Right? I just want them to give up. I know the era of the replaceable head unit is over, and probably rightly since modern screens are much larger than you could fit in those days. But please let me swap out the infotainment computer. I can find get a device that provides better maps, phone, and GPS in my old desk drawer.
Just let me flip up the screen and plug an SBC into some USB ports and a DisplayPort.
People would just buy a head unit for a fixed price, and use the built in screen only for adjusting aircon and whatever is vehicle-specific. Also carmakers would never give up to have a total control over their car screen like this. They are struggling for a decade now with more and more horrid iterations, with no end in sight.
Problem is that a lot of vehicles have displays that stick up like a wart on the dashboard now. Though it would be great if you could reuse the display and just replace the internal components.
My naive hope was just for the car to be a dumb second monitor, where the underlying standard just needs to have enough bandwidth and features like HDMI or Displayport, and then not need major changes for years and years despite the video out device evolving. Basic things like video out, audio out/in, night/day mode.
We had din sized standards for years. Every display now is still some sort of rectangle. There's no reason we can't come up with another din-like standard for displays. Put some fucking 10 cents RCA connectors on it so I can hook up some amps and speakers that don't suck. Put a CAN bus interface so that may head unit can read all that data from your car and display it. Then you can buy whatever infortainment system you want and keep your car from becoming a dated turd inside.
My 2012 volvo has a reasonably large LCD that is used for the backup camera, and infotainment etc.
However, I have it set to screen saver mode, and it is completely powered down until I put the car in reverse. It also wakes for certain things like displaying the temperature if I change it with the real knobs.
The Speedometer and Rev counter are physical needles. Newer models have replaced these with a central LCD, which means I will hang onto this one as long as I can.
There is no reason a car can’t have a display and be humane, other than stupid corporate design sensibilities.
> The good news is that there's plenty of aftermarket in-dash displays.
Only if your existing display is in DIN format, which is extraordinarily rare these days. Of course you could rip the whole thing out, but then you'd have to do something about basic car and AC controls.
It's an unfinished cabin design. I doubt they're going to leave a monitor sitting in that spot as the end look. Most likely it'll be mounted flush into the dash in some manner.
This would be interesting to have in my old MG Midget. The center radio console is essentially wasted space, with a 4”x7” speaker grill that could be replaced with a nice monitor. Not sure if I need navigation in it but I’d love to instrument the heck out of the old car.
The screen/infotainment system seems to be held to a lower standard of quality than the embedded electronics that control your engine/steering/other safety critical systems, maybe because before you put that visual on the screen, it's not yet safety-critical. I've definitely had backup/side video feeds freeze/stutter in cars before, really don't want that when changing lanes on a highway.
I'd prefer cars just add standardized mount points with power and maybe data lines. Then I could install different cheap products I selected, or none at all.
And those other cars also have postage stamp sized displays that don't let you watch Netflix nor Hulu nor live tv. Nor do they allow steering wheel integration to racing games.
Yes need three square feet of dizzying knob porn crawling and festooning every part of the dashboard. And a little bitty screen you have to lean and squint to read. Makes sense. /s
The dash screen really should be integrated into the OBD system so you can read codes etc without a seperate code reader. It doesn't seem that hard to do.
Give me a decent HUD setup and something that plugs into OBD, and I'm sold, too. I want to have some kind of conky/rainmeter/ubersicht for my dashboard window.
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