For the past several years, all vehicles have come with some sort of infotainment screen on the dashboard. One reason was to provide a built-in navigation system, which was (a) expensive and (b) not as good as a Garmin that you could pick up for a fraction of the price at Costco. As time went on it was determined that the screen could serve as an interface for plenty of things and thereby eliminate the need for the knobs and buttons that were characteristic of how people would ordinarily control things like audio volume and the HVAC system. On the one hand this was done in order to minimize costs: those knobs and buttons had a cost that could be eliminated by some lines of code. On the other hand this was one of the automaker’s attempts to be like Apple: people were becoming increasingly familiar with the swiping of the screen on their iPhone (introduced in 2007), and as Apple was (and comparatively is) perceived as being the company with the greatest appeal (in 2020 it became the first publicly traded company to have a valuation in excess of $2-billion and is pretty much the most valuable company in the world, while traditional OEMs pout and kick and quietly weep when they look at the value of their companies compared to Tesla, but that is another story), the auto companies decided that they would develop the same sort of user interface (perhaps not taking into account that when you are doing something with your phone you are staring at it and when you are driving an SUV, you are piloting something that weighs over a ton at some velocity, so you probably ought not to be concentrating on a screen).

Mazdas have screens for the infotainment system in its vehicles. There is a fairly sizable knob located on the center console between the two front seats. Various options are presented on the screen in the dash (e.g., audio, navigation) with each of the choices in a circle with the circles being arrayed in an arc. (This brings up the point that if you have an iPhone or an Android device you have an interface that is one or the other. If you get into a Mazda and then climb into a Chevy you’ll discover that each of them has its own approach. So while there is interface consistency on the phones, there is none in vehicles. Even vehicles made by the same company–say a Chevy and a Cadillac–have different approaches. No wonder that J.D. Power surveys find that people are not particularly happy with their infotainment systems.)

Last week some Mazda drivers in the Seattle area who were listening to, say, “All Things Considered” on KUOW, the NPR station in the Puget Sound region, discovered that their Mazda infotainment systems don’t work. Either they can only listen to KUOW or the Connectivity Master Unit in model year 2014 to 2017 just doesn’t work so not even the tones of Audie Cornish or Steve Inskeep can be heard.

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