It was inevitable at some point that I would end up with a somewhat "hackable" car.
I actually thought it might be the Polestar 2, but Android Automotive is quite locked down in terms of what you can actually do. So much so that I just decided I couldn't be bothered coding any apps for it. It also just works pretty well out of the box - the integration with Google Maps means it knows what the battery level will be at the destination, and it will suggest charging locations along the way.
Also: that's Heather's car, and I mess with it at risk of never eating a nice meal at home again!
Early last year, when I took up golf again after 28 years away from the game, I bought an old Nissan Leaf - a 2013 model, with a half-dead battery, and almost no fancy computery stuff at all: bluetooth audio, and that was it. Great to get me 20km to the golf course and back, and maybe 15km to Porirua and back, but after a while I found myself worrying if I'd actually get home from the golf club when I hadn't plugged it in when I got back the last couple of times, so I decided I would upgrade. Something that could get to Hawkes Bay on a charge (270km) would be nice.
Definitely an EV, of course: the home refuelling option is something I've become addicted to by now, but I haven't owned a dinosaur burner for ten years now, and there's no going back. If I can drive a Nissan Leaf for four months remote-working my way around France and the Iberian Peninsula, I reckon I can definitely live with one at home, where my normal week's travel is around 50km.
After a few months of looking around for what was available, and taking a few test drives, I concluded that I can't stand the smell of a new car nowadays - there's just so many VoCs they exude that even with the windows down I was getting nauseous with all of the offgassing!
Eventually I found just the thing: A couple of years old MG4. I was very excited when I discovered that it's also built on Android Automotive, but they didn't pay Google for any of the fancy bits: they jjust used the open source release. Then, in a rookie miistake so blatant you wonder if someone did it on purposes, they also signed their build with the AAOS release key pair. The one where both keys are public.
So, new car arrives, and the software is - to use a technical term - shite. It can't usefully navigate anywhere in New Zealand: "navigate to Porirua" I say, "Take me to Pauatahanui" I request, "where's the nearest zed charging station" I wonder? No luck. Also, basic EV driver things like "One Pedal Mode" require me to hunt through the settings not once but every time I turn the vehicle on!
I feel driven (see what I did there?) to XDA Developers to see what is avaailable, and in relatively short order I learn the correct sequence of keys to get into the operating system and start installing things. F-Droid for starters. A few other interesting apps. Something that uses gestures to start applications.
But I wanted more... I felt sure I could figure out how to put the car into One Pedal Drive mode wiithout hackishly adding a utility to navigate the menus on boot!
So I copied all of the APKs on the system onto a USB stick, and used apktool to unpack them all, each to it's own directory, and started work on a rudimentary replacement for the built-in "Home"" app. First I thought I would want something to control media playing, a few things to display values I might fossick around and find. Some buttons to single-click my way through some options, but with the correct defaults (i.e.: mine).
And then I asked Claude for a little help: "Hey Clauuuudeee... How's about a little help figuring out the interfaces to these system things... Take a look at those unpacked APKs over there and see what you can figger out...". And lo! Suddenly I had whole multi-hundred-line lists of the system interfaces for querying vehicle settings. For setting vehicle settings! I got a new system built - there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing as we learned the right incantationsm, but a job that was such a mountain as to be "I don't got time for this" soon turned into a very "builder's house" looking dashboard. It's got to the point now where it does (mostly, kind of) what I want, and I've got distracted by other things.
It's still kind of a hack, because the car's main screen still starts for a few seconds before my one takes over. One day later in the year I might get around to figuring out the whole initialisation steps that app does, and decide which ones I need, and which ones I can forget about. Around that time I might also make the car's messages scroll by in a readable font, so I can see what exactly is the warning that goes with each of the bings and bongs that the car makes.
But every time I put the car into Drive, and it switches into One Pedal Mode, I feel a smug little glow.