I drove an EV yesterday. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise on a website that specialises in new EVs, but it’s the first time I’ve driven one in Australia for a long while.
The car was a Toyota bZ4X, and driving one is like wearing a Marlboro-branded nicotine patch. I thought this was a good snarky quip to build an article around, and confecting outrage along the way. But I’d like to make a serious point about a critical failing of the car industry.
I had to travel to Ballarat for the Committee for Ballarat’s Vision 2050 Member Forum, and I would normally have cycled to the station and taken the train. However, I took the opportunity to examine the city’s logistics infrastructure in relation to an electrification project I’m working on.
I don’t own a car, and none of the car-share operators — Turo, evee, GoGet, Flexicar or Popcar — offer EVs close to home, so I fell back on my default option: Hertz.
Hertz makes it pretty easy to get behind the wheel of an EV; they even called me the day before to make sure that I really wanted an EV and knew what I was doing. It was a pretty effortless customer journey, with Evie Networks charging thrown in as well.
What is not flawless, however, is the Toyota digital experience. Snarky quips are clearly my line; so I’ll tell Toyota what I’ve told clients and colleagues over the years: ‘An app is for life, not just for Christmas’. Like a puppy, your digital experience needs work every single day – if you can’t commit to that, don’t get one.
After the smooth check-in process with Hertz, I got into the car to set it up. I’ll forgive Toyota for the five minutes it took to find the USB-C port down by my feet, but I can’t forgive being forced to download the My Toyota app.
As I regularly hop in and out of different cars, I’m a big fan of Apple CarPlay – I get the same interface in every car, so I don’t need to learn how to use a new one each time.
CarPlay is great: just plug in and it pops up — except in the bZ4X. Instead, I was prompted to download the Toyota app. This took three attempts; it might have taken more. The first time was my fault – I got my first iPhone while living in the US and I have a US AppleID, so the first app I downloaded was inevitably the North American Toyota app.
After logging into the Australian App Store, the first search result turned out to be the Taiwanese Toyota app. I was left with a choice of two apps and got lucky — I finally had the right Toyota app.
The lesson here is an easy one. App developers should recognise that Australia is a multicultural society with a large immigrant population. You can’t assume that we all have Australian accounts. Simply adding ‘Australia’ to the app name would be an easy fix.
Naturally, my troubles didn’t end there. I had to register with Toyota to get CarPlay working. Toyota doesn’t make this easy at all — there are no single sign-on options with Google, Apple or even Facebook. The app also doesn’t allow you to autofill fields on the iPhone; laboriously filling each one manually introduces yet another layer of friction.
The only Apple feature that appears to work is the password manager, but it doesn’t. I set up a password in the password manager. At first, it didn’t accept the complex password provided by Apple as it was too long.
Serious point number one: there is no such thing as a password that is too long or too complex. Then, somehow, it took the email address and squeezed it into the phone number field. This field could not be edited, so I had to kill the app and start again.
After some laborious copying and pasting, navigating around bugs and a tedious email verification process, I thought I was up and running. One final indignity was having to hunt for the VIN number in a dark multi-storey car park and enter it into the app. (Its on the front passenger side door sill, for anyone who needs to know.)
I should mention that there is no two-factor authentication to protect your account, nor any modern security features like passkeys.
After all this trouble to get CarPlay working, the first thing I saw in the app was an invitation to claim ownership of the vehicle and sign up for a free 12-month trial of some ‘premium connected services’.
Given how awful the digital experience had been up to this point, and the fact that the car was a rental, I declined both of these offers. There was also a notification about a possible recall for the ‘AC ECU’. I decided not to worry about it and get on with my day.
The Toyota digital experience is truly awful. It does not appear to have been tested with a recent version of iOS. There is no easy method of reporting some pretty shocking bugs, and it certainly isn’t keeping pace with modern cybersecurity and privacy best practice.
There is little evidence of an active development effort to maintain and update the app. What’s missing from the whole thing is a culture of kaizen (continuous improvement), something that Toyoda Eiji and Ohno Taiichi put at the heart of the Toyota Production System.
In 2025, it should go without saying that an excellent digital experience should be at the heart of a good customer journey. No company should have an app just because it’s expected, or because an overseas HQ insisted on it and charged you for localising it.
As part of a complete digital and physical ownership experience, an app has to solve user problems and make their lives easier; otherwise, you are just wasting customer time and your company’s money.
When I ran the product team at charging network Evie, we didn’t set out to build an app; we started by getting most of the team to stand next to chargers and talk to customers about their charging experiences and frustrations.
Later, as head of emerging technology, I worked closely with my successor in the product department to integrate Evie’s charging into the navigation system and overall digital experience of as many EVs as possible.
One manufacturer’s representative even suggested that we ignore the in-car navigation system, which they had paid to localise, and use CarPlay instead – at least that was honest.
We need well-made, easy-to-use, secure digital experiences in our cars and in apps that integrate with them. If we are to securely manage things like Plug & Charge, V2G and integration with energy and payment systems, the digital experience must be at the forefront.
Typically, global vehicle OEMs ask their local subsidiaries and representatives to bear the costs of localised digital experiences. In a small, highly fragmented market, these costs can often be amortised over a small number of sales and limited trailing revenue opportunities. Consequently, investments are not made, and the customer and the product do not benefit from a poor experience.
Australian OEMs therefore have two choices: they can either improve their digital capabilities, or they can hand over the digital experience to Google and/or Apple. By using Android Automotive, Polestar and Volvo have chosen to outsource to what I believe to be the cleanest and simplest in-car user experience (UX) and the best electric vehicle (EV) navigation tool (Google Maps).
The first time I sat in the driver’s seat of a Mustang and experienced the deep integration of CarPlay, which allowed Apple Maps to know the vehicle’s state of charge and plan routes accordingly, I was absolutely delighted.
However, even this was not without frustration. It asked me to select my favourite EV charging networks, but when I tried to select Evie Networks, I was unable to do so.
This led to an arduous search for someone at Apple who could add us to the list. It was a task as hard as a charging network seeking to control its Google map pins – something that, at Evie, was only resolved after two years of trying by spamming everyone I’d ever met at Google until someone took pity on us.
So, the call to action is: get good at digital, or don’t bother. Whatever you do, don’t release anything that you aren’t going to take care of every single day of its existence.
The Canberra EV meetup is on November 5th and all are welcome to join us as wrestle with how to make the transition to EVs as simple as possible. https://www.trybooking.com/events/landing/1478129
Ed Lynch-Bell is Principal at Second Mouse, dedicated to building more sustainable energy tech and mobility products, services and businesses. Ed is also a co-host of the Melbourne and Sydney EV Meet-ups, bringing the e-mobility industry together.