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- Hacker News
- That's... not what an ab test is.by tqi
- As far as I can tell it's not AI slop, but I wish this author had asked one LLM if his example is A/B testing, because the AI would've told him no, and we wouldn't have to have read this garbage.by netsharc
- They are the same platform, but of course consumers don't buy platforms, they buy brands.by bdcravens
- “ The car industry accidentally did something I've always wanted to see, which was to release basically the same car under two brands and models, with one major consumer-facing difference. ”
They do this all the time.
by rootsudo - If I didn't know they were the same car I'd probably take Honda without carplay over a Chevrolet with it.by spjt
- GM tried for years building their own infotainment system internally and never made one anyone liked until they just integrated android auto/car play finally. It was an admission of defeat in doing so, but made everyone happy. When they announced pulling this back, I laughed, thinking "trying to put the rabbit back in the bag, eh?"
Would I buy a car without android auto as an android user? No, end of story. GM can die like other stupid heavy-handed vendors, but sadly they are too big to fail, and will drag down the nation with them.
by bastard_op - This is garbage.
It’s literally not an A/B test. It’s a well known story that this vehicle sold wayyyy better under a Honda badge and it has nothing to do with CarPlay.
by eagerpace - It’s a partial driver, perhaps even meaningful in some way, but this is hardly an A/B test. Suffice to say lack of CarPlay is costing them in some way but model refreshes, steep price discounts, and other economical considerations are going to win out. Sure, 79% of some sample of car buyers said they wouldn’t buy a car without carplay but putting carplay in an otherwise crappy car isn’t going to magically make people buy that instead. There’s a lot of reasons Chevy is struggling. Blowing their own foot off with this decision can’t have been good for business but it’s certainly been hilarious for the quotes their execs have had to say in public with straight faces so they don’t get whacked for not following the party line. At some point I’m sure there will be a reorg where the opposite will become true.by captainregex
- I heard that the reason the major car companies started to sour on CarPlay was because Apple started to get increasingly needy with their data collection requirements (as of CarPlay Ultra) and the car companies weren't comfortable (or legally able) to give Apple that much canbus/telemetry data. And I guess Apple was pushing CarPlay Ultra as the only option without classic less-data-snoopy CarPlay?by bradfitz
- That explanation doesn't pass a sniff test if you even try to Google anything about car manufacturer data collection practices.by izacus
- CarPlay Ultra adds information such as speed, fuel/charge level, climate control, and tire pressure. Hard to imagine legal issues around that.
Although I could imagine the car manufacturers wanting to get revenue from refueling ads.
by Tempest1981 - I find that hard to believe. My experience with Apple (as a developer), is that they are absolutely brutal about data collection, and being an Apple developer, means toeing a lot of lines, wrt privacy-related stuff.
It seems that every time I submit an update or new app, it gets rejected, because Apple just tightened the bolts a bit further.
- Heh, the version of this I heard from a Porsche tech was that the reason Porsche's supported Carplay (added in 2017 models) but NOT Android Auto for so long (added in 2022 models) was because Apple wasn't snoopy and Google was.by majormajor
- Were the two cars priced the same? Is public image of both brands the same? I'm not sure this was a good A/B test.by bornfreddy
- We need a control group where the only difference is the Honda badge.
I know a number of people who’d buy a Honda without a second thought but wouldn’t be caught dead in a Chevy.
by bombcar - I wouldn’t feel embarrassed by association in a Chevy, but I definitely don’t trust American manufacturers to be high value (quality/price) and reliable.
They always seem ten years behind with uninspiring designs and horrible MPG.
by tyre - Yeah this is no good. If one says Honda and one says Chevy, then it's not apples to apples. It doesn't matter if it's the same car, the vast majority of people don't know that. Comparing sales numbers is meaningless.by techgnosis
- Agreed. There is essentially nothing that could convince me to buy a Chevy over a Toyota or Honda. CarPlay be damned: I can install one after market.
There is not a single vehicle produced by Ford, GMC, or Chevy that I'm interested in owning.
- This is an invalid comparison. There were enormous discounts on the Prologue, up to $20,000 off.
https://electrek.co/2025/09/23/honda-offering-over-20000-off...
by tristanj - The entire premise is silly. People don't just compare spec-per-spec cars, brands, service, etc. also matter. The assumption that the Prologue sells more ONLY because of the integrations…by port11
- Also, warranty and services differences.by xattt
- This is what I came to the comments for. The post didn't mention price a single time. It's not that expensive to retrofit CarPlay into any vehicle, and a 166% delta is hard to explain away with a single feature that can be retrofitted later.by StilesCrisis
- Also, despite the Honda being a rebadged Chevy, the average buyer may not be aware and may be drawn to the Honda brand's reputation for reliability and quality.by porphyra
- The japanese branded car outselling the domestic branded version in 2025 shouldn't surprise any millennial. If you grew up in the 80s or 90s getting shuttled around in a GM you almost certainly remember a piece of the interior coming off in your hand, or if you're an elder millennial, writing your name with your fingernail on the UV damaged interior of a late 70s/early 80s GM car that's only 3-5 years old. It's hard to shake that kind of shoddy build quality even decades later.
Meanwhile my friends kids are turning 16 and inheriting the honda accord with 250,000 miles I remember getting shuttled to and from soccer practice when I was 12 in the 90s
by hadlock - This is a meme predicated on internet fanboyism and sampling bias.
The best selling car in most of the 90s was a Taurus and the Impala and friends made a great showing in the late 90s.
But those cars got chewed up and spit out comparatively so nobody thinks they were any good.
I literally have all the entire spectrum of these vehicles in my driveway right now. I feel very confident saying that anyone peddling such a nuance-free take on things doesn't know shit from fuck. If there was a way I could phrase this to be even more existentially offensive to such people I would.
If you went back in time to 2008 and changed Toyota and Nissan's priorities so that they each picked up the other's buyers everyone with pure air between their ears would be sharing memes about beat to crap Camrys and reliable Altimas (i.e the reverse of today).
However far apart you think any two OEMs are divide that by a big number. Any two competing brands are way more neck and neck than the fanboys comment section mmakes it out to be.
- I got a 2001 Honda Accord passed down from my dad in 2016 and drove it for three years before I sold it for 2000 bucks, and the reason I sold it was because my dad had a spare 2013 Lexus RX350 I got to drive. I now drive a 2024 Toyota 4Runner and have been absolutely loving the car with least amount of smart tech.by livinglist
- Came here to say this - this is a pretty meh comparison to me, there's too many other factors that are entirely ignored. Price and/or brand alone could easily explain most of not the entire difference.
I'm sure there is some impact to not including it, tbh, but as is this article is a giant nothing burger to me.
by pyreko - I remember my Kia being a joke and held together by duct tape after 2 years while 25 years later one of the hottest brands.by mrits
- American cars then were basically disposable cars - you drive them until about 80,000 miles at which point they are practically falling apart, effective a beater. Bob Lutz was the king of marketing low quality cars as "fun to drive".by coin
- Yes, but the Honda to Chevy ratio is accelerating in just 2 years, which suggests something more than a preference for Japanese brands is at play.by fmajid