Sure, fine. But the MCU still crashes on my (very yellowed screened) unit regularly, randomly. Right now, that doesn't cause me to crash: autopilot stays engaged. The car continues to function. There's even a low-level beep when autopilot is disengaged, even though all other audio fails. Blinkers still work. Etc.

But the new car has removed the shifter stalk, and moved the controls to the screen. Now, if the screen reboots, I can't place the car into park or reverse. With the shifter, I can push and hold the parking button to engage the emergency brakes on the car. Can't do that if the screen is rebooting. The blinkers are now capacitive touch buttons on the steering wheel. While I imagine they'll stay low level and decoupled from the MCU, I sure hope that's the case.

The yoke is possibly the stupidest thing Tesla has done, ever. So many people are going to end up with completely shattered arms as they get into accidents and have the airbags deployed while they're turning and have their arms crossed. All for what? To look cool to a 13-year-old? Idiotic. And I say this as someone with a MS on order for September which I'm desperately hoping I'll be able to get with the regular wheel. Still bitter about the stalks, though.

There are park and reverse buttons on the center console too. (not just the screen)

People certainly get worked up about how Elon companies don't fit the traditional mold. But I think there are some good reasons why that is. Mostly this comes down to the "we'll just fix it later" mentality, but without an actual process for fixing real user devices when the "engineering tradeoffs" inevitably produce a broken experience long before an item of that quality should fail.

the second issue is that the severity of failure is not always taken into account. In your example of the Prius radio, there are several important differences IMO. The radio of a prius has much more limited scope than that of a tesla. It is a pain if it breaks, but you can replace it with something aftermarket and everything will be fine. While it is still possible to drive the car with a non-functioning touch screen, a lot more features will be missing, including climate control and the reversing camera. Additionally these units consistently failed early and Tesla initially didn't fix them under warranty.

A similar issue (failure of the display due to worn out eMMC after 5-6y) triggered a recall after pressure from the NHTSA. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262072/tesla-display-fai...