I’m going to come out and say it: if you’re buying a car because it has the most advanced software or assisted driving features or the biggest touch screen or the best wifi or whatever, you’re doing it wrong. To put it as delicately as possible, you’re being a drooling simpleton being bent over and brutally mistreated by pretty much every automaker. But don’t feel too bad, because it’s not entirely your fault; the whole way we approach tech in cars is kind of stupid, and we should rethink it all.
The fundamental problem is this: electronic technology advances far too rapidly to be something that gets permanently integrated into a car that you may want to own for more than, say, five years or so. There’s nothing that ages an otherwise perfectly-fine car more dramatically than integrated technology that was cutting-edge when the car was new.
Don’t believe me? Look at the center-stack display/infotainment system from this 2010 Maybach Zeppelin, a car that cost almost $500,000 when new:
(Photo: Maybach/Mercedes-Benz)
At the time, this was hot shit, the bleeding-edge of automotive tech at the time. Today, the crappiest Mitsubishi Mirage has a display with far better resolution than this gleaming chariot of the elite. And that was only 15 years ago; the lifespan of a car like a Maybach should be far, far longer than that! Is it not a precision engineered machine? Is it not an ultimate expression of driving comfort, luxury, and refinement?
And yet, when almost anyone gets into this thing, one of the first things they’ll notice is how embarrassingly backwards the tech inside is. That doesn’t seem fair, right? If we look at a Maybach from close to century ago, they don’t suffer from this issue. Look at the dash of this 1933 Maybach DS-8 Zeppelin:
(Photo: Bonham’s)
So what’s different here? It’s not like this car is free of technology; it is technology. But it’s a different sort of technology, and, more importantly, the intent of the technology is different.
(Photo: Bonham’s)
Of course, the dashboard here is full of dials and gauges; this car was extremely well-instrumented for its era. But the intent of all of this instrumentation wasn’t to showcase the absolute latest tech; it was just the application of the best available tools for the job. These are not the sorts of machines that change and advance dramatically. A good mechanical speedometer or tachometer or temperature gauge is still a good speedometer or tachometer or temperature gauge eight decades later. The fundamental technology hasn’t changed, and as a result, the instruments themselves can wear their age with pride, secure in their timelessness.
There’s a reason why absurdly expensive cars like the Bugatti Chiron decided against having any sort of center-stack screen:
(Photo: Bugatti)
Sure, I have my issues with cars like these Bugattis, but I do think they understood this fundamental concept: technology can date a car deeply. And rarely well.
There are some exceptions to this rule: some kinds of extremely-advanced tech can age well, or at least interestingly, not from a perspective of usability, but from a novelty perspective. This really only works if something is among the first of its kind, like the CRT touchscreens in 1980s Buicks:
(Photo: GM)
…or perhaps the CRT dashboard instruments of the Aston Martin Lagonda:
What these systems have in common is interesting hardware that was way ahead of its time. Neither would be great in a daily driver perspective, but from a historical interest perspective, they’re fascinating. If they work. Which, especially in the case of the Lagonda, is wildly unlikely.
Now, I’m no luddite. I’m under no illusion that we should be banning modern digital tech in cars, because that would be idiotic, and no one wants that. But what I am suggesting is that all modern tech in cars, anything that is likely to rapidly advance over the years, needs to be easily and readily replaceable, because the whole experience of an otherwise great car can be ruined by outdated technology that just taints everything.
And that means we need industry-wide standards. We had them once – the DIN and double-DIN standards for head units was once very effective, and there was – and still is – a thriving aftermarket for new head units that can quite easily bring old cars into modernity with greater ease than new ones.
For example, you can upgrade a 2002 Toyota Corolla to have modern tech with the latest version of Apple CarPlay or Android Auto far cheaper and easier than you can, say, a 2022 Toyota Prius Prime. Here’s a double-din unit that’ll drop into a Corolla for about $200, giving the car the ability to interface with a standard and devices that weren’t even introduced to the world, in their earliest forms, for a solid five years after the car was sold.
