I'm fearing the day when my quite old ICE car dies and I end up in a situation where the best option is a newer car that is a computer on wheels running software that I know will stop getting updates very quickly.
Of all the new cars ideas I've seen recently, only the Slate mini-truck seems to be taking a minimalist approach, with no fancy head unit or navigation system.
I'm hopeful that stuff like Android Auto or Apple CarPlay will continue moving some of the risky obsolete-able complexity away of the giant expensive machine I plan to keep for over a decade (the car) and into smaller easier-to-replace ones (my smartphone.)
A quick outline for those who haven't used them: The car's head-display becomes mostly-controlled by your phone, which is what supplies any navigation, music, podcasts, address-book, GPS, cellular data-connection, etc. Meanwhile the car focuses on providing the display/touchpad hardware, inputs from steering-wheel controls, and maybe AM/FM radio modes.
With the right vehicles/adapters I don't even need to take my phone out of my pocket, which is great because then I can't forget it in the car.
I posted this above, but in new Lexus RX models at least, the Lexus vehicle management software trumps the AA interface so you're forced to setup their mobile app if you want to use AA (for things like navigation).
On a related note, the Bluetooth stack in my F150 doesn't work very well with phone calls. I can place calls fine, but receiving calls will not route them through vehicle audio. I have to turn on speaker phone to participate. It's a known problem "won't fix" from Ford, regardless of the fact that they've sold millions of these trucks (mine is a 2017 and has never worked).
That sounds like sync 3.. there was a known problem with Bluetooth connectivity but there was a fairly easy way to fix it. I cannot remember but I will look at my ford vehicle tonight for what I did
They want their hands on that juicy data that Google and apple are getting. It's why GMC opted to make their own instead, and why you have to jump through their hoops first.
GM, at least on their new Equinox EV, no longer supports either Apple CarPlay or Android Auto electing instead to provide only the Google built-in infotainment system and apps.
I discovered this just yesterday while researching the Equinox for a friend.
She is no longer interested in the Equinox despite her loving its looks.
I can't figure out why car manufacturers insist on building whole parallel universes of UIs, media apps, nav apps et cetera. Doesn't it cost a ton? Do people actually use/want this stuff?
I think what they want is long term dominance, not necessarily revenues. Allowing Apple/Google run their code by default on all cars would be near out of question to them.
A lot of people also need robust offline navigation. The freebie included infotainment offer that.
And insisting on building their own mediocre ui helps them achieve that how exactly?
Maybe I'm just super out of touch on how people use their cars, but my cars infotainment system has not made its manufacturer any additional money as far as I can tell.
Once you have the data the money can be figured out later.
You can figure out how people use the car and what features matter to them and upsell or upcharge for those features in the next line.
You can cross-advertise (oh you listen to music when driving here's Spotify deal through us and behind-the-scenes we get a cut for lead generation to Spotify).
You can use the information to defend in lawsuits. Oh our car is faulty leading to accidents? But all these people were fiddling with the unit before crashing.
Also if you control the platform you can sell integration spots to companies. I know my old BMW had a specific separate path to connect Spotify on your phone to car, no other audio app.
There's surely other ways I haven't thought of. The investment pays off later IF you get the data, but CarPlay and Android Auto have really mucked that gambit up for the car makers
CarPlay Ultra sounds like it's extending it further? That is, it's still essentially VNC† with some data fed from the car and rendered by the phone, but now with multi-monitor support.
† it's more complicated than that, but still a dumb framebuffer.
> CarPlay Ultra provides content for all the driver’s screens, including the instrument cluster, with dynamic and beautiful options for the speedometer, tachometer, fuel gauge, temperature gauge, and more, bringing a consistent look and feel to the entire driving experience.
This is what I hoped for but based on the Ultra implementation in the Astons is not at all what we’re getting
It seems to require pretty deep integration with the automaker (Aston provides a lot of custom visuals), and based on the available third party reviews it doesn’t work as well as you’d suspect for a flagship integration
I can't imagine that the image shown in CarPlay Ultra is still rendered on the phone. It's used to show all driving relevant things (speed etc.). Is a wireless connection to the phone reliable enough so this would be allowed by regulators?
I thought the main image would be rendered on the car using local data and only the entertainment stuff is transferred from the phone.
And also, how would you drive your car without the phone if everything is rendered on the phone? Would they implement an entire backup dashboard for this? I thought it would always show the CarPlay Ultra interface, even when no phone is connected.
