People are getting fed up with all the useless tech in their cars

boem@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 626 points – People are getting fed up with all the useless tech in their cars
theverge.com

For the first time in 28 years of JD Power’s car owner survey, there is a consecutive year-over-year decline in satisfaction, with most of the ire directed toward in-car infotainment.

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The car as a device to transport one from A to B has been developed to completion. Any car is capable of fulfilling that task. The next stange of developement is that the comfort features in cars are being replaced with a universal control unit: a touchscreen (-computer).

All physical buttons (air condition, radio, etc.) are being phased out and are accessible over the central touchscreen, hidden in menus. This way it is easier to get customers into subscribed services (e.g. for the ability to lock your car remotely or to use the heated seat feature you have to subsribe to this particular service in order to use it).

Also, when features are controlled over a software interface like those touchscreens instead of physical buttons, it it easier to give access to users - or restrict them from it:

IIRC at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Tesla remotely enabled their cars by allowing free supercharging as a helpful measure to help people to escape from Ukraine. Pretty nice of Tesla, isn't it? Well yes, in this particular case, but this kind of remote software interference from the manufactor can also work in the other direction. They can easily restrict the functionality of your car. Functions your car still would have if they weren't controlled remotely.

Cars become a Software-As-A-Service product.

Edit: spelling

This way it is easier to get customers into subscribed services

It's also just flat out cheaper to remove physical buttons. Remove a handful of buttons and you might save a few dollars per vehicle once you add up the cost of each switch, connector, and associated wiring. That's huge when you're producing tens of even hundreds of thousands of vehicles.

They tried getting away with this crap to save a few bucks without passing on the savings but you're seeing some pushback. VW, for instance, has stated they'll be migrating some functions back to physical buttons soon.