If you wanted to upgrade your 2022 Prius, if you had one that, say, didn’t have CarPlay or Android Auto, you can either tack on a clunky extra screen to just give you that, or you could find a used OEM entire center stack for about $1,600 and replace the whole middle of your dash. There’s no upgraded versions for new tech, this is just the optional stock one from Toyota.
Here’s what I think should happen, in an ideal world: all the major carmakers would agree on a set of car tech standards, ones that define both physical dimensions and connector standards. If carmakers want to have HVAC controls on screens or other functionality, no matter how insipid, they need to agree on standards to control those.
If you spend a crapload of money on a car you really like, it’s ridiculous that it should be stuck with rapidly-aging display and infotainment hardware. At some point fairly quickly into your car’s life, your phone, which many people upgrade every few years, will significantly eclipse your car, technology-wise.
This is not always something that can be fixed with exciting OTA software updates; sometimes you need new display and computing hardware. Remember how Tesla had to upgrade the internal computers in many customers’ cars so they could run the latest versions of their FSD driver-assist software? This could have been made vastly easier if these cars adhered to some sort of car-tech standards that were designed for easy upgradability.
I realize there will be some sacrifices in design and packaging if everything must meet universal standards of some sort. Also, I don’t care. It’s not like any carmaker has made such fascinating center-stack display designs that the world will be impoverished for their loss. I would much rather be able to have a crapton of options to replace the clunky old system in my otherwise-fine car with something new.
Of course, carmakers will not like this idea at all; they’re generally loath to standards of any sort, and technically, it’s not a trivial task: there needs to be connector standards, we need to know what signals and inputs can be read, from cameras to temperature sensors to radar units. Then there’s outputs, like being able to control servo motors for vent direction (if so equipped) or fan speed or other hardware. There’s a lot!
Here’s the overall point, though: standards are good! A thriving aftermarket is good! We shouldn’t let what we had in the rapidly-declining DIN/Double-DIN standard days go away. It’s madness that we spend so much money on a car and find ourselves locked into the tech that was current when the car was new.
It’d be like buying a house with a built-in television and game console, and that’s just what you’re stuck with as long as you own the house. Would you want that? Stuck playing your Sega Master System on a 15″ Sony Trinitron in 2025? I mean, I have a basement full of old Ataris and similar archaic stuff, but that’s by choice.
We deserve better from our cars. I just wish I knew how to make this happen.
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I think that Jason made a good point about the after market support. I also don’t like screens in cars and think analogue gauges are the best. I have a 2003 BMW Z4 and 2011 Camaro. The Z4 is perfect in its lack of gimmicky displays, but the Camaro has a HUD and a early 00’s cellphone quality display between the speedometer and tach.
Because it is all digital anyway, there are all kinds of screens that the instrument cluster can be plug and play available. I could replace it for an instantly more modern screen that have build in features that rival modern cars have as well as all kinds of customization, like background and gauge design. I do feel like my car is future proofed if I ever changed my mind. The GPS and additional data that can be displayed is really interesting, but I can’t get over the constant glow of a screen.
However, before I do any of that, I’d like to add the color HUD, which is also needs no modification, but it a hassle to take the dash apart. After all, I am an enthusiast, perhaps most people probably won’t think about that or research like I do.
President Musk’s approach of having everything on one screen to rule them all is the best!1! Nothing can ever go wrong with it!
Snark.
But seriously, that would be nice to upgrade the infotainment every once in a while. Even if it breaks, sourcing a replacement would be easy. Not a car-bricking event.
Yeah you’d have the change the entire mentality towards building cars from almost all the current manufacturers AND most buyers in the US at least in order to make that happen. I do miss the old din standards though.
I tend to think we’ve reached – or are very close to – Peak Tech in vehicles. One of my cars enjoys OTA updates which will, um, update the display to bring it up to date with newer models. My other car doesn’t have this, but the displays are current enough for me, and I use Android Auto on my (small by modern standards at 8″) infotainment screen.
In other words, I think what Jason is railing against is mostly in the past.
