Why would someone need an incredibly pixel dense infotainment display in their car anyway? Does it show all the information I need? Does it have an easy to navigate UI? Will it last a long time and be inexpensive to repair or replace if needed? That's all I really care about for a screen that I look at maybe 5% of the time I'm in my car, because for the most part I'm looking at, y'know, the road and cars around me.

When using the screen for navigation, clarity and contrast of the map being shown is of upt-most importance, especially with the "glancing" nature one would view the map. A high-density screen could help aid this.

It has been burned, but the solution was to control the temperature of the car, not be behind by 10 years. Both have pros and cons.

It just usually sucks to pay a lot of money for a car that's so far behind all the cheap devices that I have.

You can't control the temperature in a car all the time. A car left outside in the south-west US will get very hot. Often up to 80 degrees C (170F). It's a greenhouse.

Likewise a car parked outside in Montreal in winter might reach -40 degrees C (-40F) inside.

Your electronics need to work through that entire temperature range, cope with repeatedly thermally cycling between extreme and room temperature and then keep doing it for more than 10 years.

Tesla's come by default with something called cabin overheat protection. The car will protect itself at something like 105F. It costs power of course, but I doubt many owners disable this feature.

Similarly if plugged in (which I do when I'm below -20F and not driving) it will heat thing to protect itself.

I spent a summer in Texas where my car would hit 185F if parked in the sun during the day. Light tan Corolla with tinted rear windows, so not even near optimal in terms of retaining heat.

I baked cookies on the dash one day. Not hot enough for caramelization though so the flavor was lacking.

Surely I had covered parking most of the time.

Seriously... it’s just some extra pixels?! The have picked cheap components, plain and simple.

I tried looking for automotive grade LCDs with high DPI. Couldn't find all that much, but came across this press release from Mitsubishi[1], indicating they released something that starts to approach retina only last summer.

As mentioned, in a car you really want automotive grade components, at least due to the heat and vibration it needs to sustain.

[1]: https://www.mitsubishielectric.com/news/2019/0423-b.html

think again.

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...

This used to be a good excuse, but somehow it starts to ring hollow. Ipads are as near indestructible as any hardware I've seen - drop'em, scratch'em, give'em to toddlers to play with. By comparison a car screen kinda lives a sheltered life.

Cars see radically different temperatures. Park a car in Phoenix for 8 hours in the sun, or let it sit overnight in Anchorage. My iPhone can’t be left on the dash in sunny weather without overheating. Even in the Bay Area, commuting home with Waze forced me to mount it on an AC blower with the case off.

A car screen will take hundreds of thousands of kilometers worth of vibration over the expected decade+ of use, lots of direct sunlight exposure, wildly varying humidity, temperatures of anywhere between -35C and +80C and it will work just the same. What you're describing is nothing compared to that.