The real solution here is to get rid of all that garbage.
To an extent, I agree with you, but to an extent your reply is perhaps a bit... dare I say “curmudgeony”?
I cannot think of a single reason why I'd want WiFi, Bluetooth or anything of that nature in my car, especially physically connected to anything related to drivetrain or safety systems.
Well, some of that is for passengers, too. Bluetooth is used to integrate with onboard handsfree phone (I’ll come to that later), which is still better than handholding a phone.
Think about a parent with kids: is it better for the driver to have them yowling in the back, or letting them listen to a story on the stereo (or, I suppose on some cars, watching a DVD on their screens in the back, with the movie audio through the speakers)?
Now, I for one would rather have cable-based integration instead of Bluetooth, but for various reasons, that’s not how the technology originally developed. Only now with CarPlay and co are we moving to integrated, well-designed car integration. (Bluetooth came because that was the first open standard for handsfree systems. First cars just used BT to read the address book for use in the car’s own carphone. Then they began to stream the audio from the phone itself. Then the iPod came along, connected via USB to the stereo. Then smartphones merged the phone and iPod, but the phone and music took different routes into the car. Parallel to all this, we had the development of satellite navigation, first standalone, then in the car itself, and now on our phones. And now finally we’re getting properly integrated systems like CarPlay, which allow us to leverage the smartphone’s vastly superior computational ability.)
In terms of the technology itself, there
are good reasons for having automobile systems connected. For example, OnStar. (Non-Americans: OnStar is this service in USA where the car has built-in mobile connectivity, and on the one hand gives you some roadside services via speakerphone, but the big thing is that when the car systems detect an accident, it automatically contacts the OnStar call center to summon emergency services. So even if you’re unconscious and cannot call, emergency services will come.)
And true self-driving cars, while not quite ready yet, are practically inevitable, and promise huge improvements in safety. (A self-driving car is going to be a MUCH better driver than a tired, drunk, or distracted driver.) And those really do require connections both to automotive systems and the outside world. If anything, the external communication must grow, so that cars can communicate with the vehicles around them.
What is clear is that the automotive systems must be designed with security in mind, to be very selective about data sources they consider.
Cars are so full of distracting gadgets that it has gotten ridiculous. Whenever I have to drive a car that's less than about 10 years old I find myself cursing at it. I'm not anti-tech, but I very much dislike tech for the sake of tech.
A lot of the time, the problem isn’t the presence of tech, but of bad tech. Car electronics have a knack for having
terrible user interfaces that increase cognitive load, which is obviously the exact opposite of what you want while driving. This is why Apple CarPlay and the Android equivalent are so important: they take the UI and put it into the hands of people who actually do good UIs. But also going back to basics, like physical knobs for core functions like volume, air conditioning, etc. That and doing really good natural-language speech recognition, which we are very close to having.
(I read Bob Lutz’s autobiography, and in it he recalls the story of an early voice control system Oldsmobile was working on. Even after a few executives nearly crashed while trying to use it in prototype cars, nobody had the cojones to kill it until he came along. Apparently, it was along the lines of “Select climate control menu. Select AC. Select temperature. Increase temperature”, where you were just navigating menus — which you couldn’t see! — by voice. You couldn’t just say “Car, increase temperature”! After he intervened, they went back to good old knobs and buttons.)
My car is transportation, I don't want an infotainment unit, and I certainly don't want it to connect to my phone.
When I commuted by car, I certainly did want music while driving, and these days, that lives on my phone. And it’s certainly better to have a good car UI (like CarPlay) than to be dicking around with a handheld player.
That ought to be outlawed, study after study has shown that talking on the phone is distracting, roughly equivalent to driving drunk and hands-free makes no difference from a safety standpoint. Phone integration in a car makes as much sense as a built in beer holder in the driver's seat.
It’s the lesser of two evils, for sure, but I personally never really like talking on the phone while driving. But we need to stop focusing on phone calls, and instead address impaired driving more broadly. Anything that distracts, be it chemical impairment, fatigue, emotional stress, eating, doing your hair and makeup, an unruly pet in the car... those are all very bad.
The only reason in-person conversations in a car work is because the passenger can both see what’s going on, but also see how the driver is reacting, and scale back conversation as needed. (When I am forced to drive and talk on the phone, I’m extremely aggressive about pausing or ending the conversation if I need to concentrate. I will say “Hold on, I need to focus on traffic for a moment” and mute it if need be.)
I think the issues with mobile phones are ultimately the same thing as with every other telecom innovation: it takes a few decades for the social etiquette around a given telecom mode to develop. For example, how with landlines and radio and TV shows, people developed the etiquette that it’s rude to call during dinner or a favorite show. With cellphones (in general), this process is still not done; we see older folks answer their phones
religiously when they ring (cuz they grew up with landlines, where a missed call was difficult to return) even though we have caller ID now, or even when receiving a text, whereas young people let it ring and focus on what they’re doing in real life. (We get annoyed that people don’t reply to texts immediately, but IMHO it’s a good thing that people are starting to learn to prioritize their real-life tasks, such as spending time with a friend.)
I think that eventually, a better etiquette will develop around cellular calls and texts, especially while driving. I think we will get to the point where it’s frowned upon. The big opposing force is bosses who expect employees to be on-call 24/7. That, too, is a cultural artifact that must change.
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