No.

Just ... no.

A critical control system should be simple, able to be used without taking one's eyes off the wheel/road.

Any control system (atmosphere, lights, defroster, wipers, ...) that requires you to remove your attention from the road in order to operate a touch screen interface with a generally terrible UI/UX is BROKEN. And dangerous to boot.

This is what I find now in many (not all, but the majority) of my rentals.

Want to turn on defroster (which is usually a snap decision as the rear window is getting foggy/frosty)? You have to navigate a screen. Not push a single button.

Want to turn down the radio? Now you have to navigate MULTIPLE screens to find the O(&^*&^$^$&^& control pane for the radio, and shut it off.

And so on.

This is not progress.

This is risk.

Pardon my pun, but someone is asleep at the wheel here. These control and interface systems are inherently broken, by not being as simple as possible.

A lot of luxury cars no longer have a conventional key but some kind of electronic system. Sometimes it is proximity based, so you simply have to have the key and push a button on the steering column or dashboard or maybe center console. Other cars have a key that has some kind of electrical connector and must be inserted into the side of the steering column and then you push a button, and still another one I drove seemed to have a proximity key but you had to stick it into the side of the steering column and turn to start the engine.

Then you have to figure out the parking brake... Used to be that it was a ratchet pedal, or a handle in the center console, or one of those pull-and-twist deals in some 4x4s. This was already a little annoying, but now there's a huge diversity of buttons and toggles in non-obvious places. At least the electrical ones usually disengage if you hit the gas.

Now for the automatic gear selector...

One guy somewhat sheepishly apologizes that his car was hard to drive... but it was an old stick-shift 4runner with a strange feeling clutch. That one I was actually able to work out!

Last week at lunch, we were lamenting the disappearance of headphone jacks from phones. We speculated that a Bluetooth-to-jack adapter would be a popular accessory, letting people keep their old headphones for use with their latest media players. I'd wager there's a whole class of products that might fit here, for example a set of old-fashioned analog knobs backed by Bluetooth or some other interface to the players, as an alternative for those who feel more comfortable - or safer - with the old gear.

Toyota, the automaker under discussion here, offers steering wheel controls that are pretty decent. The main weakness of such systems is that the interface between stereo and phone has such little functionality, and that is where many people will be playing their music. Eventually you're going to be poking at a phone and a badly-designed app unless you're happy to simply play everything from a long playlist.

Controls I want to operate without looking at them: fan, temperature, air routing, defrost, windshield wipers, high beams, turn signals.

I ended up splitting the difference, going for a modern Bluetooth equipped radio with old-school physical buttons and a knob. I play music through my phone over Bluetooth and control playback with the phone's voice control. My eyes never leave the road, and my right hand never leaves the steering wheel except to change volume, which is easy with the huge knob and muscle memory.

Exceedingly poor UI design.

I don't know if capacitive screens and proper GPUs are just somehow incompatible with cars, or what the engineering problem is to get solid framerates with solid responsive time in a good looking screen, but no car manufacturer other than Tesla seems to have been able to solve this problem.

Now that doesn't address everything you're pointing out here, which several of these are legit points. I'm just saying if my car's touch screen felt more like an iPad and less like an Android tablet from 2006, it would be a metric fuckton easier for me to use.

Of course provided that the stupid proprietary toouchscreen infotainment system can actually be interfaced with them.

I don't think such a product exists (or that current infotainment systems would allow such a connection), but it could be a nice thingy.