> Given that with a physical button you didn't have to take your eyes off the road and given the tactile feedback you know for sure you activated/pressed/moved the control

I never understand the "you don't have to look at buttons" argument—my car has lots of physical buttons and to push them, I briefly have to look at the console, find the button, and press it.

If a touch screen interface were properly designed with large enough touch affordances and the correct levels of responsiveness, I'd be just as happy with that as I would a big dashboard full of buttons.

For me, when things get dangerous, its when pressing the button (physical or touch) doesn't do what its suppose to do.

For things that you do regularly the button should be optimized to not be in the middle of a cluster. Ideally it'll be somewhere you can see easily (like on the steering wheel), and most importantly of all it isn't dependent on context. In my car I can easily turn on the aircon, or change the music volume, or answer the phone without looking away from the road because I know where the button is and one press always does that thing. On a touchscreen you always need to give it attention because the screen area changes what it does depending on what you've pressed before pressing that area. That is a huge disadvantage.

Your point about pressing a button not doing what it's supposed to is right, but I have to admit I can't remember the last time that happened in any car I've owned. Buttons not working isn't a common issue as far as I know.

I found that I was using the wheel warmer button way more than I through I would. It's located right in middle of a cluster on the central console, in an awkward place to look at (right next to my hips in a blind spot).

I devised a nice and cheap fix for this UI problem that wouldn't be applicable on a touch screen: I put a googly eye sticker on it.

Better tactile feedback, no loss of function, and more whimsy in my otherwise boring car.

It illustrates the point that accessibility isn't only for disabled people. It benefits everyone, and if you're lucky to live long enough, you'll need it even more every day.

I suppose we're all just pre-dead as well?

What a depressing way to look at life.

You may want to seek out help from a counselor.

Not everyone is predisabled: many unfortunate people won't live long enough to suffer the consequences of old age. But I'd rather not die before I get old, myself. I certainly hope I'm predisabled instead of short lived, myself.

It sounds like you're the one who needs a counselor if you're so depressed and having such a hard time facing the fact that you're getting older every second, until you die.

If you're designing user interfaces, you might want to seek out help for an accessibility specialist.

I suggest we call the people on the other side of this divide "Daltreys" and prohibit them from designing any UIs.

The touchscreen latency issue discussed in parent posts is just that...

With the entertainment system, it's a tree of menus on a touchscreen to find what I need to do and then the screen has several buttons neatly arranged which I need to look at (not just feel for) to find what I need. When I tap on something, it's not immediately clear to me without looking and verifying whether the function has been executed or not.

It's true of some buttons, but there are lots that you don't, mostly on the dipsticks: indicators, wipers, lights and the like.

Others are well delineated and just need a quick glance, but lining up your finger and multiple presses on a touchscreen is not that at all.

Do you look down at the shifter every time you use it? It's the same thing really.

Huh? They cannot be. You cannot get the same level of tactile feedback from a touchscreen as from a properly designed knob.

> For me, when things get dangerous, its when pressing the button (physical or touch) doesn't do what its suppose to do.

I have experienced that regularly in cars. When you have clear, unambiguous feedback that you gave the input exactly how you're supposed to, it's a minor annoyance; you instantly know that the UI failed to pick up on your input. Redo and if failure is consistent, have it repaired.

When you have to start debugging whether it's your input method or the UI having an off day, while driving, that's when things get dangerous to me.

That's true but also I feel like they could make much more tactile touch screen if they actually spent the money. For example, you could use a pressure sensitive touch screen so that mere touch doesn't activate buttons, and you could put a haptic feedback mechanism in it like that of Apple that actually informs you when you press something. The haptic feedback could even subtly tell you whether you are touching a button before you click it.

The reason they don't do that is that touchscreens are a cost cutting measure and making them as expensive as buttons would cut into margins.

You don't realize just how MUCH worse doing it on a touchscreen is.

