UIs in highly reliable machinery feels old because they're in development for so long (plus the manufacturers are typically blind to software UX).
Hopefully old car makers are currently considering easily updatable software (what an invention), so that we can have it in 3 years.
I think InitialLastName's point was (and it's my recent experience as well), that why the UI, in vehicles at least, may often be "modern" now to a relatively reasonable degree, the whole experience is often just shoddily put together. With obvious bugs that shouldn't have made it into a firmware version in the first place, and behind very strange user interaction concepts to begin with.
