Hear me out. There are those who like the limited accoutrements of cars that were built in the 1990's and early 00's, where they were merely used to get around, and sometimes hooned. In other words, cars that don’t have distractions.
Today’s cars are built much like smartphones: Cram as many features as you can into it, without any thought as to the preference of the driver.
This is fatal, because it turns the car into something that inevitably gets treated the same like smartphones do: Once it gets boring, chuck it and buy a new one.
So, why don’t auto makers offer the choice to delete certain “factory” options from their cars? Like the Infotainment Center, the SiriusXM thingy (Why, GM?), among other things. I know that the Infotainment Center is used to display some pertinent information for the car, but you know what? It’s extraneous.
If we wanted to know the status of our AC, we can just look at the buttons, the dials. Vents blowing too hot? Look at the air conditioning dial, and adjust it. You don’t need a screen for that. If anything, the infotainment center is adding more expenses than is necessary to the car, as well as forcing certain dashboard features into places that make it even more unsafe for the operator.
And moreover? Why do many of them have streamcasting features? Isn’t running a movie or video from your phone to the dash a safety issue, in that it can be a distraction?
There are eDUI laws in effect in my state now. I’d love it if that got tightened up to also include entertainment being shown on infotainment centers. That would force automakers to dial back the digitization of the car a bit, in my opinion.
Well, this is a quick and dirty opinion, but I hope I articulated it well enough. The TL;DR is: The newer modern cars are nice, but I’d love it even more if they offered optional deletions of features.