A touchscreen button is in a specific region of space, yet that region jumps and jostles around because the car and the touchscreen are moving and your arm is moving (usually in a different direction).

If you bump or drag your knuckles on the touchscreen, you accidentally engage some other control.

It's not as bad if the control is at the edge, is a large enough target and the touchscreen has a raised bezel around it to rest your knuckles on, but you still have to use your eyes to locate the button.

It's really annoying with tesla - the targets have gotten smaller over time, they've adopted apple's ios 7 mess of buttons that don't look like buttons, and now the buttons move around due to context, or passenger in seat, or other nonsense. Some buttons have state, but it times out. Some buttons can be moved. Some buttons change depending on what you used last. lots of map stuff auto-hides. Buttons along the edge are good, but they made them smaller and left lots of unused space. many buttons are in the middle with no good reason. ugh.

My suspicion? I suspect the model S/X touchscreen was designed by people who don't drive a model S/X and test it at their desk with a crappy dell monitor and a mouse.

Even if that’s the case, you can lightly drag your finger across a row of buttons, and remember that the button is the third one in without asking your eyes off the road.

Are there no buttons on your car's steering wheel? Really, not even a horn? These can be pressed without even taking your hand off the wheel.

And what about indicators, gear shifter, parking brake? Do you "briefly have to look at the console" to find those?

<laughs in old Citroën>

The only electronic thing on the whole dashboard is the clock, and it's never worked.

In a crowded field of craziness I'd personally have to place the Citroën Visa high up as bonkersiest of the bonkers.

Happy to hear other nominations though.

I liked the control clusters it had instead of stalks.

If I owned one of those I'd feel obliged to make myself a mix tape with Jean-Michel Jarre, Cerrone and Desireless.

I can just see me rocking up at the pub with Voyage Voyage drifting out the sun roof.

I keep my hands at about 2:30 and 10:30, just up against the the airbag cross-member. With my right hand I reach out and a tad down but not much and a bit forward and land on the temp knob (also a toggle push button for temp auto mode) and I can do this every time with perfect muscle memory, to the right of that are six buttons, the closest is the power toggle button, then there's the recirculate/outside switch button, then a pair of side by side buttons for fan up and down then vent modes and against the right edge is the ac toggle button.

It's a breeze to slide my finger across those buttons from closest to farthesst and know exactly where I am. Depending on which I'm after I can come in from the left or right side. Never need to look as the feedback for all of these is an environmental change I can sense by air movement or temperature or whatever, and so I generally know if I got something right or wrong without looking. On a rare occasion I'll be in a rush to flip from outside air to recirculate and will hit the fan down button but that's immediately recognizable and I correct and then easily reach the recirculate button.

Below that space under a lip in the dash face, is, first in line to the right of the temp knob, my 3 stage heated seat button, then the windshield defroster, then the big giant slightly elevated hazard button in the middle and the rear defroster to the right of that. Like with the controls above, I start at the temp dial for orientation and then can usually leap right to the button I want since that distinctive center hazard button provides wayfinding at the mid point.

Reaching down to the console I have two dials, a big one and a small one and I can easily land on the right one directly from the steering wheel in one jump. Then, still without looking, I can rest my hand on and move the dial leisurely, under no pressure for having my arm extended into space holding a specific pose, muscles poised to move quickly as soon as my gaze can align with my finger tips and the touch screen. Instead, my fingers fiddle the knob and usually get what I want on their own, or with only peripheral vision on the screen, but certainly those fingers can just sit there indefinitely until my eyes are safely free to make a glance that's not down at the knob, but due east, horizontally and to the right, atop the dashboard where a low and wide horizontal screen can be seen without losing peripheral vision directly in front of the vehicle and even some out to the left.

The two dials are also joysticks and push buttons. Navigating the stock software and Android Auto are about equally easy and only require peripheral vision on the high-mounted screen most of the time, or the occasional short glances where I can have my eyes on it and the road in front of me considerably more at the same time than if the screen were extending down toward or even to the console.