Amen! There are two things keeping me from buying a new car in 2025. One is that the EV world hasn’t yet found it’s 1916 Cadillac moment, and everything just feels too transitional to last the expected lifetime of a car. The other is all the electronic gewgaws that will age as well as a fine cheese. I don’t know that the answer is a double DIN type slot in the dash so much as a slot BEHIND the dash. My 2011 Mercedes E550 can be updated to run 2025 wireless Carplay by putting a little box in line behind the dash. A standardized box size and location (passenger footwell, for instance) where the “infotainment” gewgawery lives would solve this. The screen resolution is good enough at this point that I don’t think anything beyond a significant technological advancement (3d dancing Twi’lek slave girls on the dash for instance) is going to do much to improve anything for a LONG time.
I have a 2020 Honda that came with wired AA/Carplay but the USB connection was finicky and would drop off when the phone screen turned off. I have been using a wireless Android Auto adapter that plugs in the USB socket. I think Honda dealers offer a $200 software update that enables the wireless connection, but my adapter dongle was less than $100 and works fine.
Really most modern cars will not end up as drivable collectables. Older cars from bygone eras has fairly low tech and if you could not fix a part, you could adapt a part to function as the old one did. If one tried to restore any of the latest offerings, let’s say 20 years from now, you would be hopelessly hamstrung. Sourcing connectors, an essential part of new tech, would be impossible. One of the side of effects of the EU push to make plastic recyclable was; connectors that crumble in your hand that are 7-10 years old. Then there is the programming new parts into the computer. New transmission; well your junk yard find is not going to drop in without the software to register it with the CPU. Plastic parts just get brittle and crumble. Dashes split, trim parts break and bits fall off. Again 20 years from now find that push in weird plastic doohickey that makes you door handle stay in place. Nope, these new cars will either be in a glassed in garage for display and all you do is wipe it down with a diaper cloth.
This issue is not alone with cars, even high end fighter planes, like the F-14, where set aside due to 70’s electronic tech being un-sourceable. They used 54LS chips in it, find one today. The aircraft had to be re-wired and re-boxed to run all the systems with new tech. Made it far cheaper to move on to a new airframe. While in the Navy I was a test pilot and officer in charge of re-work of a lot of high tech aircraft, we had scads of aircraft we stored in high tech, environmentally controlled bags, just waiting for us to find some obscure parts. When I left, we had 74 F-14’s in bags.
One of the worst little annoyances of nav units in cars is that most of them decided to run the clock from the Internet, even though they have a perfectly good GPS signal, and didn’t bother to include a good quartz backup.
This means that nearly every nav unit from 2016 or older now gives you the choice of showing a wildly incorrect time because they can no longer connect to the NTP server since 3G has been shut off, or of having the time drift annoyingly because they just use processor cycles rather than something more reliable.
GPS fundamentally is a time signal. So if the unit knows where you are it knows EXACTLY what time it is. And yet cannot display the right time because of stupid programming choices.
Poor Luddites, their name is often misused, they were not afraid of a new technology, it wasn’t new for them, they were a labour movement who raged against capitalist, of course history is written by the victor but now there are enough books tell their true story.
As for cars and tech, i just wish car companies offer an option of no tech, i don’t want a screen in my car, but i know they won’t.
+1 get the screens out of my car I learned to drive in a poverty spec 1990 Honda Civic give me three pedals, crank windows, and no goddamn computers
Preach! One of the beauties of the DIN approach is that it allows the owner so many options for what “right” looks like to them. I recently replaced my single DIN head unit, the options I considered for blasting Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” while I roll down the highway included:
-an original 80s-tastic Blaupunkt tape deck off Ebay, which you can wire with a bluetooth receiver to bring it into the twentyworst century
-a new “Blaupunkt” (not really the same company but whatever) that looks like the 80s-tastic Blaupunkt, but has modern guts and has all its blueteeth in already
-a fancy big flip out touchscreen thingy with nav and probably an AI compliment bot and acres of screen to watch clips of “Sprockets” on
-simple cd and bluetooth units of various levels of quality and beauty, some of which can tweak their lights to match the vibe of the car, starting at $20
Something for everyone there!
