By Panasonic is one of many audio manufacturers looking to take advantage of the recent Android Auto wave. We’ve seen manufacturers like Audi/Volkswagen show it off in their own cars, so what’s going on with Panasonic?
Well, it won’t be a “drop-in” solution like Pioneer is looking to bring this year, where you can add Android Auto to any existing car that supports expandable dashboard bays. Panasonic will instead look to work with auto manufacturers to get Android Auto built stock into their vehicles.
We took a look at what their booth had going on and, honestly, it isn’t much. They showed us an Android Auto installation as it would appear in a car.
It boasts the same standard Android-driven user interface and the several apps being cooked up for it we’ve seen before, but nothing out of the ordinary. We did get a kick out of seeing the company use knob-based volume controls for their example instead of the button-laden fad going on right now, but that will likely differ from vehicle to vehicle.
At the end of the day, though, it doesn’t seem like it’ll matter who, exactly, is responsible for Android Auto inside your car if you buy one with it pre-installed considering it’s the same experience no matter where you look.
That’s not to say we aren’t excited about Android Auto itself — we definitely are — but wake us up when we can install one of these into something we’ve already paid thousands of dollars for. Hit the play button above for a closer look.
I would never want a white faced radio/entertainment center in my car. I would think that it would get dirty way to quickly…
Didn’t even cross my mind, but now that you mentioned it, neither do I.
I really want to do a 3rd party install, but it would be such a hassle and expense. Will it look out of place? Will steering wheel controls still function? Etc.
anything white gets dirty so fast— screw it.
But it’s modern and looks great. They make cleaner for that.
As they say in the video, that’s just a demo unit, real systems will probably look a lot nicer.