In my experience touchscreens are great for passengers and very dangerous for the driver, unless the car is stationary.

All commands must be around the wheel. An alternative that could work is voice commands, if the car can really understand the driver. Good luck to foreign drivers, tourists with rental cars or people living abroad, unless they can configure their own language.

Years ago, I was in Germany with a Serbian, Japanese, and someone from Turkey. We each took turns trying to get the German navigation system of our rental to understand us, and then we finally pulled over to operate the very painful non-touchscreen navigation system.

I don't think the parent was talking about complicated systems like GPS, that you should probably set up before driving, and yes, they are often a pain, touchscreen or not.

A touchscreen is a dangerous interface for the myriad of simple mundane systems like heat up/down, AC on/off, fan more/less, sound more/less/next.., heated seats, windows... things that you may need very much want to do while driving.

This is my experience with voice recognition, and I'm a native speaker of American English: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU