Your car’s dashboard is about to get a lot more expansive — and expensive

Here's an update on the kind of things we'll soon be seeing with car dashboards. Say goodbye to a lot of free conveniences.

I still remember the Delco AM radio in my dad’s 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 that sat smack in the middle of the dash with its two knobs. The one on the left set the volume as well as turned it off and on. It had an inner ring on the same knob stalk that controlled “tone” (left to turn down the bass and right to turn up the treble; it was useless). The one on the right was for tuning in stations. Cranking it sent an indicator across the dial.

Once you found the station you were looking for, you pulled out one of the five slat-like buttons on the front of the unit and then pushed it all the way back in, mechanically creating a memory for the tuning indicator. When you had all five buttons programmed, flipping from station to station was as easy as pushing the corresponding button which responded with a hearty ka-CHUNK.

There was a lot of fighting over that radio because it was the only entertainment device available in the car. How times have changed — and continue to change.

I was reminded of that old Delco while attending a couple of panels at Canadian Music Week in Toronto this month. Dashboard times are a-changin’ and changin’ fast.

As manufacturers and dealers pivot away from ICE (internal combustion engines) to electric vehicles, they’re also looking for new ways to monetize their vehicles. For example, dealers are going to be heavily impacted in the area of after-sales service, the part of the business that brings in most of the revenue.

With electric vehicles, there are no oil changes, radiators to fix, belts to replace, injectors to clean, exhaust systems to replace, and spark plugs to change. Sure, there are still the mechanics of the electric motors that need attending along with tires to swap, bodywork to repair, and brakes to maintain, but overall, electric vehicles should need less service than ICE vehicles.

That lost ICE revenue needs to be made up somewhere. And that somewhere is going to be the dashboard.

Manufacturers worldwide are looking at new ways to monetize the experience of being in a vehicle, not just for the driver but for all the passengers, too. And it all comes down to data. More and more vehicles are coming with cellular connections, linking them to the exchange of all kinds of data with the cloud. Cars are increasingly big computers on wheels run by millions of lines of code and for them to work properly, they need to be connected to the internet.