| I think a good analogy here is retro digital cameras. I have a Fuji X-T30, which is about five years old now. Still a decent camera and it has a lot of physical controls. Except they are not really physical controls. They are buttons and dials that are re-programmable. Even the aperture ring on my lens is not physically connected to anything. The aperture is controlled digitally. The aperture ring just gives off a signal to the camera that is than hooked up to the aperture. Some lenses even have re-programmable buttons now. Some cheaper lenses don't have dedicated controls like that. But you can still hook up one of the other dials on the body to do the same. There are wheel-button thingies on the front and the back that you can bind to whatever. Cars basically could use controls like that. Maybe with some sensible defaults; and there's going to be a bunch of things that most people would like to control with a button or a dial. Not that hard to execute and you can sell cars with more and less dials. Or no dials at all. The touch screen is always the cheap fallback. The buttons are a nice up-sell. And with the right APIs and wireless protocols, it wouldn't even be too hard to have third party bluetooth buttons even; or a strip of buttons that plugs in a USB socket. Or similar. You can buy flight simulator hardware that emulate most of a modern cockpit with physical buttons. Most of these things are USB devices. Some of these things are pretty affordable even. Throttle compartments, landing gear buttons, buttons with a satisfying click/thunk/etc. Whatever you want. Like it or not, this stuff is basically cost related. Buttons have lots of wires, components, etc. That increases cost of assembly and bill of materials. They can also break and cause additional cost under warranty. People need training on how to install and repair that stuff. The nice thing with a touch screen is that it's just a handful of components and wires. Installs in no time and if it breaks, it's easy to replace. So, the question for manufacturers then becomes what is the car with the least buttons that drivers still pay a premium for? Because, that's the most profitable for them. And the reality of course is that what people say what they'll buy mostly doesn't match their behavior in the show room. It's the same with a lot of products. It doesn't matter whether people are buying a TV, a phone, a new laptop or whatever. Some people really know what they are buying, but most don't, and some only think they know and talk themselves into buying crap they definitely are not going to be happy with. In the end, people mostly just select the thing with the largest feature matrix that still fits their budget. And the nice thing with software features is that there's no assembly or component cost involved. Modern cars are smart phones with wheels. Literally made by smart phone manufacturers like Huawei and Xiaomi even (both sell lots of cars in China). |