> I can't imagine that the image shown in CarPlay Ultra is still rendered on the phone. It's used to show all driving relevant things (speed etc.). Is a wireless connection to the phone reliable enough so this would be allowed by regulators?
I have some understanding of this being someone who has installed way too many aftermarket head units, and as best I can tell, all the rendering indeed occurs on the phone. The CarPlay experience is virtually identical across all the units I've tested on, from my stock '18 Corvette unit, through 4 or 5 ones I've shuffled through in my F-150, and through 2 or 3 through my Chrysler 300. Apart from display size and density, there is no difference at all in all these CarPlay units. They function identically.
The phone also gets notably warm even just playing music which is part of why I strongly suspect all of that is phone-side activity at play with the dash just providing a resolution/density combo and touch inputs.
> Would they implement an entire backup dashboard for this?
Correct, if my research is to be believed. There's a stock OEM OS look to everything in line with each brand's visual designs, which is then swapped out to whatever degree they feel like exposing to CarPlay Ultra, at which point it's reskinned in Apple's look.
I don't own any vehicles new enough for this, but it's pretty cool if it works. That said I'm less a fan of everything being a display. For gauges and such I do prefer physical gauges.
I know that regular CarPlay works like this, but I thought they would change it for CarPlay Ultra. Normal CarPlay isn't really safety critical currently.
Honestly it's like TVs? They're all broadly the same thing, usually Android tablets stuffed into whatever form factor. All have quirks, many have things to troubleshoot in terms of getting them to play nice with your vehicle's CAN system. That said the one I just installed this month in my truck is great. Wireless CarPlay, all the time, quick bootup, good quality reverse camera image, and it was a fairly cheap amazon-sourced unit.
If you want a name brand, you're probably looking at Pioneer, though they only make double-din units which make for less transformative upgrades than my truck's which is an entire replacement center console. To each their own though.
> I can't imagine that the image shown in CarPlay Ultra is still rendered on the phone. It's used to show all driving relevant things (speed etc.). Is a wireless connection to the phone reliable enough so this would be allowed by regulators?
For efficiency's sake, I hope it's like a theme (in the style of Winamp, or well, Windows XP), so you can pick some theme on your phone, and the phone tells the car to use that theme while rendering the car's instruments. For UI elements needing data from the phone (like album cover image), the theme would tell the car computer to fetch it from the phone. Considering the state of the tech industry, it's probably HTML and CSS too. And Javascript. Goatse anyone?
By the way... who the hell thinks it's important that someone operating a 800+ horsepower car should be able to be distracted by what the album cover of the music currently playing looks like..?
This is a bit of a two-edged sword. I kind of doubt that Carplay and Android Auto will keep working with new phones as long as a car can. At which point you will end up with an old smartphone in your car or some workaround like that.
This isn’t something I have actively thought about… but now that you bring it up, I am definitely concerned. If the APIs were deprecated, CarPlay would be useless as the auto manufacturers would not update their head unit.
The thread about an F150 with a known Bluetooth issue is a great example. Number one vehicle sold in the US for a LONG time, and yet no incentive to keep it working apparently
Automakers didn't update the cassette decks in their cars when CDs came out. You could expect cassettes to be around in cars for a good solid ~20 years, but that was about it. At some point technology moves on.
> Number one vehicle sold in the US for a LONG time, and yet no incentive to keep it working apparently
Yeah, there's no incentive to fix problems when people buy the product anyway.
> Automakers didn't update the cassette decks in their cars when CDs came out.
And reasonably enough: few people even in the early 90s had CD changers in cars, and people didn't want to scratch their discs, and in any case everyone pretty much still had a tape deck at home - it wasn't too hard to copy your CD to tape, which was cheap, small, rerecordable, and more durable, and sound quality in cars wasn't great anyway.
HDMI should have had a multitouch-over-EDID extension. An I2C HID controller with a spec-agreed address should be able to be just wired in parallel to EDID ROM line and it would just work. Lack of such standard must have strongly justified existence of CP/AA.
Has this ever happened with CarPlay? As far as I know, even if your car was made in 2013 when CarPlay was first released it should continue to work just fine with the newest iPhones. If you plug the latest iPhone into your 2013 car, you would see the latest version of CarPlay pop up on the screen. I know there's a new version of CarPlay which requires support from the car maker, but I think CarPlay support is a binary matter of if the car supports CarPlay at all. I'd hope they'd design the system such that it wouldn't become obsolete over the average lifespan of the vehicle.
