This is an excerpt from the new Radio World ebook “Discovering the Dashboard 2025.”
Documenting how the top 100 best-selling car models in the U.S. display radio metadata is a tall order. Quu has done it twice, and Joe Marshall coordinated the effort.
As the company’s senior director of technical services, he heads its support group and works closely with its development team.
Quu released its first “In-Vehicle Visuals Report” on new car models a year ago and decided to repeat the effort in 2025.
The report is published as a resource to the industry, but for Marshall, it also made sense as an internal tool.
Sources of car metadata were proliferating even as Quu’s own customer base was expanding. In his support role, Marshall fielded questions from broadcasters about why text was truncated on a given display or why a certain station appeared a certain way on another dashboard.
Quu would ask radio engineers or market managers to submit photos of how their station’s metadata appeared on various car tuners; but such photos might not provide enough information to assess the problem. Was the car displaying metadata from HD Radio or via RDS? Was it in fact even tuned to a terrestrial broadcast station?
“We’d get questions about why a station was displaying in a certain way, but it was actually via its stream on Apple CarPlay,” Marshall said.
He and the Quu team concluded that a full-on evaluation of how radio stations are displayed in new cars was merited. Such a report would help customers who didn’t have the time to research how their own metadata would display across many vehicles. More generally it could be used to learn how consumers are seeing the radio industry’s product in new vehicles.
Working with auto dealers
Marshall, who is based in northern Kentucky, started to contact automotive dealers in and around Cincinnati and Covington, Ky.
The effort required access to the top 100 best-selling car models in the U.S., based on data from GoodCarBadCar. He said this kind of research project had never been done before.
Marshall wasn’t alone; car enthusiast and university student Jackson Houchens has played an important role. “I think he’s looked at more car radio screens than anyone on the planet at this point,” Marshall said.
Houchens is a field researcher for Quu while attending Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. He has been involved with both reports.
Houchens was able to access vehicles at multiple dealerships near Bowling Green. His enthusiasm and knowledge of new car trends helped to make gathering data more efficient.
Marshall and Houchens coordinated evaluations. Sometimes, a desired model was not to be found on a local dealer’s lot. For vehicles not available in Bowling Green or near Cincinnati, for example, they would meet in Louisville.
They worked with many of the same dealers Quu contacted in 2024, which has helped strengthen relationships.
They followed a checklist of features to document and photograph in each model. The number of variables is dizzying, with so many sources now serving dashboard data, including HD Radio, RDS, satellite radio, Android Auto, Apple CarPlay and built-in streaming apps. Hybrid services such as DTS AutoStage and SiriusXM’s 360L are augmenting the dashboard experience.
The evaluations would typically include whether there was a dedicated radio button; whether HD Radio was available in the car and whether it was active by default; how the car’s visual presentation was affected by HD Radio being set as on or off; and whether RDS RadioText was set by default. A handful of models by default do not have RDS RadioText on, Marshall noted, which could adversely affect the metadata that displays in the vehicle.
Marshall and Houchens also identified widgets on which radio metadata can display. Multiple vehicles, for example, had a widget with metadata that would display album cover, artist and song title, if available, on the dashboard’s home screen.
Houchens observed that several models use split-screen layouts, where radio data is displayed alongside GPS-based navigation. Such scenarios also were described in the report.
Once their findings were compiled into a spreadsheet, broadcast researcher Doug Hyde analyzed the data and identified the six key findings for this year’s report that are described in the current Radio World ebook.
One-touch button
Marshall said the study provides insight into the latest technologies that automotive manufacturers offer. The dashboard in many vehicles, he said, now looks more like a phone’s home screen, with icons grouped into folders.
One result: It is becoming harder to find the radio function unless the dashboard has a dedicated radio button. And according to the Quu 2025 survey, only 26% of these new models do.
Another takeaway from the survey is that in about three-quarters of the new car models, the infotainment system defaults on startup to the most recent active audio source. As noted by Steve Newberry in the previous article, this suggests that broadcasters may need to devote more attention to previously neglected parts of the programming day, because all dayparts gain in importance if a car starts with the last audio heard.
The backup camera opportunity
An important factor in how digital dashboards look and function has been the development of backup cameras.
“When they became mandated, the screens had to support the needed video resolution,” Marshall said.
As screens have become better and bigger, offering more real estate on the dashboard, broadcasters have an opportunity to pounce.
Marshall said stations should explore the available options not only to show “now playing” messages but to display station branding, information about the air talent, and advertising content. And while HD Radio gives a broadcaster the most editorial control, RDS metadata, when set up properly, also still presents well on new dashboards.
Consider the source
Marshall noted that the proliferation of sources for visual data means troubleshooting can be complex.
For example, the GraceNote platform in most new Toyota vehicles has an onboard database of artist images and station logos. But because it is onboard, he said, the system may sometimes display outdated or missing album art if a song isn’t in its database. A firmware update might address the issue, but that might not occur until the vehicle’s next maintenance service.
Marshall said that typically, if a station is using HD Radio, metadata transmitted through HD will be prioritized over an on-board database.
Quu offers a platform on which stations can edit individual song information, including artist and album titles and album art. The company also has a relationship with DTS AutoStage, so changes broadcasters submit through Quu will be shared on AutoStage-equipped vehicles.
Being able to see what’s coming
By conducting this research over multiple years, Quu is building a growing database of information about how radio looks in new cars, allowing it to provide better support to its broadcast customers. Quu also has begun to add older models to its database so stations can reference more data and photographs of dashboard displays. Auto dealers themselves have also expressed value in the report’s findings.
Above all, the goal is to help radio broadcasters standardize station metadata while staying informed about how dashboards from the major automakers are evolving.
“I hope this data helps the radio industry look more toward the future,” Marshall said.
Read the free ebook “Discovering the Dashboard 2025.”
