I know that I, personally, love having a backup camera, but don't need or a screen for anything else, and would prefer physical controls for most things. Unfortunately that's not an option in most vehicles, so I am kind of coming to the conclusion that my next car will be an older model that's "dumb", since this is an overall better experience.

I don't think you could use the number of sales of cars with this kind of UI as evidence that people like it, since (the article mentions this) car manufacturers want to put it everywhere, regardless of popularity. It's got so many benefits from their side. It's not that I think they forced it on people, I think it was originally a cool novelty that people were excited about. But, after the novelty wore off, and a lot of people stopped wanting it in their cars, the industry had so fully committed to it that people just don't have the option to do without it these days.

Most everything else is just technological kitsch. This isn't that new though.

Stereo systems have had equalizers forever even though almost everyone is just going to make already mastered audio sound worse by filtering it. That is not the point really of an equalizer. It is just to have a series of useless controls that will never be used but looks cool when you first see it. Pure technological kitsch.

people want fancy bells & whistles in their vehicles right up until it makes them a maintenance nightmare—you want your car to just work, like they largely used to.

I find it much more true that most car software simply isn't very good yet on average. Let's say most existing implementations of touch UIs in cars don't add value and are cumbersome to use, for example - but that just means they're individually badly realized, not that it's not worth trying. And in reality, it's also a much more nuanced "depending on the use case and the situation" or "impacted by bad performance".

There are quality differences out there. And there's plenty of use cases in cars that benefit from a thorough software approach. This is an area with interesting problems to solve and plenty of innovation left to happen, and where hard and good work makes a mark.

The best automobile interfaces use knobs of different sizes and with different textures so that you can find them without looking. Buttons should be arranged in rows, so they are easy to find with a short look. Extremely common buttons should be located on the steering wheel. Etc.

Until screens can offer some kind of dynamic tactile experience, where you can feel what you're about to control, they can't be better than real tactile buttons and knobs.

Don't get me wrong, I love a big screen in my car for advanced features (360 camera, vehicle settings, navigation, music, etc). But the basics need to be tactile.

- Already in the pre-touchscreen, button-dominated area, plenty of more complicated use cases had terrible UX, and in many cases touchscreens have made them much easier. For example, do you remember how difficult it often was to program radio presets in 80s head-units? There were a lot of real clunkers there.

- There's plenty of newer use cases that would be hard or impossible to make easy with traditional hardware button UX, such as route and EV charge planning.

- Good software offers many possibilities to avoid interactions altogether, or make them single-step instead of multi-step. A good screen-based system will now often suggest interactions pro-actively and situationally at the top-level of the system and reduce interaction to a single multi-modal (touch/gesture/speech) confirmation on what used to be multi-step processes.

- Screens can offer tactile experiences - most recently with the introduction of screens that can do permanent haptic feedback via electrostatic friction coefficient modulation, emulating different surface feels as the finger moves.

- You already mentioned features such as 360 degree cameras: If nothing else, screens are great for showing information. Interactions aside, this alone has a lot of legs left and there's absolutely quality differences between good and bad implementations.

- There's absolutely nothing wrong with a good physical button (on the contrary - few things are more satisfying than a good, solid, weighty button) and having both for use in the appropriate situation. It doesn't mean there's no possible benefits from further investment into good car software.

I feel a lot of this is rooted in first-hand experience with bad systems - which I agree are plentiful, and just as awful as a bad, clunky, unrefined phone onscreen keyboard. Dare to imagine a good one.

Working on car systems means getting to own the form factor and the entire surroundings of a user, much more than working on software targeting rarely-changing phone and PC devices. It's an open field for software and hardware innovation and deserves a little more professional excitement and ambition to do it well.

I wouldn't rule out that tactile HVAC and Audio controls are always better than a touchscreen, but I have trouble seeing the benefit for some of those basic controls. I mean, let's take the volume control for example. It's a very simple linear concept, there are no branches in the options for volume. There are no sub-menus -- you either want it higher or lower. You always want that control in the same spot so it's easy to find and you always want it available so you can use it at any time. For those reasons, I have trouble seeing what a touchscreen can add to that particular parameter. A knob seems better suited by nearly every metric.

Touchscreens on the other hand, are great for controlling more complex parameters. Even a temperature control, while similar to volume, is actually more complex because the change is not immediate. You're setting a parameter that will be true in the future, and that is something where a dynamic display can be beneficial. That said, you still generally want that control to be in the same spot and always available so it's not an obvious win for touchscreens.

Then you add on the argument of what they are doing with the information, and if they can be trusted..

I absolutely hate my screens keyboard, and wish I could just buy a phone with a real physical keyboard. I get so angry trying to use this thing. It’s far less useful than a regular keyboard.

That's why people buy Teslas, they're a software company that makes hardware on the side. And participates in hacker challenges, offering cars to the winners.

No one actually wants cars with no computers, they just think they do because they don't realise how much computers do, like reduce the amount of wires by 10x, and output error messages on the level of a crappy microcontroller instead of maybe a flashing light if you're lucky

- Brakes work perfectly well without computers.

- Airbags don't need computers, they work perfectly well by mechanical means.

- Power steering works perfectly without computers or any electrics at all. Every car I've ever owned had mechanical power steering without any fancy electroics including my latest one. Why tamper with something that works perfectly well?

- Engine starter? Cars have starter motors since just after the hand crank ers, computers were still nearly 100 years away when starter motors were introduced.

- Automatic windows are a damn menace, they are reliably unreliable. When one failed - fortunately the driver's side - I had my garage man retrofit a traditional hand windup one. On the three remaining windows I got him to isolate them so they only worked on their individual switches.

