It's unbelievable how far behind the technology curve most car companies are.

We recently test drove a used 2015 Suburban with a touchscreen console. The MSRP for it in 2015 was almost 90k, and the touchscreen was laggy, unresponsive, and terrible resolution. 20 years ago I worked on a touchscreen point of sale system that was better than that shit.

Consumer electronics are designed to fail in 3-5 years. Cars aren't. If my 2012 Honda Accord started failing this year, I'd be really upset. If my 2012 iPad mini started failing this year... well, I wouldn't be surprised given it's age.

I don't want my car's firmware failing or even slow when my ABS system needs to kick in because of an icy road. We must hold automobiles to a higher degree of quality and consistency than consumer electronics and I don't believe these things are on par at all, nor should they be held to the same standard.

You think the features of car touchscreens will still be relevant in 5 years? The point them in because it adds planned obsolescence.

I really don't think it's planned obsolescence - it's just that automotive entertainment systems are subject to the same amount of testing as everything else in the car, which means your average media system is 5 years behind. I have a 2005 Land Rover Discovery 3 with a touch screen, and at 11 years old, it still works the same as on the day I bought it. That's what you want. Software and hardware which continues working fine for more than a decade.

On the other end of the scale we have Tesla, which clearly does very little testing of their media systems, and pushes updates over the air, so things get broken or changed with every update. But "hey, it's not a big deal, we'll just push another update in a month!" - that's absolutely not acceptable with cars.

For example: https://medium.com/@michaelmeier_90534/tesla-model-s-is-grea...

I would be absolutely furious if my car did this. I would rather have a shitty system that stays shitty for the lifetime of the car, than have a good system that gets broken through an over-the-air update.

I agree the tesla system is pretty bad, but software needs to be updatable. How many exploits do you think your 2005 land rover has?

Does it really matter if the vehicle is not connected to the Internet in any way?

I mean, if an attacker has physical access to the insides of your car, all bets are off and is now his vehicle.

They might not have the internet (although some do via various methods) but most will have Bluetooth which could kill the console in the best case. There has been cases of people getting access to things like the door locks and the brake system.

Remember it's not just the internet that makes you susceptible, it's any network.

The issue is that an attacker could gain access to the inside of your car only briefly, but leave a device that continues carrying out the exploit

And do what exactly? make the car crash? If you want to do that just cut a break fluid line, don't even need to open the car for that.

I mean, I take your general point, but I'm almost certain that 99.9% of people breaking into cars do it to steal them, not to install a virus that will track your location or make your car crash. Both of those can be achieved trivially without even opening the car.

That's poor design. My wife's new car has physical buttons for all the common functions that you might require to use while in motion:

- Radio on/off

- All radio controls on the wheel

- Heating/cooling, physical knobs

The touchscreen is treated as an optional, secondary interface, as it rightfully should be.

Just Radio?

I'm assuming people are listening to podcasts/Pandora/spotify/audiobooks just as frequently , not to mention looking at/listening to directions.

And it doesn't even have a siri/google assistant button? I'd consider that vital.

It would work the same for anything your phone provides if it's connected via Bluetooth. There's likely also a way to get to Siri like on pretty much all Bluetooth headsets.

Almost everyone is carrying a touch screen in their pocket, complete with internet access, navigation, music, audiobooks, everything. Car manufacturers should just solve the problem of how to plug in the phone since they'll never deliver anything smarter or more powerful anyway. And, yes, physical knobs for things that you might do when driving, such as adjusting sound volume. The rest of the effort they should direct at the thing which they are good at; building cars.

Equivalently, TV manufacturers should stop trying to make their TVs smart and leave this to 3rd party devices such as the Apple TV, Chromecast or whatever. Just make great image quality and make the smartness pluggable. Anyway, I'm digressing.

It is not because of the touch screen, but because the designer was probably an intern.

It probably won't be as big of a concern going forward as self-driving cars become the norm. For non-self-driving, I agree with you.