I'm sympathetic to the pleas here. But I'm a luddite. A real luddite, not, as this article is, a simple petty reactionary: the problem is not technology, it's who owns it[1], it's how we are puppet-ed along via technology (Ursala Franklin would call this example of the car a prescriptivist instead of a holistic technology[2]). Technology is good when it empowers folks broadly, when it is soft. But the car systems of today are all prebaked in a hard, demeaning way- unsoft in extreme- and their systems don't entirely align with the people's interest, & even more rarely align with the power-users interest. Ideally, to me, the car has some built-ins but is a tabula rasa, a blank slate: it presents a robust & thorough API for the car systems, including the main interfaces.

Basically I just want a Chrysler with the infamous "Jeep Cherokee" hack[3]. Those cars were a modern miracle of amazingly well designed, consistent API engineering. Users gaining access to those systems, remotely, was shunned as a horrible vile thing, but it was an act of beauty & amazingness, a revelation of wonderfully good engineering. The coverage focused on the malicious acts, & that FUD far out-shined the amazing limitless potential of letting the world try to enrich themselves, make better. Tragic miscarriage against potential: the press murdered any hope of possibility in it's cradle. These cars were/are amazing. QNX OS running DBus protocols to expose all the car's systems: an easy to interface with, exploratory inter-system API for the whole car. We could have built anything here, it feels like. Instead, we damned & cursed the makers for having left some portal open to this computer: we parroted out terror.

I guess my gravy-on-top nee-plus-ultra ask atop having access to a car via DBus- the FreeDesktop standard IPC system- would be for the buttons to be more software defined, independent of their subsystems, which I think still wasn't entirely the case. I'd love to have a phone or console app running which can read from the big giant volume knob, for example, as I adjust some windows or the sunroof or the temperature. Infinite flexibility, please. I've said this before[4].

It's disappeared quickly, but Webinos was a very very interesting decade old attempt to define a user-empowering IoT architecture, & had significant interest from BMW/Land Rover. It's basically bitrotted off the internet, last seen early 2021[5], but was a really interesting user-centric system, where devices were linked not to corporate cloud services but to systems of users choice, exposing their capabilities & offerings generally. We need more holistic potentials in the world. We need to stop consigning away possibility, choosing retro-minimalism because we can't imagine any other possibilities than the vice, than the authoritarian, restrained systems of control most technology imposes upon us. We need personal computing to be possible again, broadly in the world, across devices, we need choice, we need agency, we need to stop being damned by computers & start being served by them: this is only possible if we let the users back in, re-open the frontiers.

In the end, I think the Chromecast model is basically right. The car should have a pre-baked system, but present some HTML capable interfaces, which themselves expose a couple additional above-and-beyond Web IoT apis to adjust windows, sunroofs, hvac. There should be decoupling (which I think Webinos was an early & technically successful contendor for).

[1] https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1478387800542224392

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...

[3] https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27463898

[5] http://web.archive.org/web/20210115211241/http://webinos.org...