I've been through models of this same car that were screenless, fully touchscreen, hybrid, and now they've completely dropped the touchscreen and settled on dials and buttons far away from the screen. This is the way.

When you touch a touchscreen, you can't feel the buttons, and it always triggers whatever button you touched.

If you have so much trouble with physical buttons, then you'll have even more trouble with touch screens.

Maybe you should stay off the road.

Touch screens have no such luxury - a graze is a press, the same as an actual press, and because it's a smooth surface, so even if you know the button you want is the second from the bottom, you can't find the bottom button and then go up one.

Ultimately the problem with the touch screen interface is that it has to be looked at, in order for the user to know what mode it's in. Is it in climate control? Is it in radio mode? Is it in Carplay navigation mode or deep in settings? Who knows! Let's find out by not looking at the road where the cars and people are.

As a pedestrian, this does not fill me with joy.

Assuming you possess this basic competence, I find myself wondering how you managed to purchase a vehicle with such absurd ergonomics.

You have a strange, poorly designed vehicle

This "big dashboard full of buttons." Please provide a picture. Is this a custom design?

"For me, when things get dangerous, its [sic] when pressing the button (physical or touch) doesn't do what its [sic] suppose [sic] to do."

What actions are you referring to? Changing the audio volume? The interior fan speed?

You may want to consider researching your vehicle purchases more rigorously.

This entire thread has me wondering the same thing. I've owned many cars and drive far more than average. What are y'all adjusting so much that's causing issues here?

If we exclude infotainment, which even the best have lousy driving ergonomics, you need to be able to turn wipers on/off (most are automatic now), turn the HVAC up or down (many you can just leave at a single temperature in more modern systems) and turn your headlights on/off, high/low (these have been automatic in the last few cars I've owned). Most other things should be adjusted before you start driving.

What are you having to adjust, outside your music, that's so difficult?

This may not be needed at the start of the drive if people's breath gradually steams up the windows or the weather changes. I have noticed that passengers from warmer climates probably don't have the same problems as they didn't understand this and were complaining at me to turn the fan off.

Though I always buy cars with physical buttons that are in ergonomic places and wouldn't buy something with a touch screen. I am also not sure how a touch screen would work with the thin gloves that I wear in winter when driving to work in the early morning.

Hazard button is pretty hard to miss in every vehicle I have entered

Do you find those difficult in your vehicle's layout?

HVAC--it does not compensate for ambient sunlight. What I want while driving in the sun is very different than what I want driving at night.

I do not have automatic wipers or lights. I have driven cars with automatic lights and I found them wanting.

Volume.

- Climate Control: -- A/C On -- Circulate / Outside Air -- Temperature Up -- Temperature Down -- Fan Speed Up -- Fan Speed Down -- Dual Mode -- Dual Mode Controls ( 4 buttons - Repeat the temp/fan buttons for passenger side) -- Front Defrost -- Rear Defrost

- Lights: -- Headlight mode -- Light dimmer -- Brights on/off -- Foglights on/off -- Flashers on/off

- Driving -- Gear Shift -- Turn Signal -- Cruise Control --- On/Off --- Set/+ --- Resume/- -- ESC (Electronic Stability Control) on/off -- Tripometer / info - check mileage to empty / range / etc

- Wipers -- wiper speed -- spray -- rear wipers --- spray

- Entertainment -- On/Off -- Volume Up -- Volume Down -- Mode (Switch between radio/android auto/sirius/etc) -- Next / Radio Tuner Up -- Previous / Radio Tuner Down -- Radio Presets (6 buttons) -- Play/Pause

- Calling / Voice -- Initiate Voice Command -- Answer call -- Hang up / Decline call

- Mirrors -- side mirror switch left/right -- side mirror adjust

- Windows -- front driver window up/down -- front passenger window up/down -- rear driver window up/down -- rear passenger window up/down -- window lock

- Locks -- lock/unlock

There are a few buttons I would need to look at but they are not something I would usually need while driving.

