I genuinely don't understand why cars suddenly
have to have tablets built into them.
Back in the 1990s, in-dash sat nav was a premium feature only available on high-end cars. The first all-in-one TomTom wasn't introduced until 2004, and before that people in sales were willing to pay a big premium for sat nav, as a business expense.
Hence, car companies _think_ an executive/luxury car needs to have a screen in the dashboard because that's just how it's been for as long as they can remember. And they think putting premium car features in midrange cars makes them more appealing to buyers.
In the US, all new built cars are required to have reversing cameras from this month, so they need some screen in them. Once you have that there, it makes a fair amount of sense to start to use it for other functionality when not reversing and to use it to replace the old media interface.
Err, both of them can in practice, the only difference is whether the data is bought or self-collected.
In practice Volvo would probably just sell the data to others (i'm pretty sure they already do sell it to everyone from insurance carriers to you name it), and Google would probably just keep it.
They already have your location, and based on how fast you're moving they know if you're in a vehicle. Based on how you leave that vehicle in a certain spot and come back to it, they already know that's your vehicle.
You are assuming I carry any device Google is capable of tracking on my person. If a car comes with Google Maps built in, it is no longer a car I can consider for purchase.
I'm actually super impressed with the recent progress that the Android OpenStreetMap client has made. In the past six months or so it's gone from virtually useless to being a full Google Maps replacement (at least for my use cases).
I found the actual map quality quite lacking, unfortunately. Your mileage may vary by location, of course. I had been testing using OSM for a project to get some data, and MapQuest both had the OSM data and their own proprietary data. I compared the two and it was really painful to try and work with OSM's data.