever, it’s worth it.

What Else Works Great

I’m happy to say that the main raison d’etre for this thing, running CarPlay, works just fine. It connects wirelessly and pretty seamlessly once you do the initial setup. It’s not especially quick, though; every time you start up the car it takes between 30 seconds to maybe(?) a minute before CarPlay starts, and there’s always this odd little dialog box that you have to dismiss:

I especially like the cavalier quality of that “sure” button. It pretty well encapsulates my feelings about being told “have no media file!” Sure. Whatever you say.

But, more importantly, CarPlay just seems to work, and, really, along with a working back-up camera, that’s about all that will be asked of this machine.

But There’s So Much More, And It’s So Weird

Now let’s dig into why I think these devices are so damn weird, and such products of this time and place: they’re incredibly well-featured, but I’ve never really encountered a product that has so much undesired capability.

I get that fundamentally, this machine is basically an Android phone, just in a different sort of presentation. And, as such, it’s basically free to include software that does all sorts of stuff, to the point where it’s so easy to do that questions like “should it do this” or “why the hell would anyone want this” just don’t ever get asked.

That’s the logic that puts a fully functional audio recorder in your head unit:

It works just fine, I tested it out. It saves separate audio files and plays them back and everything. It’s an audio recorder. On your dashboard.

Now, maybe if cell phones that do this – which is pretty damn near all of them – didn’t exist, maybe this would make sense, if you were willing to drag the people you wanted to record into your car. Maybe.

Actually, not maybe. No one wants this. What possible use could this have? If you need to record audio, you have either software on your phone or a dedicated voice recorder. You may have both. I think you can get these audio files off the car with an SD card, but why? It’s so baffling that this is here.

Look, there’s a web browser, too! I guess if you had no phone or computer or tablet or internet-connected fridge or anything like that, maybe you’d choose to browse the web on your dashboard, provided you were close enough to a WiFi network (there’s no cell connection on this head unit, at least not that I saw?). I guess if you don’t want to pollute your phone with porn, you can have the option of watching dirty videos in your car while you sit in your driveway?

There are YouTube apps and dedicated Google apps and picture browsers and a calendar – I guess you could log into your Google account and get some of these things populated? But, again, you have a phone – everyone has a freaking phone – why the hell would you want any of this?

Look, there’s a calculator on this thing. A calculator. You can make your car a 3,000-pound self-propelled calculating device, should you so choose. Was any living modern human being asking for this? At all? I would genuinely love to meet the person out there who was thinking, damn, I wish I could calculate logarithms on the dashboard of my car, like a king, instead of on my phone or computer, like some miserable, filthy animal. Introduce me to that person, and I’ll buy them a beer and multiple tacos, just to spend some time around them.

Look, it does this, too:

What the hell is that? I had to look it up; it seems to be some sort of digital radio standard I’d not been aware of. I bet there are people out there for whom this is important, even if I’m very much not one of them. If that’s you, look, this does that! Hot damn!

It does regular FM radio, too, of course, and it can store files if for some reason (there’s 25 GB of local storage!) you think the best place for all your TurboTax records is on your car’s dashboard; it has its own nav system that’s somehow different than the Google Maps app it already has, there’s that floating robot on the right there that is some kind of AI chatbot thing, and there’s probably even more I didn’t bother to find out about.

And you need none of this.

Everything this does that has any utility at all whatsoever, you’re already doing on your phone. Everything else you’ll never need or want to do. This is an absurd machine.

But at the same time, it’s an incredible machine. It’s cheap, it does the job it needs to do pretty well, and you can pretty much ignore all the superfluous stuff. It’s both incredibly well done and incredibly sloppy, all at once, and I think that right there is the punctum of where we are technologically, especially with cheap electronics like this.

These devices are such a strange combination of overkill and half-assery. For example, the built-in settings and help give some really useful information that you normally don’t seem to get from most electronics, like connector pinouts right there on the screen:

That could be very handy! That’s good information! And then, in the same set of settings, you also get screens like this:

Wait, what? Peptides? Aren’t those chains of amino acids used in the building of proteins? Why does my head unit have those, and why do I get to pick if they’re left or right? What the hell does this mean?

This one, too. “Protocol Vehicle Model Alert Pop-Up Box?” Do I want that closed or open? It may as well be asking me if I want my argyles diurnally oriented or re-swepsonized?

At least half of the entries in the settings are incomprehensible in the same way, thanks to some clumsy mistranslations or similar sloppiness. And then at the same time there are settings that give you a staggering amount of control and deep customization of what this thing can do.

These Cheap Head Units Are A Perfect Metaphor For Our Time And Place

Do you ever get the feeling that, especially when it comes to AI, we’re just kind of letting the technology pull us along and we’re no longer really steering? I kind of feel that way. The pace of innovation is so fast, we’ve given up trying to assess what we’re creating or how it gets used, so now we’re faced with unregulated AI that isn’t taking drudgery away from people, but is instead destroying creative jobs and leaving a wake of malformed slop over every aspect of human culture.

AI has incredible potential to become a multiplier of human achievement, but left unguided, it’s just taking jobs and turning things to crap. These head units feel similar: they’re incredible technical achievements, and can be made to do exactly what you want, but they feel like they were just flung together and every possible feature was thrown at them, whether or not it makes any sense.

There’s no plan here, just a few rough guidelines and the hard edges of economic pressures. They’re almost like organic things that way, not designed but just sort of coarsely bred, with the pressures of the market evolving what these become, like generations of fruit flies.

Yes, it’s got some sloppy UX and is full of vestigial and unwanted crap, but it fits in the hole in the dash just right and does the two things I actually want it to do, all for $110. Does my satisfaction with this make me part of the problem? Definitely.

Do I have a better idea at the moment? Not really. But I’m kind of fascinated by it all.

[Ed note: This post contains an Amazon affiliate link. If you click on that link and buy something on Amazon, we might get a commission. – MH]