My chevy has fixed buttons/knobs, but the only one I don't have to look for is the volume knob. There are too many climate buttons that I use maybe once every two weeks for me to gain any muscle memory from pressing them.

A simple demonstration of this back from the 80s: My mother was blind. Along come microwave ovens with their flat control surfaces with push buttons behind. She had no way to find the buttons without inadvertently triggering wrong buttons. Labeling them would have been fine if she was alone but a problem with sighted people in the house. She solved it with a crude jig to let her locate buttons without applying pressure, but that was a two-handed operation that required concentration and still wouldn't work on a true touch screen.

I would be curious to see a well implemented, fast response touchscreen design. I am strongly in favor of buttons but I would love to try a touchscreen operating with the boundaries set by users in this thread (16ms reposne time etc...). I will keep an open mind but have not seen a working example yet.

Haptic tech I have seen are ways to vary the drag coefficient across the screen, tiny actuators that deform the screen, or use of interference to create vibration on a specific location. There is even touchless haptics, using ultrasound.

The only instance where a manufacturer seemed to care was with the iPhone 6 "Taptic Engine", which is little more than a better vibration motor, giving a better "whole screen button" effect. But they didn't improve further, in fact, if anything, the newer models are worse.

It's about stateful UI.

physical layout of buttons is usually stateless - press button thing turns on, press it again it turns off.

You don't need to think in which menu you are, and where to press, while driving.

Tactile buttons are usually much harder to press by mistake. I'm glad my i30 only seems to require the touchscreen for CarPlay (a necessary evil), or settings which I'd generally only check when parked.

I think this is key. I'm perfectly happy to adjust the frequency/folume of the rear reverse sensors, or the date/time format, or whatever, via a touchscreen.

Stuff I use while driving though is a different thing completely, that's where physical buttons come in.

Fortunatly my Skoda meets this - temperature, volume, radio channel etc all on buttons.

Tiny field, not an obvious button, hard to hit while moving. Takes way too much time or effort. Meanwhile trying to do it in my wife's Mazda 3? Just press the big FM button, can't miss it, and can feel for it.

Repeat ad infinitum for other functions. The touchscreen is great for when I'm in the driveway and want to change settings but otherwise terrible for everything else.

Not to be pedantic, but that is a state. But I get what you mean: the button has a fixed place. Know your car well enough and you won't even need to look there to turn the thing off or on.

OP means that the screen has different modes that you traverse between, the car is still stateful.

But gotcha, this depends on your definition of "stateful UI"

> It's about stateful UI.

Yes it is about 'looking and pushing' the button.

And yes it's about stateful UI.

Both can be true at the same time.

Are you sure you want to modify the temperature? Please read the following agreement and type I AGREE if you agree.

Features like Heated Seats, Navigation, Spotify ...and Brakes.

Coming to dystopian future BMW, Tesla, Mercedes (terms and conditions may apply). :(

That’s not true with all buttons. Those infinitely turning dials have some of the same problems, especially with response latency and the same magnitude of input not always resulting in the same magnitude of change. The presence of the dial is better than the touchscreen, but with those dials you still need to monitor the screen to get feedback on how much change you’re (usually slowly) effecting.

I predict it's a matter of time before we'll see a correlation between number of crashes, and cars with touchscreens.

What’s explicitly prohibited is texting/writing and driving.

I did laugh when of course sometimes they would pickup someone holding a chocolate bar while driving. While not necessarily the best thing to do with the one hand, not illegal all the same.

The way that the separations of powers work in the US, basically all driving laws are set by the states. The rules for driving can and do change when you cross state lines in the US, sometimes significantly. It really doesn't make any sense to talk about specific driving laws in the US as a monolith.

It is only one data point but my insurance went down when I got the Tesla.

Also, claim rates have all kind of confounding factors. Maybe a car is safer but more prone to theft, or more dangerous but easier to repair, or has better controls but is driven by inexperienced drivers etc.

