[PaulHoule]

I am scared of the infotainment system myself as it could distract you to death. That goes for cell phone and tablet and the stick-on GPS which gets confused in the most complex urban areas, falls into your lap when the suction cup fails, etc.

[SoftTalker]

My big complaint is with the transition of controls from dedicated, tactile knobs, switches, and levers to touch-screen buttons or menus which demand more visual attention (i.e. distraction from driving) to operate.

[mikehodgson]

Mazda did the research, and transitioned back to real tactile controls in 2019. I expect more automakers will be or are already following their lead.

https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur...

[ptmcc]

I love Mazda for resisting the touchscreen-everything car interior. Everything in my 2021 CX-5 is physical buttons and knobs. The design and ergonomics are just fantastically nice and usable.

Like you said, the infotainment is also not a touchscreen and is rotary control only. While not as immediately intuitive as a touchscreen, once you get the hang of it it is much safer and more accurate to use while driving. Trying to use a touchscreen while moving is just awful.

And I don't think it is wise to optimize short term intuitiveness over long term safety and usability for a vehicle I will own for several years.

[ModernMech]

I have a 2016 Mazda and they had tactile controls then. What they did in 2019 was remove the touch screen feature on the center display, but there were always tactile controls to access the display. I have a 2022 Mazda and it's largely the same interface as the 2016 controls.

[izzydata]

This is my least favorite trend in new cars. If there aren't any new cars in 10 years that aren't just a giant screen in the center then I guess I'm going to be walking.

You can make a modern electric vehicle with actual buttons and dials. There is nothing about a car not having a gas motor that requires every tiny bit of functionality being controlled by a touch tablet. If anything it just seems like laziness in car design.

[jimbomins]

You may get your wish. Recent research has shown that real knobs and switches are much less of a driver distraction than trying to fiddle with screens or get voice commands correct. The two either mean you look away from the driving because you can't just feel your way across a screen like physical controls or you add cognitive load whilst thinking and talking.

I'm with you and hope all the idiot touch screen crap is ditched.

[vel0city]

> I'm with you and hope all the idiot touch screen crap is ditched.

I agree many manufacturers have gone a bit overboard in making even things like vent positions and glove boxes behind touchscreens. But at the same time, I don't want touch screen to completely disappear. Punching in a destination and controlling the navigation interface is way better with a touchscreen than using a dial. As a passenger or while stopped, changing the media with a touchscreen interface is better than a dial. Changing a lot of the finer settings in the car (ones you wouldn't be doing while driving) with a touchscreen is better than scrolling through menus with a dial. For the most part, a lot of things you'd do with the system while not moving or while being the passenger can be better on the screen than with a bunch of physical controls, controls which would necessitate making the screen a lot smaller.

Also, then when wanting to quickly reference the navigation system, having a larger screen with larger items on it means it is easier to understand what it is telling the driver in a glance. Having a ton of physical controls means it is a much smaller map, meaning smaller items on the map, meaning harder to understand at a quick glance. It's nice having the next turn up in the driver's information cluster or on a heads-up display as well to reduce the needs for the driver to reference the larger navigation system.

There definitely needs to be a balance of physical controls versus software buttons, but I wouldn't buy a new car without a screen these days.

[twiddling]

Muscle memory to know that the third button in past the volume knob turns on the windshield defroster, vs. looking at a menu on a screen whilst driving...

[sokoloff]

Indeed, the software most likely to kill or injure you in a car is running on someone’s smartphone. It’s probably not even close.