Digital dashboards are now standard in both traditional and electric vehicles, yet most still replicate analog layouts, limiting the expressive potential of digital media and affecting how drivers interpret information. As ADAS, automation, and software-defined systems evolve, these interfaces often fail to align with drivers’ cognitive needs for awareness, trust, and understanding.

As automotive cabins evolve into shared living spaces, current in-car entertainment (ICE) systems remain largely screen-centric, promoting individual consumption. This paper introduces BonGO, a car-native system designed to enable collaborative phygital interaction among passengers. Using a research-through-design approach, the study combines exploratory research, prototyping, and experiential evaluation to investigate alternative interaction paradigms. BonGO integrates tangible controllers, a shared console, and multimodal feedback to support activities such as interactive storytelling and shared music curation. Results from a prototype with 30 participants show increased engagement and social interaction, while highlighting challenges in usability, accessibility, and safety.

This paper presents Cloud-9, a multimodal interaction paradigm for assisted parking that reorganizes existing capabilities into a graduated, driver-controlled support model. Cloud-9 consolidates guidance on a single dashboard display, combining visual overlays, textual cues, and auditory feedback to reduce attentional fragmentation. A preliminary simulator study with 40 participants showed reduced cognitive load, and high willingness to adopt guidance-based assistance in everyday driving.