Wasn’t expecting a Sprockets reference. Nice. But no, I would not like to touch your monkey!
I agree with Jason. I have a 2015 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon Hard Rock. I specifically ordered it with a manual transmission, hi-end sound system, but no navigation. Phone works fine for navigation and has been upgraded three times since I got the Jeep.
When I bought my current truck, I deliberately sought out:
1.) Regular cab. 4-door trucks just don’t look right to me.
2.) 6-foot box. (minimum) The truck needs to be usable as a truck. I see they now make padded tailgate covers so people can bring haul something as small as a bicycle.
3.) Manual transmission. You understand.
4.) Hand-crank windows.
5.) Manual door locks.
6.) 2-wheel drive
These are my must-haves for a truck. I’ve owned three trucks over the past 34 years and all of them met the above qualifications. #s 3, 4, 5, and 6 are for longevity. I’ve only had to replace one clutch, and that was a few years after I bought the first truck with over 250,000 miles on it. I’ve never had a hand-crank window not work. Keys work just fine to unlock the doors, and I replaced rear drive-shaft U-Joints only once, again on that first truck once it hit 300,000 miles.
I do listen to music from an iPod, so I updated the radio with a Kenwood head unit that has a USB port on the front and an iPod interface so I can control the iPod from the head unit and the song titles show up on the display. I purposefully found one without any Bluetooth connectivity so it cannot connect to somebody’s phone.
This, to me, is the ultimate driving machine. I drive it almost every day.
You had me until 2-wheel drive. I use 4wd quite regularly not for some off-roading adventures but just to not rip up the paddock when moving heavy loads of firewood, gravel, hay or feed.
Some truck stuff involves sketchy footing.
Wish I had held out for an 8′ bed though, 6.5′ isn’t ideal.
And that’s why I love my old BMW’s, because they all have standard single-DIN radios from the factory, so all it took to put Bluetooth/USB/aux-in into my 95 540i was 15 minutes of fiddling around (I brought an Alpine head unit with me along with a wiring harness adapter). I installed it in a hotel parking lot shortly after buying the car so I wouldn’t have to drive 1500 miles home with a useless cassette player.
The audio situation was one of the most frustrating things about my 99 740iL. Because I had the ‘digital’ amp and Nav I was greatly limited in what I could do, really it was just a few factory upgrades that were pretty expensive even sourcing the parts from eBay and junkyards. Also the speakers were non-standard sizes which is something else that should be addressed. Another problem was they stopped issuing nav updates in the mid 2010s for cars with disc based nav systems.
When I bought my e46 330ci and e83 X3 I made sure you could put a double DIN head unit in them – which I have done. On the e46 I actually discovered a OEM Euro center mount single DIN radio plate (the standard aftermarket US one mounts the radio to the side and recesses it into the dash such that a bunch of controls are hard to operate) that looks better and makes it easy to operate it’s controls.
When I recently bought a Ford Escape I made sure it was Android Auto compatible.
Yeah, the DSP sound system in the E38 and E39 is so-so and is rather hard to upgrade. With the E46 there are a ton of decent aftermarket head units that mimic the factory navigation system and give you modern features like wireless CarPlay/Android Auto, that’s what I’m going to install in my girlfriend’s E46 sooner or later.
I just don’t trust the companies making those, they seem to be hit or miss – and expensive. I have a stash of radios I can use in car, so for a time I had a Alpine double DIN unit in there but I moved it to another can and now have an Alpine single DIN. Both are media only players, the double DIN one had Android Auto, but the single DIN one matches the interior pretty well, the orange you can get on the Alpine units matches the factory instrumentation very well.
To the Maybach point of this. That started me down a rabbit hole. Does anyone want to see the stupidest way to spend two MILLION dollars?
Behold! A 2009 Maybach Landaulet with 897 miles! Surely this will age out well.
https://www.cars.com/vehicledetail/b7a52155-472f-4f00-81b4-e17e7b4e173c/
As an aside, I love that cars.com always estimates payments, even with ridiculous shit like this. Only $36,000 a month!
