In my car, the stereo system connects to the phone via Bluetooth. There is no other independent wireless communication system available to the car. At startup, after connecting to my phone, the display announces "911 Assist enabled". My stereo needs to know when the airbags have been deployed so it can call 911 on my behalf. Thus they need to be connected.

In your car, there may be a more subtle reason. Perhaps a phone interface is an option it didn't come with, but it is pre-wired to support it. Maybe the gas gauge is tied to the nav system to highlight gas stations when you have less than 1/8 tank of fuel remaining. Maybe the nav system feeds the vehicle data recorder. Maybe your car has warning sounds that play through the audio system. Or maybe the volume control is tied to the speedometer to keep the music level appropriate for the road noise.

I don't know what your particular car does or is capable of. But there could be a dozen obscure reasons the car could want to talk to the satnav or audio systems.

Tape? Why not buy a mounting kit? http://www.ipadandiphonestuff.com/colby-ipad-steering-wheel-mount-p-188.html

Yep. A touch screen has no place in a car. They can be installed very nicely, even by an amateur, but they will always be a stupid idea because drivers are humans that have two eyeballs, both facing forward.

Because they're all integrated. Your car's radar can detect that the vehicle in front of you has suddenly hit the brakes, it can sound an alarm and blink a light on the windshield warning you of a road hazard immediately ahead, the engine telemetry can talk to your ABS braking systems telling them that the car is still moving even though the brakes have locked up, your crash sensors can detect an accident, your seat belt pre-tensioners and airbag deployment systems help protect the cabin occupants in case of an accident, your entertainment system can tell your cell phone to call a number, and your telemetry system records the events. Tying them all together permits your car to help you avoid accidents, protect you in case of an impact, call an emergency services number in the event of a crash, and can even help prove to a court that you were traveling only 5 MPH and had applied the brakes two seconds before you were struck.

There are safety designs in place. The different systems tie to the CAN bus through a fairly simple and robust chip that implements the protocols, which helps insulate and isolate a faulty device from overrunning the bus. There are often multiple CAN buses in a car, with engine management and safety being isolated from cabin entertainment systems. The CAN bus protocol has a priority mechanism, where lower numbered devices take priority over higher number devices - safety systems, such as ABS, crash detection and airbag deployment, are the lowest numbers, security systems like door locks have higher numbers, and the whiz-bang gadgetry of your stereo has the highest numbers.

Furthermore, your ABS system is an active driver assistance system, but it's not your means of braking. If it fails, the hydraulics still connect your brake pedals to your wheels, and you can still maintain control of the car. The airbags are just one component of an overall safety package, so if they fail, the seat belt pre-tensioners might still work. Even if the pre-tensioners also fail, the seat belts themselves still offer protection. The steering wheel is designed to collapse in the event you hit it with your body. The body is designed with crumple zones to absorb impacts.

What they've done is to combine these pieces that have known failure rates of one per tens or hundreds of millions of miles driven, and used them to protect you in the case of a serious accident, which they know happens once per hundred thousand miles driven. The chances of the systems working together to keep you safer are much higher than the chances that they'll all fail at the moment you need them the most.

No wonder Debian was insecure. Seven would have been a lot more random than four.

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In-Car Electronics (ICE). Control console. Dash GUI. Dash interface. Driver interface. Carputer (I threw that one in to go with infotainment. :-) Make something up.

Ford's SYNC is bad, but MyTouch is abysmal. Not only do you have a touch screen, but the fixed controls are touch sensitive. Reaching for them blindly is the same as activating them. And they reportedly don't work with gloves, which may not be a problem in San Diego, but here in Minnesota that's a killer.

Older cars used to have a fairly standard interface for the in-dash radios, because they were simply radios. But with factory installed sound systems featuring a dozen independent speakers, trunk-mounted amplifiers, integrated climate controls, navigation systems, and all tied into the car's CAN bus, replacing them with an aftermarket product is much less of an option these days. On many of these tightly integrated vehicles, I fear they may never be upgradable.

Take a look at what the "local maniac" did to install an iPad mini in the dashboard of his truck: http://hackaday.com/2013/01/02/a-very-dash-ing-ipad-mini/

Of course, not every stereo installer is going to custom sculpt a trim ring for each stereo they install. But when they do, the results can be impressive.

What amazes me is that companies like Ford refuse to acknowledge this. To me, it's incredible that they can be so stupidly focused on trying to make a product that can never be made to work properly, because humans don't work that way.

And it's not like they aren't being told this repeatedly. Consumer Reports states in every article featuring a Ford product that has their "Ford MyTouch" system that the car lost somewhere between 4 and 8 points on its overall score due to the crappy interface. And in many cases those points would take the vehicle from the middle or bottom of their grouping to the top of their category. This has been going on for every MyTouch equipped vehicle they have released since the 2012 model year.

After looking at this carefully, the conclusion I have come to is they must have some hyper-egotistical VP of infotainment who has an MBA or marketing degree but no engineering background, and he has deemed by fiat that "touch screens are what people buy on their phones, make it happen on the dashboard", ignoring the advice of his safety engineers and human factors team. Microsoft was overjoyed to sell them their misnamed SYNC system (it actually syncs with nothing) as a base product, which they then had developed by some team who had no idea they were writing a car interface, and who still think popup "Are you sure you want to exit?" dialogs are appropriate for a vehicle. I wouldn't be surprised if their next release has the Windows 8 interface, complete with animated tiles trying to tell the driver that he has a new Facebook follower, three emails, and a coupon offer for a free trial of Angry Birds.

If Ford can't change under pressure from engineers and consumers, I expect that there will be several lawsuits from the victims of distracted drivers. And that's a tragedy.

And the minute you buy the car some improvement comes out and if you can't upgrade a module easily you're stuck.

Sirius and XM merged about ten minutes after the car radio for my VW was manufactured, so it doesn't go to the higher channels. I'm not about to fork over $700 for a newer radio, when only the tuner needs a fix.

Not really an option when you have a fairly sculpted dash, unless you want it to look like something the local maniac hacked together with his own three hands.

The crazy is in thinking she can regulate better security onto any random industry. It doesn't work like that. Security is too complicated to magically fix by insisting on blind usage of a particular tool.

If you look at the article, a huge number of the breaches are to do with credit card leaks. Well, duh, credit cards are a pull model not a push model. Bitcoin is more sensible, but the California DFI is busy harassing Bitcoin companies. So if she really cares about upgraded security, maybe she should get the DFI off the back of people building more secure, cryptographic financial systems that compete with the incumbents? That's much less fun than coming up with new laws though.

The spirit of Jobs will continue to shine down upon them and power them. Ye of little belief.

To point (2).

Seems pretty likely that they will. I know the democrats did in 2008. Of course, a 180 was made on that policy after election.