Well I _live_ in New Zealand, but the area I'm most familiar with is the pacific islands. The cars there are mostly used exports from Australia, New Zealand and

Well I _live_ in New Zealand, but the area I'm most familiar with is the pacific islands. The cars there are mostly used exports from Australia, New Zealand and Japan. That's also true in New Zealand, half of the vehicles registered here every year are used imports from Japan, normally 5-10 years old. We don't get the low-cost models though as our safety standards are higher, though you do see Kei cars and trucks. When they can't be sold here anymore they get re-exported to the islands, and generally they make it back here as scrap. There _are_ brand new cars of course, with the full suite of touch screens, but they're out of reach for most people. Even here in NZ we get feature-cut models to keep the price down. As for 2017, the cost of large touchscreens was much higher then, and the general purpose computer that was definitely running it behind the scenes was much slower. And as I said in my post, it's certainly for cost saving. Manufacturers realised they could save a few cents on controls and dollars in labour per car by using the touchscreen they were going to add anyway and there was enough compute power to make it responsive enough to sell. Plus a touchscreen look shiny and most people won't realise the problems until it's sold...