As carmakers use infotainment systems to stand out from competitors, the essentially unregulated displays are becoming flashy, feature-packed distractions
Context & Ripple Effects
The infotainment race began as an accessory play — Parrot's 2015 aftermarket dash put Apple or Android brains into any dumb car — but has since become a core differentiator and revenue line for automakers, culminating in GM's gamble to replace CarPlay with its own system and, later, Apple's countermove with CarPlay Ultra. What Slate flags in 2021 is the safety side of that same escalation: none of these screens face meaningful regulation, so flashier features ship unchecked.
The warning signs were already visible in the coverage — [[a:943003|the IIHS had found that names like Autopilot lead drivers to overestimate what their cars can do]] — and distraction is the next frontier of that gap between what the dashboard invites and what the driver should do.
First-order effects
- Tesla's decision to make games playable while driving — the move that drew safety critics by December — shows the direct consequence: passengers and drivers get more screen temptation with no regulator standing between carmaker and cabin.
- Drivers are affected immediately, since every new infotainment feature adds visual and cognitive load to tasks that already compete with the road.
Second-order effects
- Safety bodies like the IIHS, which already flagged misleading automation naming, have a template for pressing regulators on distraction the way they pressed on driver-overestimation.
- As carmakers like GM build proprietary systems to capture service and data revenue, each has an incentive to pack in more attention-grabbing features, ratcheting the arms race rather than restraining it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, cabin software becomes a regulated surface the way automation naming eventually may — forcing carmakers to trade some of the differentiation that justified their in-house software bets.
- The broader shift is toward software-defined vehicles where the cockpit is the product; whoever owns the interface — carmaker or platform like Apple — also owns the liability question regulators have yet to answer.
The trend: In-car screens are evolving from convenience add-ons to the primary battleground between carmakers and phone platforms, with safety regulation arriving years behind the feature cycle.