The crazy thing for me is that apart from physical buttons, if car manufacturers actually just released models of 20-30 years ago as new launches, complete exterior and interior, they’d so well!

Edit - with just Bluetooth added but I’m cool with using a cassette adaptor of some sort. Also assuming the engines would be up to today’s emission standards. I mean just the shape and looks.

I prefer voice controls to either, but don't have a strong preference between physical or digital because I end up looking either way. Subscriptions on the other hand can fuck right off.

love how looking at phone screens is (rightfully) considered bad while driving, but then they just put a big fucking tablet on cars.

Leave me a phone sized screen for CarPlay and everything else can go back. I agree with the giant touch screen only stuff being nonsense, but CarPlay is life changing to my driving experience.

My major problems with this design trend, in my own (biased) experience:

• Center console entertainment UI is usually the slowest thing ever made, making it an even bigger distraction than needed. I could develop muscle memory for blindly pushing the right virtual buttons, but the slowness makes this impossible. It's usually wildly under-specced, but what's stranger is that there's never an upgrade option you can buy from the manufacturer.

• Can't use the panel blindly, creating a big honkin' distraction within reach of the driver. Speed (see above), iffy capacitive touch with no haptic feedback, as well as multiplexing the UI through deep menus, are the chief culprits here. If there were standard controls that were always on screen in the same place, with a suitably responsive UI, this wouldn't be as big a problem.

• For systems that are fully-integrated, it's all or nothing. If the panel/CPU dies, you lose your stereo, navigation, and climate controls all at the same time. My car, fortunately, has the A/C physical controls. This creates a distinct point of failure which is nice - I'm pretty sure I will still have A/C if the panel craps out.

• It's dirt cheap to manufacture and I think we all know it. We're already paying historically high prices for cars, and cheaping-out on the bits we touch the most is just an extra kick to the junk at this point. To the manufacturers: we have remarkably better experiences on our freaking phones every day, so nobody but your grandma is impressed with the weak-sauce, crippled, bogus UX you bolt into your expensive vehicles. You're not making cars cooler, you're just making car ownership worse. Do better.

Counterpoint:

Reject smart cars because they're collecting your data and it will be used to increase your insurance rates.