I would hope so, but I don't trust computer makers.
There are people who still use cars made in the 1960s as their daily driver (probably only a handful in the US). Most parts are still available, and if not you can make them in your garage with affordable tools (metal lathes are rare but not unheard of in a home shop).
Apple switch to OSX, m68k to PPC to x86 (ARM is in progress). I had the first android phone - the apps I bought for it back then are not on installable on my current phone (most haven't very modified from what I ran back then). If I had a copy I could still run Office 97 on a modern windows 11 machine - or so I'm told - but nobody will know how to inter change files with me. My company has had to redesign perfectly good embedded controllers just because the chips are not made anymore.
On the other hand, Apple is quick to get rid of old APIs in their software, but they consider features sacrosanct. Only this Fall will macOS lose support for Firewire, which finally means that we have a version of macOS that doesn't support the first iPod. Which came out in 2001. All the USB iPods will still connect and sync.
> There are people who still use cars made in the 1960s as their daily driver (probably only a handful in the US).
I do like resisting the disposable economy, though I hope keeping ICE cars that old wouldn't be normal enough to be a factor in designing a product if for no other reason than emissions and safety features.
> (metal lathes are rare but not unheard of in a home shop).
Indeed. I grew up with a >1 ton metal lathe in ours, as well as a milling machine. My siblings and I would use the lathe as a climbing gym.
CarPlay is essentially a conditional pair of video inputs. Any system that supports on-screen rear-view camera and that has a wheel speed sensor can support CarPlay.
What do you really need? Is the car moving forward or backward is the only one you can't figure out from GPS on the phone (this is possibly what they are getting from wheel speed - GPS speed is more accurate if you have a signal).
There are a lot of nice to haves of course. GPS does eat phone battery so better if the car can give you that. There is a lot of other car data that is interesting, why force plugging a OBDII dongle in to get DTCs, RPM, O2 sensor values, or whatever. However for car play to work at all it doesn't need anything more.
Nav apps on phones will use dead-reckoning if they don't have a GPS signal, so they don't really even need the wheel-speed sensor, but I'd guess they use it just to increase accuracy.. e.g. in a long tunnel.
Increasing accuracy is a wild understatement. Dead reckoning with mobile phone hardware won't give you a usable result for long. Maybe your experiences are from tunnels with dedicated beacons to tell the phone where you are.
Most vehicular tunnels aren't too terribly long, if you're stuck in one in traffic, yeah dead reckoning drifts quite a bit. But if you're driving through one for a minute or two, it's sufficient.
On a side note I've personally had bad experience with beacons in train tunnels telling me I'm miles away from where I'm actually at.
I'm not really worried about a lack of updates to an embedded device provided that it isn't network connected. To me the root of the issue, and also a far more concerning problem in and of itself, is that from what I understand modern vehicles are connected to the mobile network and phone home.
Dealerships will want you to service at their shops because they will upload all the BT metadata that the car has logged. Just because it can’t upload data on its own does not mean data instead logged.
Yeah, security is not a liquid. It won't diminish over time, and can't be added by updating. Updates replace something with something else, in this day and age likely third world outsourced code with vibecoded burning dumpster. Disconnecting the device from networks is basically always a better alternative. I don't understand why that much isn't so obvious to HN readers.
I really wish these options would become more common, maybe even similar to the whole ecosystem around old American muscle cars. Pick and choose a (mostly) standardized drive train, standardized battery packs of different capacities and and your electronics to connect everything together.
I thought the issue is more the batteries and weight distribution. That is, EVs usually have the batteries along the length of the chassis to spread the load out, which is not practical to retrofit onto an ICE car.
And if you fill the engine bay on an ICE car with battery packs during the conversion, the weight distribution will be extremely uneven and cause trouble with the suspension and related components, poor handling, etc.
That "etc." hides "moving the heaviest, most flammable and non-extinguishable part of the drivetrain into a primary crumple zone in front of you" pretty neatly. :D
However, lithium fires burn hotter and can't be contained as easily. So, that firewall may need an update, too.
Plus, as I noted in the weight part, an engine in a compartment is designed to detach and slide down to protect the cell. Can every retrofitter guarantee the same thing for their battery packs?