Edit-this gets so much worse too. So I pulled the CarFax. FOUR FUCKING OWNERS. The pictures, while there are plenty of them, are riddled with water spots on the paint, poor lighting, dirty pedals and a mediocre reconditioning job. If this were a 2013 Nissan Altima 2.5 S, I’d accept these photos. But for this? For TWO FUCKING MILLION DOLLARS? Fuck all the way off.
I need a beer.
For two million I’d rather get a beater house in a decent part of California.
Yeah, that’s asinine…and it has a bland body style…and a grille that looks similar to that car from Daewoo, Kia or whatever (I can’t even think of it since it’s so boring)
The cheapest car I ever had was $100 TOTAL…so for $2 million I could have 20K cars! (If I could find $100 cars…how bout an average of $2500 for just a running/driving car from Shitbox Showdown…for $2 million you could still buy 800 cars!)
I’ve always been conservative re: tech in my cars, but I wasn’t ready for having to go with a far more rudimentary solution to add bluetooh to my 2006 Volvo V50 that in the Renault 4. See, the Volvo has a beautifully designed, so-called floating console… with an integrated stereo that, for my base model, didn’t yet have bluetooth capabilities (or an aux in connection for that matter). It does have a semi-working CD player, in that it plays the CD that’s stuck in the CD player, which belonged to the previous owner.
The Renault 4 has an afterthought of a central console that was tacked on as optional equipment, and which has a 1DIN slot. The console itself is so primitive, you could buy hand-built aftermarket ones as a budget choice. In my consle lies a €15 aliexpress stereo with bluetooth, aux in, USB and microSD card slot. That is all I need right there
My first idea when I realised how primitive the stereo was in my Volvo, was to look for a newer stereo with bluetooth and aux in from a junked, more recent/upmarket C30/S40/V50; so good that this part was used in so many models, right?
Haha, wrong! You can’t just swap stereos in these cars, you’ll need to electronically reprogram stuff to be able to do so. And that is not a process that can be done by an amateur from what I was able to find online. So yeah, I got myself one of those shoddy bluetooth FM transmitters that plug into the lighter port. I have much better speakers in the Volvo of course, but the sound quality over bluetooh is not that much better than what I get in the Renault 4.
And that is why I don’t like my cars to come with closed-off proprietary tech, and may well get rid of the Volvo V50 in favour of a 940. That and the fact that the V50 is a lemon whose engine disintegrated soon after I got it and has been in the shop for over a year while we look for an engine.
I guess the Apple Planned Obsolescence has afflicted the car manufacturers, too. Apple makes sure that its computers in the last ten years could not be easily upgraded or replaced. The goal is to “persuade” people to buy the latest technology rather than spending millions on supporting the older and vintage technology for eternity.
Of course, there comes the cottage industry that specialises in this sort of thing such as Juicy Crumb for the vintage Mac computers and DosDude for upgrading the RAM in Honda information system.
This will change, if they want to sell in the EU. A right-to-repair type of directive was passed last year: household appliances and electronics should be repairable, in principle at least.
Guys, do some research
It’s so easy to find retrofit aftermarket android touchscreen radios for most popular cars, which will fit where the old touchscreen fit but just be more modern
The “nightmare 7 series” with dying pixels pontificated about in the comments? Easily replaced with an android unit that looks stock but has a modern screen and CarPlay compatible
For the Maybach? Probably yeah. I’m sure
The screen is probably reused from another Mercedes product, much like a Rolls Royce is a BMW parts bin car with very fancy knobs and dials
Honestly at the end of the day, 99% of us just need the car to load CarPlay/android auto and we’re good
One of the things I’d like to see the most in cheap cars would be the complete replacement of any proprietary infotainment screen with a centrally positioned, adjustable cradle for a tablet/smartphone, with a usb-c plug for charging/tapping into the integrated amp/physical controls, and just let devs do their thing in terms of infotainment apps. We already carry around a screen (or multiple ones) at all times. I liked CarPlay the times I used it – when it wasn’t refusing to connect for some reason – but I also felt like it’s not that much of an improvement over just letting me conveniently place my phone in the same spot.
