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.
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.