I absolutely refuse to buy a car where the only thing in the dash is a single big touchscreen. This is a really cheap and lazy way to design a car. It’s not fancy or futuristic. It’s turning an engineering problem into a cheap software problem. Any feature that controls some aspect of the physical car such as AC, headlights, turn signal, seat placement, side mirrors, etc… should all be physical buttons with some tactile feedback. The only thing that is acceptable as a screen is information display and controlling entertainment.

If electric vehicles 10 years from now don’t re-engineer buttons, dials and knobs into their cars I am just going to walk 30 miles every day.

Mazda has had it figured out in my opinion for years with their dial setup. Most of the important stuff is on the wheel itself, but you can control the entire center console with an easy scroll dial and like 4 buttons surrounding it, and all the traditional stuff has physical buttons right near it. Their cars have other drawbacks, but the interior design just makes sense to me.

Driven a few Mazda 3's and the wheel / button placement is great. Lots of things within fingers reach. One thing I'm not keen on is the sports mode button, that should totally be on the steering wheel, where right now it's on the middle dashboard.

I guess the idea is you want people to think about switching this mode on/off so it disincentives them doing it all the time maybe?