this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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I truly don’t understand why the infotainment systems in vehicles aren’t air-gapped from the systems that run the vehicle.
Because the infotainment panel is also used to manage features in the car that need to be controlled by the vehicles main controller, e.g. ESC enable/disable, auto start/stop of the engine, park assist systems etc.
So use a different panel/controls for that. I should not be able to start a car from a USB port or Bluetooth EVER, no matter how locked down the system is. Nothing with that sort of connectivity should come anywhere near the engine.
Yes they could do that, they choose not to probably to save cost. I'm just explaining to you why it is that way in cars available, not that it can only be that way.
It is not a necessary design element of a car to have a single touchscreen to control the car. It is a willful bad choice.
It is entirely possibly to have a car who's main driving components are air gapped from the windows, ac, radio, locks, etc. It just isn't done for a lot of modern cars.
I'm not saying it is necessary, I'm just explaining why it is not air gapped.
But if you were to have a physical button for every single thing you can adjust in modern cars, you'd literally need over 100 buttons which is absolutely insanely bad design.
Edit: not to mention that most of these settings can't be clearly identified with small simple pictograms. All in all it would make a confusing and horrible mess of the interior.
An infotainment screen can be separate from the thing that handles driving without a need to replace everything with physical buttons. It's just a matter of having 2 computers (and thus extra cost) that are not connected. The driving computer can handle things like ECS, ABS, acceleration, braking, locking, unlocking, headlights, turn signals, and of course managing the motor components all while being disconnected from the Internet. The cabin computer can handle everything else and appear to the user the same as it does today. You can even connect the cabin computer to the Internet without risk of dying if you want the ability to remotely heat or cool the cabin or want an auto emergency response call in cases of a crash.
You don't need an individual control for all the things that happen in a car, you just need intelligent, security aware decisions to be made when deciding what is critical for driving or safety and what is just there for comfort.
Uh.. cars existed for decades without needing hundreds of buttons everywhere. Modern cars are still made without Internet connected infotainment systems.
Your argument doesn't hold water.
Yes and for the past few decades the features of cars has exploded giving the driver a lot of options for configuration. Go through the car settings menu on any new car that isn't just the cheapest scraped version, there's dozens upon dozens of options that you can configure. Without a screen (not necessarily touch) to manage this, it would be button-hell where you couldn't find anything.
My infotainment system doesn't control any features of my car besides the speakers. Everything is either buttons, or is configured via dashboard, but even then that's like 5 options that could definitely be buttons.
I guess you might believe that it's required if your only experience with automobiles is a Tesla.
My experience is from VW/Skoda, Hyundai and volvo...the volvo was by far the worst and an absolute button-hell, it has insanely bad interior design.
I 100% prefer managing settings on a screen where I can get a proper detailed layout and logic representation of functional structure.