I think the fact that car companies are not tech UI/UX design experts is the reason infotainment systems are so terrible these days. They can design a nice interior, but designing a system that looks nice, works well, and can play nice with iOS/Android/Windows/etc isn't their forte.
Car companies don't usually design these things; heck, most don't design many of the parts of vehicles.
Everything is offloaded to third-party car part manufacturers who make things to an OEM spec (and later supply replacement components to the repair and maintenance market) - but in many cases they also supply their own parts, which can be picked and chosen by the manufacturer.
In the case of infotainment, the standard unit is DIN size; usually double-DIN for most systems today (hidden behind the plastic dash panels); the parts manufacturer designs and builds a number of components and units for that (along with software and such), and the car manufacturer picks it out of a catalog (if there's something that will work). Otherwise a more customized option is done (and then back to your comment of course).
This applies to engines, drivetrains, and virtually every other component of the car, with the exception of the frame and bodywork (interior and exterior) - though even there the part manufacturers lend their hands and expertise to the task, because they have to supply replacement components for those items as well usually.
Many of these parts suppliers used to be wholly owned by the auto manufacturers (some still are), but more than a few are independent as well, and supply parts to various manufacturers. Others are more independent, but only supply to a single manufacturer or brand. All this is to say that an automobile manufacturer today doesn't necessarily do everything completely in-house like they used to. It is much more complicated and fragmented today.
I think there are a couple of reasons vehicle infotainment systems are somewhat bad across the board.
For starters, cars only get redesigned about every 5 years. That means that most major models that are on the market right now, have only had a full screen interface for 2, maybe 3 generations. So manufacturers can't iterate on what works and what doesn't in terms of their design/development process as quickly as other electronic products.
Figuring out how good, is good enough, and what kinds of personnel, suppliers, and processes you need to design an excellent infotainment system is something that naturally took the auto industry a lot longer than say, smartphones or TV's. Because of that, it took a long time for them to even figure out how a car infotainment should fit in with smartphones. And it took a lot of them a long time to figure out that making an interface touchscreen-only for a car is actually an anti-pattern.
I LOVE CarPlay for this exact reason, the OEMs system is terrible.
When I bought the car I read reviews that said it was head and shoulders above the previous model, which terrifies me.
Even if the software was good/fast there’s plenty of hardware problems with the system. It has a nice big touchscreen. They obviously asked around and found out the people love iPhones (surprise) and so obviously doing things with touch is the best way. So they replaced all the physical controls on the radio with capacitive touch strips.
End result? You can’t use any of them without looking at them and being very careful. In the next model year (or perhaps the one after that) they put the controls back as physical buttons. Good.
But, they added a capacitive touch strip to the steering wheel to make it “easy“ to adjust the volume by various amounts. My mom has that car. She CONSTANTLY adjust the volume up or down a whole bunch accidentally do to that control.
All because of a “fad”.
If it wasn’t for the up and down volume buttons (and I mean BUTTONS) on the steering wheel I wouldn’t have bought the car at all.
