When cars eventually go self-driving, not having a touchscreen will be a big competitive disadvantage. Over-the-air updates of car software will be essential to

When cars eventually go self-driving, not having a touchscreen will be a big competitive disadvantage. Over-the-air updates of car software will be essential to adapt the driving/transportation experience, also for the existing fleet of cars, as the product matures and manufacturers can use people's experiences to make improvements. This does require part of the car's user interface to be software driven, and touchscreens are the best way of doing that. If the car is capable of safely driving without human input, most of the the safety concerns of touchscreens disappear. There's also the question of being able to configure the car to operate in fleet/rental mode, which would probably be challenging with controls that are less intuitive than a touchscreen. You're left with some UX considerations of sometimes needing longer time or needing to look at the screen for operating common functionality. I'm not saying that tactile controls in general should be banned, and I'm probably also saying that most car manufacturers _absolutely suck_ at software and will elegantly botch any attempt at integrating a touchscreen. Maybe Tesla has gone overboard and should add (software-controlled) physical dials for the systems that are used all the time and are never expected to change much, such as A/C, seat heaters, trunk & frunk and so on. But that's a comparatively minor UX modification. The million dollar question is whether proper self-driving is 5 or 15 years away -- if it's the former, auto companies really don't have as much time to adapt as they think. Some customers might like a touchscreen-less Mazda if they can tack a safe self-driving system onto it, but they will have a hard time competing with companies that understand software and have good integration of intuitive touchscreen interfaces. Once (if?) proper self-driving is here, software suddenly becomes critical, and it's hard to control a complex software system through physical knobs. People will also want better entertainment systems integrated in the car at that point, and a touchscreen makes such modifications simple.