Extending that idea further, & removing most of the native infotainment from the car, turning it into a bunch of dumb, wirelessly controlled displays & buttons, that an external system can use, would be interesting. Certainly there's still a large maintenance burden. And now we're talking about allowing external consumers of the car's services.
There is some precedent for this. Webinos was a very intersting ubiquotous computing platform, and one that BMW/Jaguar/Land Rover did a bunch of work on[1]. It definitely still kept the car's infotainment system, but it also exposed many of the car's systems & services externally, over a normalized, secure, webinos control system, such that you could manipulate the car's systems, or in one demo, look at the radar system, from remote devices. I kind of picture the radicalized form of this as, your car has some hdmi ports in it, and you plug in a Roku or Chromecast or whatever to power the screens, or have your phone wirelessly send a video stream. The manufacturer would still need to have an out-of-box experience, but in 10 years or whatever, the manufacturer might not have to still support it like they do a built in one: they still have to maintain some API surface, but that, hopefully, can be a simpler, more controlled, known interface, with less maintanence burden, & less fancy application processors.
I don't really think what I suggest saves all that much trouble. It introduces more trouble too. But starting to decouple computers, starting to untangle the weave, but it does seem like a long term more sustainable course of action. Whatever modern computer we carry with us is what we trust, and leaving it to provide an up to date experience across all varieties of screens, inputs, peripherals we encounter has always been, to me, what the ubicomp revolution was about.
[1] http://www.autoconception.com/bmw-group-research-and-technol...