You can’t pair a phone on the fly though, even if you’re a passenger. Which is incredibly lame. If your phone is paired you have access to text-to-voice – the car will read your text messages to you so you don’t miss a thing and also are not a distracted driver, because distracted driving is bad. And now we get to one of those frustrating quirks that get worse with time. In a one-week test I might say “YAY! Text to voice!” – because I really like text to voice. Too many people text me when they know I’m driving, instead of calling. But after some time I’ve realized the system takes a long, long time to notice your incoming text, longer to load it, and even longer to read it out. I’ve spent up to seven minutes with the “updating” screen stuck and no messages loading. It’s worse if you jump away to change a station or check the map. Hopefully a software update can fix that one up.
In the audio menu there is an example of something I only really noticed after a few months in the car, and immediately love: the faux analogue tuning dial on the FM radio. This screen is gorgeous, and I’ve found myself using FM radio more than Sirius XM because of it.
Well, that, and the fact the Sirius Channels are difficult to scroll through and select. On Sirius, you can bring up a channel list to scroll through and use the puck to select your channel, but it returns to the main info screen once you’ve done so. So if you don’t like the song you have to go back in and find the menu to find another station. My solution is to use the “next station” button – which remains highlighted once selected.
I have three wishes: 1. Make the steering wheel controls configurable, so I can use them to scroll stations or set them to scroll presets. 2. Show me the “now playing” information in the channel list, and 3. Leave the channel list open when I select a channel on it.
A software upgrade would probably fix all three of those, and this system is in its first iteration so it’s likely we’ll see some changes.
But hopefully not to the navigation system, because that thing is on point. Okay, maybe one change: stop locking it when I’m moving. But they won’t do that because the nanny state is alive and well.