Nah man. I would say from around 2010 onwards, carmakers don’t expect people to hold on to their cars for longer than a decade. The aim is for people to buy a new car every few years, and the technology is somewhat designed with that in mind.
Horrible way of doing things but cars are tech products now. And tech products get obsolete very quickly.
I don’t care about so-called ‘outdated technology’. The screen infotainment in my 2012 XC70 works brilliantly with nothing but knobs and buttons, and I have zero desire to ‘upgrade’ it to something newer.
What I do care about is longevity. I’d like this system to work for as long as I plan to keep the car (i.e. indefinitely). Thus I agree that we need to develop standards for better third-party integrations and repairs later on down the line, but I’m not in it for some faddish upgrade just so my phone screen can pop up useless notifications on my dashboard. Bluetooth is good enough for me, and I like to look at the map before I leave.
Damn, that Zeppelin dash is amazing – it looks like a bunch of $10,000 watches. So how about a dash like that with a decent place to put your phone and bluetooth speakers in the doors, dash, etc? Use the phone for nav and music, and use buttons and sliders for climate control, heated seats, and everything else.
A friend of mine bought a used BMW (E38) 750. It was a very comfortable car, but the dead “pixels” of the dot-matrix display in the radio foreshadowed other more significant issues to come. We were heading out to a golf course when my younger (than his) nose detected the unmistakable smell of gasoline hitting warm bits on the engine. We pulled over and lifted the hood and there was fuel pooling on the intake side of its V-12. We got back to his house before the whole thing erupted in flames.
I had a no-nonsense 2001 Jetta TDI then and just seeing the radio display in his car convinced me that cars were going to get progressively more difficult to repair, especially the electronics.
In sports bars with enough screens, you’re almost certainly going to see flat panel TVs with a variety of age-related defects. Given that the environment car components are so much harsher than the inside of a bar, it’s amazing that there aren’t more problems. My local in SE TX had about 25 Samsung flat screens in their (large) outdoor patio and they were replacing one or another or more at least once a month.
I was not a fan of the iDrive system in my wife’s X5. I rented a Mazda CX-5 a few years ago and it took me too many hours to figure out how to navigate its infotainment system. Between irritation and distraction, it’s a little scary.
I’m not a luddite, but I do like a volume knob and separate, intuitive HVAC controls.
If anyone is tired of or their infotainment screen breaks look into replacing it with the commercial/ police version. Assuming your model was made as one you can snag a AM\FM\CD player that will last forever maybe even Aux if your lucky.
It was easy to get Car Play/Android Auto in my VW MK6 Golf. VW makes RCD330 Plus units that are a 5min swap from the RNS310/RCD510 units that came with the car. No coding required. Just a plug and play. I paired that swap with a rear camera install (very much more work) and my 13yo VW feels pretty new tech wise.
Saving that part number, I’ve been meaning to upgrade my 2014 Sportwagen.
If you plan on getting one from china, make sure you find the correct version. There are several, some are apparently hacked to work with carplay, instead of just mirrorlink. So there might be some issues and no upgrades. Seems confusing, it is. Researched this a while back to upgrade the Golf. Finally decided against it, as the chinese versions lack RDS for the radio and Euro market languages.
Maybach Zeppelin? At least it wasn’t a Hindenburg. Maybe Ford should have done a Hindenburg edition of the Pinto.
I am bothered more by the eventual failures of these electronics than they look and act dated. Replacement parts just won’t be available. If the blind spot and backup camera quit in my 17 RDX it would be a pain, but I still have windows I can see out of. Some of the moderns take that vision away for design creativity. Without the collision avoidance, blind spot sensor, and backup camera you can’t see jack in some cars. It really pissed me off in an XT4 I rented, the backup camera decided on the second day, sometimes it wouldn’t work. It put up a cute icon of a video camera with a slash through it on the giant Cadillac screen. Tried to call to figure it out, then decided after an hour on hold, I didn’t want to spend my whole vacation fixing an effing backup camera. Crossed the XT4 off my list.