One of the reasons why cars are so much cheaper today is because of electronics. The creation of the "CANbus", two-wire protocol that wraps around the car to c

One of the reasons why cars are so much cheaper today is because of electronics. The creation of the "CANbus", two-wire protocol that wraps around the car to communicate, and the movement of all portions of the car to the CANbus, is what has lead to incredible reliability. It turns out that these two wires can be made incredibly reliable, and that communications across it (steering wheel, accelerator, brakes, tire pressure, speeds, A/C, etc. etc.) just makes sense. -------------- All those haptic buttons are "just" CANbus interfaces in practice. Now don't get me wrong, I prefer buttons too. But the next leg of "cheapness" naturally was to shift to an iPad-like capacitive screen, since one-tablet connected to the CANbus is far cheaper (and more reliable) than 20 individual buttons (each of which has a set life and dies on their own). That being said: physical buttons are clearly more intuitive than an iPad-like floating-moving button that is inconsistent and stateful.