>I thought the issue is more the batteries and weight distribution
That's something spewed by people who don't know enough about cars to know they're chasing the wrong criteria. Battery placement is like a 2nd/3rd/4th order problem. You could fit a very respectably battery in the space where the fuel tank and exhaust go and if not there then the floor might just have to get a couple inches taller in the rear row. Not a big deal. Making battery cases to fit those locations is hard, but also not crazy. Just scan it like Weathertech and Uhaul do for mats and hitches.
The first order thing that's keeping all this from happening is that there's no money in it after all the expensive re-engineering and low volume manufacturing you'd need to do to integrate it into the vehicles you want to support.
This is why the industry is kind of stalled at the "supporting DIYers" level. It just don't work without free labor doing the vehicle specific bits.
> You could fit a very respectably battery in the space where the fuel tank and exhaust go
You can fit some battery there, but liquid fuels have a much higher energy density and so I wouldn't call it respectable. I have know people who converted a car to electric, and finding places to stuff batteries was the major challenge, they did the fuel tank of course, but then went looking for any other unused empty space. In the 1980s old trucks were favored because under the bed there was a lot of empty space to work with (even then those old lead-acid batteries didn't give much range)
At least in the UK the Kia Niro comes in petrol, plug-in hybrid, and full EV versions of the same chassis. It seems like most Uber drivers in London have replaced their hybrid Prius with an EV Niro.
I think the latest Niro is kinda the opposite, an EV platform retrofitted for ICE for some models. I would say it is well liked (for its size and price point)
I live in a place with very harsh winters, and our used cars usually command a premium, simply because we get cold enough that road salt is no longer effective, so the municipalities generally don't bother in the first place.
I really, really wish my area had that mindset. Even on the -25 and lower days, the trucks will be out salting. Thick enough that it basically creates a layer of grit on top of the snow/ice. I end up undercoating my cars 2-3 times per season, and washing them as frequently as possible (every day sometimes). Every aspect of which is horrible for the environment, but letting the car disintegrate is even worse, so it’s a “lesser of two evils” situation.
If my car's engine dies (which at some point it probably will do, after all, these things don't live forever) I'll just rebuild it again. It's got 200K on it and a relatively fresh engine (40K) so I think I'm good for a long time to come but buying a modern vehicle isn't even on the menu for me. If I really want malware I'll disable my adblocker, I really don't need it in my car.
Same, early 2010s IMO seems to be the point where the industry really started to shift. There are some good cars from before this time, but keep them running past the 2030s will be a challenge.
1980s widespread adoption of electronic fuel injection - this is generally a good thing, cars become more complex but run better more of the time
1990s widespread adoption of more advanced emissions control systems - for reliability i'd say this is only a backwards step - none of these systems are required to propel the car down the road but many of them can stop a car from driving. They are additional complexity, weight and cost for limited functional benefit (in this generation, fuel economy improvements were fairly small compared to the leap from carbs to EFI in the previous gen).
2000s widespread adoption of on-car networks, the emissions diagnostics technology introduced in the previous decade was now no longer the primary use of on-car networks. Now your car stereo knew how to increase its volume as your road speed increased etc. screens became larger and colourful. Onboard software (typically bug ridden) became a security risk.
2010s widespread adoption of telematics maybe? That was more mid-late 2010s though
According to the industry people stopped doing maintenance and were more likely to trade in their vehicle for a new one. So they stopped optimizing for that segment of the audience and started making disposable cars.
Truthfully, industry watched the government bail out the banks, require next to nothing in return, and demanded no prosecutions for illegal behavior. The writing was pretty much on the wall. Industry realized it no longer needed happy customers.
>> According to the industry people stopped doing maintenance
Nah the motoring industry has been saying that forever. Just to back that up, I inherited a ton of the "Car Mechanics" magazine here in the UK. Just for fun I've just pulled a random 1960s one - November 1965, 2 shillings it cost. Flicking through, firstly i'm struck by just how many adverts there are, there's 1.5 pages of advert per 0.5 page of content and the adverts are commonly absolute tat like antifreeze additives that surely do nothing useful. Anyway, by page 35 we've found our first nobody maintains anything anymore story: "Transport Tests", top right hand side - a column railing against "defective lorries on the road", "49% of trucks stopped were defective" - i knew no matter which magazine i pulled, there'd be something in there decrying a lack of maintenance these days (in 1965...).
