[karaterobot]

Touchscreens appeal to a lot of knuckleheads, but mainly the main reason they're so popular is because manufacturers can do the wiring once, then change the UI as much as they want without having to redo it. In other words, it's cheaper for them. One thing touchscreens don't do is perform better than physical buttons and knobs.

[hunter2_]

Soft keys/knobs have that exact same benefit, and people are quite familiar with the idea since it's ubiquitous in ATM interfaces. You get the software-defined functions and labels, without the touch screen. Quite popular with audio mixing consoles and tons of other professional gear, too.

[chrisandchris]

Everyone always brings up this "it's cheaper" argument and I get it from an "only financial" standpoint.

But when was the last time and when is the next time you're going to change the behaviour of the "up" button on the steering weel to something like "switch to backwards gear" instead of "volume up" (the newest Volvo EX30 has touch buttons only on the steering wheel).

This argument is so dumb. This argument does not count for any replacement of knobs-to-touch-button, because there will (almost) never exist a use case for changing the behaviour of the button.

So IMHO manufacturers take something that worked and still works, replace it with something less error prone, simply to justify flexibility nobody asked for and noone will ever actually use.

Transferred to SWE, this is just overengineering.

[AlotOfReading]

As someone who's worked in auto manufacturing, moving buttons around happens all the time for all sorts of reasons. Different trims can have different buttons in the same place for example, or different cars using the same consoles.

It's not every button on every vehicle, but I have definitely had that conversation before when the hardware design is due to be finished before the product team is done changing things.

[bobmcnamara]

My people have a saying, "cheap shit"