There are obviously a hundred ways to make a touchscreen terrible. Laggy, distracting, too small touch points, bad touch sensitivity, low contrast, overly nested menus, etc.

But “haptic feedback” isn’t a panacea and there are plenty of ways to make buttons that you still have to look at to use effectively.

My old 2006 Infiniti G35 which I had for 12 years, I would still have to look to turn on the front/rear defogger. Or even to adjust fan speed. The buttons were arranged in a flat row and there was no way to distinguish one from the adjacent without looking. Even with more depth you would still glance over to find your target and confirm the state change.

The large touchscreen in my TM3 makes navigation an absolute joy. When I’m at a complex intersection, pinch to zoom in and I can easily see at a glance what to do. This beats squinting at an iPhone by a massive margin. I never thought in-car GPS made any sense at all and activately hated the systems I had seen in Audis and Mercedes. Dialing in destinations was a huge pain and the screens were small and non-interactive making the system worse than a phone-in-hand.

So it’s obvious to me that large touch-screen interfaces can be joyful and safe, and even enhance safety in some cases.

There are also two massive benefits which most articles miss or just gloss over, and that is upgradability, and dynamic state.

My TM3 shipped without blind spot warning, or lane departure warning, or Navigate in Autopilot, or a dashcam, or Sentry Mode, and dozens of other features that have since been added.

Legacy manufacturers want to sell you a new car every time they add a new feature. Knobs are great for this because it’s pretty hard to shoehorn a new feature into an existing hard-labeled set of knobs. A touch interface—done right—can evolve over time to support dozens of new features which improve the driving experience.

A car that gets better (and faster, and longer range) every month is no small wonder. Rather I think it’s the bane of the legacy model and the old guard is terrified by it, because their entire ecosystem isn’t set up for it.

The second key advantage is dynamic state — or rather, the idea that the system state can change independently from the knob. Now it is possible to design certain types of knobs and switches which can accommodate this type of state change, but there is a whole host of knob and switch designs which are outright excluded if you want to support that case without adding a motor to physically move the knob/switch (which would be ridiculous). And these “stateless” knobs and switches tend to be the ones which provide significantly less feedback and are more likely to need to be looked at to be manipulated / confirm the state change.

Of course it’s important to note that it’s not all or nothing. The reality is that knobs on or right around the steering wheel will always have a place for activating the most common features. Several articles miss, for example, that TM3 does have a button to activate the wipers. The screen then automatically shows the interval status (which on mine is always just ‘Auto’)

And the most useful button is the one you can eliminate completely by automating it out of existence. Like that complex multi-position dial so many cars have to the left of the steering wheel to configure the headlights. I see cars all the time driving at night with the switch inadvertently set to daytime running mode. There’s no dial in the TM3, because the lights just always do the right thing.