Best infotainment systems - ultimate guide to in-car tech

We rate 10 of the top infotainment set-ups on the market

Around 73 per cent of British adults don’t understand how to use all of their car's features, according to research by BookMyGarage.com. That may sound like a case of ‘don’t know, don’t care’, but at the same time 54 per cent bought their particular vehicle because of the systems it offered.

So, if people are tempted by hassle-saving gadgets but can’t work out how to use them, what's the point? We teamed up with tech site Alphr.com to put the kit to the test to establish whether it's user-unfriendly or simply that owners have all the gear but no idea.



We broke our test down into five sections, rating infotainment systems on their usability, performance and connectivity, and their sat-nav, plus their cost. We then chose the 10 most searched-for car makes, and combined this with the most searched-for infotainment systems, to give us our top 10 models to test.

Each car got a score out of five for each section of the test – and here's how we did it...

Usability

Two seconds looking away from the road is said to increase your risk of an accident by around 24 times, so being able to use an infotainment set-up quickly and safely is vital. We assessed how long it took to operate various functions, such as tuning a DAB radio station, and how many steps there were to access different features.

Performance

A system that's just slow to respond can prove equally distracting to drivers, plus the interface can be infuriating rather than helpful. We tested how quickly the screens loaded, their colour quality and brightness, the cars’ Internet connection speed, audio quality and voice commands, which can be infamously problematic.

Read More: http://www.carbuyer.co.uk/tips-and-advice/151421/best-infotainment-systems-ultimate-guide-to-in-car-tech