>> So they stopped optimizing for that segment
Again, i don't think you're accurate here. There's nothing a mechanic loves more than to gripe about the engineers who foolishly designed a car to be harder to service. It's a time-tested complaint of the mechanic. Today with all the tight packaging of various systems i think there's often a point to be made about ease of repairability but even when engine bays were gaping empty holes in the 50s and 60s that you could literally stand in (in some cases) with plenty of access space while you worked, there were models of cars derided as "hard to work on" because of lack of optimisation for maintenance. Packaging is hard. If the decision is between optimising for sale (aesthetics, packaging etc) or for maintenance, the design engineer is going to lose that battle in the drawing room.
I think market forces have changed how manufacturers view servicing over time though. If you're doing fleet sales, and your product requires an oil change every 8k miles and the other manufacturer is every 20k miles, then the company purchaser who cares not a jot about mechanical sympathy and a whole lot about a bonus for saving the firm money, applies a pressure to the market to reduce maintenance costs over the first 3-4 years that a vehicle is leased for. And so today i own a van with an absolutely absurd oil change interval of 25k miles.
You're approaching this as if it would be a binary across an entire industry. That's obviously not the correct level of analysis. The question is, "are more and more manufacturers doing this?" You've made no case to this point.
> And so today i own a van with an absolutely absurd oil change interval of 25k miles.
Would you share the Year, Make and Model please? I want to see this and I want to see precisely which oil products they recommend. The part you may have missed is that specialty oils have come a long way in the last 2 decades.
Software updates and data collection. Eg, my mums Toyota Corolla 2018 already has a disabled infotainment button because of dropped support. If it was a 2019 it would have been eligible for an update, but not for 2018.
Lots of cars from the same period are collecting and sharing data to various different companies from weather to insurance.
Personally I don’t want monitoring or software updates, and definitely don’t want any cloud dependencies.
I'd say Tesla built a futuristic computer on wheels, with huge screens, always-on internet connectivity, smarter remote features than most other cars, etc. The car itself was exotic enough by being an EV and that drew attention to these other features too. Everyone else started to emulate them for better or worse.
For now these things are modular because it was the cheapest way to build them. If manufacturers get over the hurdle of cost and find a way to have everything more vertically integrated (think Apple) then we'll lose all access to tinker with the hardware which might be a couple of black-box chips, or the software.
This is probably what Apple was trying to sell as a smart car to car manufacturers. They might have dropped those plans to focus in CarPlay and have the phone be that "smart car". Hopefully some brands go the other way and make a dumb car where the brain is entirely the phone but that's handing out a lot of their agency to the phone manufacturer.
> 2010s widespread adoption of telematics maybe? That was more mid-late 2010s though
I haven't done it yet, but maybe looking into the EU mandatory regulations would make sense. eCall, for instance (a feature that will call for help if you crashed by contacting an operator), was made mandatory in new cars in 2018. The initiative gained traction at around 2013.
Hmmm, but I think that was already happening in the early 2000s. It definitely accelerated in the late 2000s.
I worked for a deutsche telekom subsidiary in 2004 and they had a brand new BMW e65 7 Series all liveried up in corporate branding, advertising internet connectivity on the move. At the time i thought that was the ultimate car but i never managed to borrow it...
On an adjacent theme there has been a large debate in Sweden if a car that has mandated automatic eCall over 2G or 3G is faulty and thus not roadworthy if the 2G and 3G networks are turned off. The eCall feature was introduced broadly in 2018. It still uses modem sounds over a voice phone call to relay car emergency status and position. New solutions for packet only networks (4g and 5G) have been standardised but are not retrofitted to older cars.
I had thought most of europe was keeping 2G service online. Too many deployed devices that are low traffic but expensive to replace modules on. Even if they had a 3g module, they'll fall back to 2g, so there's no sense in using spectrum for 2g and spectrum for 3g.
The first way this can go is that the people with a stake in selling cars (dealers, OEMs, etc) get their lobbyists leaning on the politicians and get it rammed through.
The second is that the issue gets delayed long enough that the number of older vehicles it applies to goes down out of attrition and it's not worth fighting over.
Considering the cultural disposition of the nordics when it comes to matters like this I expect the first option to be chosen. There will enough people hand wringing about safety and whatnot to provide the political lubricant to ensure the first outcome.