- Mechanical intermittent wipers have been around since at least WWII. No computers or electronics to go wrong and complicate matters.

- Central locking on my last two cars has been a disaster. You obviously have never experienced a situation where the locking gets out of sync and some doors remain unlocked - unlock the others and then the unlocked ones lock and vice versa.

- Where I live alarm systems are likely to get you a brick through your windscreen - not from burglars but from annoyed residents who are fed up with car alarm noise.

- Automatic lights are another menace, you often can't control them, they switch off when you want to leave the lights and so on. (It seems to me that the designers of these systems never anticipate what we drivers actually need. Perhaps they only test them in the most tame and predictable environments.)

All this gumph is unnecessary, it makes the car less reliable and more expensive to buy and fix. Moreover, they're impossible to fix when you're in places where there's no service mechanic or garage (out on the open road for instance - I've some excellent instances from long trips 3,000 - 4,000 miles anf of cars in convoy on rough roads. Cars with all these unnecessary gadgets were, without fail, the first to break down. And they were a disaster because none of us techies could improvise in the usual manner that we could do with a more traditional car, often we could be stranded for days whilst waiting a tow truck to come from hundreds of miles away. What's more that's hellishly expensive.

You people are just gadget mad.

"in the 1960s and 1970s, the typical car reached its end of life around 100,000 miles (160,000 km), but due to manufacturing improvements in the 2000s, such as tighter tolerances and better anti-corrosion coatings, the typical car lasts closer to 200,000 miles (320,000 km)"

Not sure why you think a load of extra moving parts is going to be more reliable than some solid state electronics.

Because cars can go anywhere including right outside tow truck range especially where I live. Here, being rescued can be days away. Then there's the adverse conditions, temperatures well in excess of 40° C and from my bitter experience, the electronics fail much more frequently under these harsh conditions than do the mechanics.

Then there's the issue of make-do. When one is hundreds of miles from anywhere, one can often improvise a mechanical repair whereas it's nigh on impossible to quickly sort out an electronics problem (unless it's trivial).

I recall being in a convoy of four cars in central Australia when the computer failed in the one and only Volvo in the group. What an unholy mess that was. None of us could fix it.

Note, everyone in the convoy was skilled in electronics (we were all radio amateurs on a field trip) and almost everyone had a full-time professional job in electronics. We even had lots of electronics test equipment as well as various electronic components with us - semiconductors, resistors, capacitors etc., as they were to service our HF transceivers when they failed.

That's just one instance albeit one of the worst cases.

My car chucked a universal joint on the same trip and although very inconvenient, we fixed it on the spot. Similar repairs were made on the spot when my petrol pump was ripped clean off the bottom of my car by huge ruts in the road.

From what you've said, I'd guess you live in a temperate climate in the suburbs of a city and only a few kilometers from a service garage.

The fact is, electronics and harsh environmental conditions (high thermal cycling) are not good bedfellows. Moreover, most electronics faults are thermally related (caused by thermal stress). I know firsthand as I ran the electronics department of a large corporation for years, before that I worked in the prototyping (design) department of a large US corporation designing professional electronic (not domestic stuff).

First rule of design: 'keep it simple stupid'.

__

Edit: "1970s, the typical car reached its end of life around 100,000 miles (160,000 km)."

Uh? When I was younger all I could afford were cars with over 150k on the clock - and that's miles not kms - and I usually drove them to about 300k. The usual reason for getting rid of them was was rust - not because of mechanical problems. Sure, there were 'junk' cars around but you'd have to be mad to buy one.

One final point, around the time the Volvo broke down I was averaging 44,000 miles per year (~70,000 km/yr).

As for typical cars, that's why it's bad to base your theories on personal experience.

Should the computers and software be open and fixable though? Yes

- Brakes work perfectly well without computers.

- Airbags don't need computers, they work perfectly well by mechanical means.

- Power steering works perfectly without computers or any electrical stuff at all. Every car I've ever owned had mechanical power steering without any fancy electroics including my latest one. Why tamper with something that works perfectly well?

- Engine starter? Cars have had starter motors since just after the hand crank era, computers were still nearly 100 years away when starter motors were introduced.

- Automatic windows are a damn menace, they are reliably unreliable. When one failed - fortunately the driver's side - I had my garage man retrofit a traditional hand windup one. On the three remaining windows I got him isolate them so they only worked on their own individual switches.

- Mechanical intermittent wipers have been around since at least WWII. No computers or electronics to go wrong and complicate matters.

- Central locking on my last two cars has been a disaster. You obviously have never experienced a situation where the locking gets out of sync and some doors remain unlocked - unlock the others and then the unlocked ones lock and vice versa. It's a nightmare, any attempt to properly lock the car fails.

- Where I live alarm system are likely to get a brick through your windscreen - not from burglars but rather from annoyed residents who are fed up with car alarm noise.

- Automatic lights are another menace, you often can't control them, they switch off when you want to leave the lights and so on. The people who design and program their operation clearly don't use them except in the most tame surroundings.

All this gumph is unnecessary, it makes car less reliable and more expensive to both purchase and fix - and they're impossible to fix when you're in places where there's no service mechanic or garage (out on the open road for instance - I've some excellent instances from long trips 3,000 - 4,000 miles of cars in convoy on rough roads. Cars with all these unnecessary gadgets were, without fail, the first to break down. And they were a disaster because none of us techies could improvise in the usual manner as we could do with a more traditional car. Often we could be stranded for days whilst we waited for a tow truck to come from hundreds of miles away. Moreover, that's hellishly expensive.

You people are just gadget mad.

Most people have little idea what features they have, besides the obvious ones. Read through some of the features listed for a car - some aren't even explained.