"There's no other reason to put all the vehicle information so far away from the center other than planning on eventually phasing out human drivers."

It's to the right of your steering wheel so you can see it and touch it with your hand.

The screen should not be essential to use to drive safely. No brakes, speed changes, turn signaling, etc. These should be tactile, so you can use muscle memory and focus on the traffic. Obviously any screen can also be distracting, so it's important that it is designed well and thoroughly tested.

Paying attention to your speed, means not paying attention to the road. No matter where the dial is. Checking your speed is not something you need to do to drive safely. A responsible driver can pick a safe moment to glance.

You already do on a 'normal' speedometer. The glance slightly down, vs slightly down and slightly right are no different. A HUD would be cool, but that is not common yet on vehicles.

The current position of the speedometer is a poor excuse for moving it further from where the driver’s attention should be: the road. The distance and context of where the driver information is displayed matters a lot.

My car has its entertainment display roughly where the display is on a model 3. I can tell you that looking at the speedometer is much much quicker than glancing over to the screen in the middle. Probably by an order of magnitude or two. Even checking the clock takes a dangerous amount of time compared to checking my current speed, the difference is that drastic.

Further more, the instrument cluster is designed specifically to be easy to read and driver oriented, Porsche’s habit of putting the tachometer in the middle comes to mind. The center console has to support many more activities, including entertainment, and is thus much more distracting by design. This is true on my car, and the center screen is much simpler than a model 3.

HUDs aren’t exactly exotic supercar material these days. The Honda Accord Touring (MSRP $33k) has one standard. Now that’s the top level trim for that model, but it’s also in a much lower market segment than the model 3.

It's a shame that HUDs aren't yet more common as they deliver a real safety benefit. Some GM vehicles have had HUDs for over 20 years now and other manufacturers are starting to catch on.