> Consider an electric cargo bike if you're life will suite it.
Don't they have proprietary batteries? So you're out of luck at end-of-life if that company still isn't in business. And if a part fails are there replacements?
I'll give you the price is cheap. But if we're just looking for cheap then OP has nothing to worry about. There's cheap transportation in a variety of forms if you buy used.
I ride such a bike, and I would no longer call it cheap - the range/speed is limited enough that I feel compelled to have a car anyway that just sits. I still have to pay taxes and insurance on that car, plus the yearly oil change (at least it is paid for). What with replacing the bike tires, chain, and cassette a lot more often than I expected I end up spending as much on bike maintenance and I would on gas and the other costs of the car are paid either way. If I could get rid of the car it would be cheaper, but otherwise no.
don't get me wrong - I encourage everyone to ride a bike where they can. However it is for health reasons not saving money.
It may be easy to get a simple(ish) one now, but there are already a lot of e-bikes out there with "smarts", apps, vendor-lock-ins up the wazoo, cellular connection and the like. If electric cargo bikes ever go mainstream, I expect the majority of them will be techifyed in the same vein as the Hyundai the author wrote about.
> Of all the new cars ideas I've seen recently, only the Slate mini-truck seems to be taking a minimalist approach, with no fancy head unit or navigation system.
Agreed re: Slate, it looks interesting through this lens for sure.
But I also think there's probably a business opportunity here, and wonder why a bunch of thinkpad enthusiasts don't get together and start a classic tech business delivering simple EVs with knobs+levers, and computers that don't suck.
You're driving an old car now; you could just drive a different old car when that time comes.
But if you're talking about new cars, I think the best way to mitigate that is to buy something that is ubiquitous. The popular cars are the most likely to have enthusiasts finding ways to keep them running until the wheels fall off.
There are plenty of modern options. Most of my vehicles do not get over the wire updates ('12 honda civic, '15 base model Colorado, '17 Spark). Our tiguan does, sadly.
This is the whole point: putting intermediaries between you and the things you think you own.
You think you own your car, phone, appliances, but actually, once this system is in place, you will effectively be on some sort of subscription contract with few traditional ownership rights, with many other parties (the car maker, government agencies) able to turn your car off remotely.
Concretely, why not? If you don't get updates, there's nothing to break the thing -- and if you don't have a network connection, you don't need the security updates.
I would be on board with this if the system was not touching the outside world, but it does every time you hook a smartphone to it or if you have an optional data network. Just like with our smartphones, there's nothing stopping a car company from pushing system-damaging updates when they want to steer us toward buying a new vehicle since that one is too outdated/no longer supported.
What you say can be true about a static isolated system, though. My employer has a Windows XP computer still running a machine in our factory. The PC was built built in 2006, connected to the Internet once upon deployment then disconnected thereafter. It has been running the software and machine more or less untouched since, receiving zero updates, performing it's duty as it was built to.
I'm not opposed to a player connected to a phone or other network, but that player doesn't need to be on the CAN bus, or any other car bus. Car speed for volume control, steering wheel buttons, lights, etc. can be communicated from the car to the player via dedicated wires (on/off, pwm, voltage ladder, etc.) like they did it in the early 2000s.
I'm happy to manually apply updates for my immobilizer as necessary. Keyless entry is already broken (recent front page) and can't be fixed via update AFAIK at least without leaving behind all current fobs. Given that it's still using a proprietary encryption scheme from the mid 80s it doesn't seem the manufacturers were particularly concerned about security to begin with.
Not likely, because they're extremely short range (one centimeter or so). The attacker would need to turn the duplicate key in the ignition exactly at the time the other attacker bumps into the owner, exactly on the correct side where the pocket with the key is, and precisely match the position of the key in the pocket with the antenna in the attacker's pocket/bag/whatever. And if the key is in a handbag, then good luck trying to get a reader close to it.
But then, how would they get a duplicate of the ignition key?
Since at least 2009 it has been possible to duplicate keys using photography, a hobbyist replicated the work in 2018. So take a photo when the keys are out somewhere; on a table, or when unlocking the car.
I suppose then you can change the date on the car's computer so it's still 2014 or something, at least the car would remain a non-fascist place with Obama still president...
Of all the new cars ideas I've seen recently, only the Slate mini-truck seems to be taking a minimalist approach, with no fancy head unit or navigation system.