Interfaces designed for looks, not function
It is unwise to forget that concept cars are mostly really expensive trade show gadgets. So indeed, the cross-over with a smartphone is apt on many levels. It isn't especially useful, though. I like the augmented reality, but a hologram popping up is no more than a nuisance. Rather spend that computing power on having the thing learn to steer itself, leaving me to interact with my fellow passengers instead. But maybe the modern car dweller will find talking to people directly rather than via some cloud-based social medium especially offensive, who knows.
To dig up an old quote about Brian Kernighan's car: its only instrument is a big question mark on the dashboard, which lights when something goes wrong. "The experienced driver," Dr Kernighan is quoted as saying, "will know what's wrong." This, of course is more than a little silly, even though programs like ed were indeed that bad. Unix was (and is) very terse when things go well, but does usually give fairly precise information about what is going wrong, even if the viewpoint tends to the system centric and as such appears inaccurate, even warped, to those not well-versed in it. This could and probably should be improved, but mere verboseness doesn't cut the mustard, as certain systems notorious for producing pop-ups with lenghty messages that nobody ever reads, not even when they later turn out to've been actually important for once.
The point I'd like to make, using above illustration as extreme antithese, is that very little of what this concept car's interface does has to do with getting from a to b, but everything with appearance to the point of terminal distraction.
On that note I'd be far more interested in some sort of "3d printed" design with an open source software based controller so as to experiment with innovative interfaces. There might be a couple things I'd like to try. Those will be solidly from a functionality perspective, as I'm usually too dull to come up with good, sensible uses of flashy graphics and other distractions. I'm not surprised to see that people focusing on MovieOS type flashyness don't come up with truly useful new car dashboards.
Smartphone type functions and such might be very useful, even in a car, but only after the car has shown to be good at providing people moving utility, and that it carefully separates that from anything related to connectivity. If it doesn't, well, we've already had the first BSOD-related car crashes (and yes that was a redmondian blessing, to a Jaguar I believe) and now we can have cloud-based road trip interference, too. Experience has shown that "embedded" software tends to be less than very well secured, whether that's water plants or car control. Maybe, while at it, the enterprising remote car jacker will replace princess Leia with, oh, darth vader or something. Through the mobile car cloud. Isn't that fun?