They need to make a profit over their whole insured client population, not necessarily over any given segment or car model, so I wouldn't use insurance rates as data points in determining car safety without a lot of caveats.

We should be very careful not to include the kitchen sink in with "essential" items.

Turning the wipers off and on, is critical, adjusting delay timings is not

setting it to a high speed will fuck up the wipers when there is little rain, a /low/ speed will be useless when there is appreciable rain, and when driving you often move from one to another.

Construction, cliff roads, country roads, etc.

Tesla are unsafe death traps by design.

This is completely untrue by third party metrics (both governmental and not).

Drivers are licensed operators of heavy machinery that travels at high speed. Let's not encourage systems that turn us into more dangerous operators.

Teslas are the safest cars on the road, and not even by a little bit.

https://www.tesla.com/en_eu/support/voice-commands

If that's your safety criticism, that's more evidence for my point. Teslas are statistically safer than any other car by any measure.

You know, like on my appallingly primitive 1998 Range Rover, or pretty much anything from the same era?

Besides, what if you are on the road with no shoulders.

You've never driven in rain, have you?

My ex (one of my best friends), born and raised in Seattle, used to give me serious grief anytime I mention rain in Boston or NYC. She had no belief in what I would describe.

Work finally ships her out to (NYC). She calls me up to say she just ran ~2meters from the hotel to the taxi and is soaking wet.

She has never commented on Seattle "rain" since.

REAL rain.

We get that rain too periodically.

Sesttelites complain about rain because we regularly experience 100+ days of rain.

Seattle rain is not not a storm, it's a marathon.

There's a map here that shows that most of the eastern US gets more rain than Seattle, but Seattle is very high on the number of days of measurable precipitation.

Many years ago we had a guy working for us who was sent over from our company's parent company in Southern Cali. He was not keen on going out in the rain at all, and was absolutely terrified that we still drove at 60mph when it was raining. "But what if you skid? It's raining!" he'd wail.

He'd never driven in rain. He just did not take well to a Scottish January, especially the bit where you get 140mph winds for a couple of weeks.

I guess we also have laws about keeping cars in good condition with decent tyres and stuff.

But also, you can now adjust wiper speed / interval on the steering wheel in a Tesla without using the touchscreen.

Feature was actually added a just a few weeks ago in a software update.

Yes, in theory it would be best to have the perfect speed without intervention but there isn't one perfect speed for the conditions.

The speed the driver wants changes from driver to driver and might depend not just on how much rain is coming down but on the amount of traffic on the road, proximity to pedestrians, eye sight and time of day and any number of other factors.

It's always going to be better to have an automatic system that can be tweaked by the driver because everyone is different. The more easily the driver can do that without thinking the better.

There is a specific ban on using phones while driving.

There is an obligation to drive with "due care and attention" so taking your eyes and attention off the road to spend time fiddling with a computer screen can be an offence as well.

I parked (where I could not be seen by the van) to warn oncoming drivers of mobile speed van 50 metres ahead over brow of hill.

While nearly all made eye contact with me and speeders instantly slammed the brakes, two drivers on phones (both women with kids), despite me flashing my headlamps AND putting my hand out of my car and waving at them, they still did not look at me or put down the phone.

This was after the penalty was doubled to 6 points.

(And yes I know its not legal for me to warn drivers of speed traps like this)

"Please click all the images of bicycles to access volume controls".

The adaptive cruise is pretty good, it's been fooled once by two cars moving in front of me at the same time and it appears to have no understanding of cars with huge speed differences. (Bozos that enter the road at half the speed limit.) It also refuses to operate below 28 mph which I dislike because cruise control is good for using the engine to hold your speed down on hills--and there's a certain 25 mph mountain road I sometimes drive. Yeah, maybe the adaptive stuff can't work but at least give me basic control so I don't need to use my brakes!

