One point Renault did right was use beefy enough hardware. They went[1] with an automotive Qualcomm Snapdragon, while it seems Volvo and others went with an Intel Atom.

All I know is it's smooth like a good tablet.

While voice recognition is not perfect in Norwegian, it was also by far the better one. A lot of room for improvement though, like if I say "call Merete" it won't find my contact named "Merethe", which is pronounced exactly the same here.

[1]: https://9to5google.com/2021/09/06/android-automotive-renault...

English is not my native language so I'm yet to find a car where this works. But it's not a problem with the car, it's Google's voice assistant being useless for anything other than English sounding names. I can say "Google call Janusz Zawadiadzki" and there's exactly 0% chance it will work. It just can't do it. Don't get me started on it trying to read texts that aren't written in English when the system language is set to English, it's hilarious.

>> picking extremely mediocre hardware that is too slow to run it.

It freezing and losing sound and generally being in all kinds of non-operational state isn't due to the hardware being slow, it just doesn't pass muster for automotive-grade software which should never exhibit any of these behaviours no matter what.