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Comment by James_K | Hacker News Reader

I think the added complexity is in areas where it doesn't really matter. The stuff the driver actually cares about is still the same as it was then. You can just put the rest in a bluetooth phone app. If it is more complicated than a button press, people probably shouldn't be messing with it while driving anyway.

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I definitely don't want my car controls tied to a phone app. No matter what I should be able to configure my car's functions long after the company stops distributing their app. But there's no reason why we can't have a "best of both worlds" sort of deal. I have a modern Mazda with a touch screen that comes with a center control knob and has physical controls for a good chunk of the settings you'd ever want to change while driving. So I don't have to go through menus to change my air conditioning from low to high, but I also don't have to use a tiny character led display and a "push 3 times, then hold for 5 seconds then pull twice and rotate 37.8 degrees" multi function button to find and access settings outside of those physical controls. In fact, the touch screen disables touch input at speed, so the control cluster MUST be able to access any functionality without relying on the touch display. It works pretty darn well. In fact the only thing I'd argue it could do better is be more responsive and have a decent set of distinct tones for navigating the screens without sight. It's not often I want a setting in the menus while driving, but it would be a lot nicer if each menu screen had a distinct set of sounds so that by ear I could know where I am and memorize those controls if I needed to.

> long after the company stops distributing their app

There is a cool idea called open source, but I suppose something as radical as giving users ownership of software for their car isn't something companies would be willing to consider. Much better when you get to charge a subscription for heated seats.

Even if its open source, I don't want to spend my own time or depend on other people deciding to keep the software working and building on newer devices just to configure car settings. There's no reason in the world to eschew a touch screen or other control interface in a car and instead put all the control in a phone app.

I would say safety is a big one. It's a lot easier for users to justify fiddling with a touch screen interface when it's a part of the car vs on their phone screen. Sometimes you want to make unsafe things harder to do.

If fiddling with the touch screen while driving is the issue, you can solve that with software lock-outs. The Mazda's touch screen stops responding to touches at faster than 5 MPH, and if necessary you could also lock out option and setting controls entirely while the car is in motion so that even the control knob couldn't be used to fiddle while driving. Moving control out of the already on board computer and control system and onto some external device is just plain over-engineering a worse solution.

The vast majority of these settings are unavailable to even browse on my cars while the car is in motion. No need to go with putting it in a separate app. Which putting it in an app doesn't even prevent it, the driver could still just be messing with their phone anyways.

Even if we achieve that, there are still closed-gardens to open

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