Cars have a product lifetime of 15 years or so. Electronics are often obsolete after three.
Back in the day - the 1990s or so - if you had big bucks, you could buy a car with a built-in factory cell phone, and by the 2000s, even a factory navigation system! These "luxury" features no doubt sold new luxury cars, which were largely leased or traded-in every few years. While they were selling features to the new-car buyer, they were largely irrelevant or even a nuisance to the second-hand buyer.
Our 2002 X5, for example, had a built-in infotainment system (long before they called it that) which comprised five modules scattered throughout the car - the CD changer, the Radio module, the headend display, the navigation CD player, and a box of CDs for all 50 States. It was pretty clunky and only a few years after we bought the car secondhand, it started to fail, with the radio module shorting out when the dog tipped over her water dish (BMW, in its infinite wisdom, put this module under the spare tire, when there was plenty of room in the electronics "rack" above and behind the left wheel well) and the headend display started losing the very few pixels it had. I ended up replacing it with a Pioneer aftermarket system, which worked well - even the steering wheel controls worked! - but would drain the battery dead in minutes if the engine wasn't running.
It also had a space in the armrest for a "cell phone" - analog of course - and buttons on the steering wheel to dial and hang up and so on. This was long before the era of Bluetooth, of course. As a result, there was this oddly-shaped space in the armrest which made the compartment mostly unusable.
The car soldiered on for 15 years or so, but the electronics were obsolete in five. Today, no one would tolerate having a navigation system that requires you change a CD when you cross State lines. It is cumbersome and primitive. Of course, modern built-in systems (which will also drain your battery dead in minutes, if the engine isn't running) rely on stored data, which you can sometimes update by removing a memory chip (KIA) or by paying the car dealer (Ford) $240 for the privilege (No Thanks!). A lot of people are just noping out of built-in nav systems, as you can just use your cell phone instead. And many modern cars allow you to "mirror" the cell phone display to the main display of the car.
My experience with screen mirroring is mixed, however. I used to do that to show movies on my television screen (monitor) from my cell phone, but the phone would actually get hot from the effort of sending a rendered picture over the air. It was easier to use the cell phone as a hot spot and then let the television surf the Internet and download and render the images. Nevertheless, the idea of using the cell phone as the electronics "engine" and then communicating with the car via Bluetooth or screen mirroring makes more sense. When the cell phone becomes obsolete, well, it is a lot cheaper to replace than a car.
Oh, and Google Maps updates its maps for free - without having to burn a new chip.
So the problem is solving itself, perhaps? Perhaps. But then again, in ten years, a "Gen Alpha" person will look at Grandma's car and say, "What is this Bluetooth thing, anyway? Do you need to see a dentist?" Formats change and communications methods change.
I saw an ad for Chevrolet the other day and they were hyping their built-in electronics. They were hyping their Apple interface (which apparently Ford got tired of paying licensing fees for) and also touted that the car had a "built-in hot spot!" - as if this was some novel feature and not something that has been offered for a decade or more. And a useless feature as well. Why? Well your phone can function as a hotspot and may already be doing so. Many phones - particularly Apple, default to hotspot "on" and many phone plans charge an extra fee to use this feature. Many users - particularly Apple - have no clue about this and walk around with their hotspot blaring and paying $20 a month for the privilege.
Granted, it is confusing. I ask Mark to turn his hotspot "on" as my phone has run out of data. He turns on the WiFi and says, "There, it's on!"
"I don't see it," I reply. "But I turned the WiFi on!" he says. "Not WiFi, Hotspot!" I say.
"Isn't that the Hotspot?" he replies. We've had this same conversation many, many times, over the years.
"Think of it this way," I say, "The Hotspot is broadcasting to a phone or computer, while WiFi is receiving. When you turn on your WiFi, it is looking for a HotSpot to receive data from. When you turn on your HotSpot, it is broadcasting data to other devices, such as my phone!"
And yes, that is not accurate, as both devices are communicating two-ways. However, given the asymmetrical nature of the Internet (upload narrow, download wide) it sort of makes sense. And you can't have both WiFi and HotSpot turned on at the same time on your phone (Otherwise you could log into yourself!).
So touting that your car has a "Hotspot!" is sort of dumb. How exactly does that work? A Hotspot, by definition, has to have some link to the Internet, via a cell-phone connection. So if your car has a built-in "HotSpot" then you have to pay a subscription fee to a cell phone provider (and there are two different networks that are incompatible - which one works with the built-in Hotspot?). Moreover, you can buy a hotspot for as little as $99 (as I did with my poverty HotSpot) and pay as little as $25 a month for 100GB of data.
To me, it makes more sense to have the electronics separate from the car - and maybe this is the way the industry is going. Your navigation, entertainment, internet, and whatnot are provided by your phone, and the car just provides a display and a stereo system - sort of like your television and sound bar.
Speaking of which, it seems silly to me that they sell televisions with presets for various streaming services (no doubt, the services pay to have this done). Some services take off, others fade away, but the television remains. We use a cheap netbook to load the streaming service "apps" and then use the external HDMI output to drive the television. It works so much better than the built-in "apps" (all three of them) that came with the TV - and won't go obsolete so quickly. So in a way, keep the technology separate from the display and sound system.
Like I said, maybe the problem is solving itself, as newer cars have these interfaces which allow you to use the phone for the technology, leaving the car to merely act as a display. But since Ford charges $240 to update the GPS, maybe it is removing a profit center for them. Maybe that's why they are phasing out ApplePlay from their platform. Or maybe it is just one of these mundane money disputes like the CableCos have with content providers, every year or so. Who knows?
Our cars are 7 and 8 years old, respectively. So far, the electronics are not obsolete, but they are dated. Neither has a screen mirroring feature, which is OK with me. Both have Bluetooth, so you can at least have audio cues from Google Maps (on your phone) play over the car's stereo. The nice thing about this kind of arrangement is that if Google Maps becomes yesterday's news, well, you can just load a different app instead.
But I suspect in five or ten years, they will come up with a new form of communication for your phone, and over time, things like Bluetooth will go the way of the CD player (which, inexplicably, our truck still has!) and some new format for communication will emerge - perhaps one that allows for screen mirroring without baking your phone and running the battery dead.
Maybe paying extra for built-in electronics, though, isn't necessarily a swell idea, when they become obsolete so quickly.