Insurance companies should have this data already. They should start setting rates based on it.

https://www.themanual.com/auto/touchscreen-in-car-less-safe-...

https://actslaw.com/dashboard-touch-screens-safety-hazard/

https://www.ala.co.uk/connect/in-car-touchscreens-more-dange...

Its position is only a "gentle suggestion" to the software to move volume up or down.

At times, especially when starting the vehicle, there is major latency in the software processing the knob movement..

Also, if the knob is moved too fast, the sw gets the wrong reading.

This results in volume being way too high for serveral seconds as well as many other frustrating, dangerous situations.

UX in cars made in the 60s were better than this.

I don't think slapping on fake physical knobs onto laggy buggy software is a solution at all.

Problem is they probably had project managers breathing down their necks about "don't spend time working on non-release-blocking tickets".

1. throttle response, move your foot to 20% and experience between no throttle and wide open as the 'turbos' kick in in my outback

2. every time we get near an intersection with bollards, it thinks it's a kid and slams on the brakes

3. you're not allowed to persist auto start disabling

4. you will be nagged for looking anywhere other than dead straight, especially if looking around a curve, you'll get beeped at

5. sometimes when driving the main 'touchscreen' just dies, takes about 5 minutes to reboot, and the entire time i have no climate or audio control, luckily the adaptive cruise control seems to stay working, you just can't reenable it...

Is this limited to their higher end models?

I personally don’t mind it, but thought it was indicative of how unpopular that feature was when a software update moved the disable button to my Subaru’s dock.

FWIW my Subaru doesn’t experience the other issues mentioned besides 1 & 5. 1 is like any turbo I’ve driven before so maybe my expectations are off but 5 is crazy annoying.

With all the fleet mileage requirements, there are much higher gear ratios for cruise and coast modes, so the engine can be bogged way down near idle speeds. Also, there are more software based throttle controls and interlocks. Some of this has to do with heavy-handed reaction to prior "unintended acceleration" panics, and some is just part of all the modern traction/stability control and efficiency programming.

The programming can get utterly confused and fail to dip back into a ground state where it is ready to accelerate. People doing various combinations of heel-and-toe or other transitions between braking and acceleration, including rolling stops, may get their car into a different mode than they would want, and the recovery from this seems like "turbo lag" or worse.

The 5 speed outback sport I had before was absolutely a joy to drive.

Sadly the last year one can get it as a manual.

I do wonder if the mapping of the pedal is direct. Because one can do it in 2 ways: First one being: putting your foot down 20% means open up the air intake valve and derive fuel requested from that. Or 20% is give me 20% engine power, which then can actually continuously remap what that means in terms of how much we open up the air intake valve and how much fuel we inject as the turbos spin up.

3. I have never seen a car that allows you to do it as the user. I program it in my BMW.

5. If the car is new enough I'd start the lemon process.

It's a great car otherwise, but that makes the flaw stick out even more.

I have a 2015/16 Ford and Chevy with the infotainment screens - both have physical buttons and both respond instantly to my changes. They also both have an additional volume control on the steering wheel itself which also responds instantly.

I'm not advocating everyone go buy Ford/Chevy by any means, but physical buttons - when implemented correctly - are superior to touchscreen controls.

That's kinda the problem; these 'Infotainment' systems keep getting upgraded/etc for marketing purposes but don't have enough care put in the upgrades to make sure stuff works right.

"Move Fast and Break things" is not a good motto for anything that does in a car IMO.

fwiw my '20 Honda Civic doesn't have this problem. Volume knob feedback is instant.

Yes it does. We constantly ban entire classes of goods because some of them can be badly built or badly used by customers knowingly using them wrong. Sydney even banned a few hundred bars in 2013 because tenants were using alcohol then misbehaved on the public street.

Of course, a proven track of horrible implementations of OS for physical knobs should ban those companies from using them for 10 years. Come back to us when you can control how your gear behaves, we should tell them, this is the textbook implementation of no-upfront-regulation-until-you-misbehave.

As a Sydneysider you know we like those shame pages for bad restaurants and the like, maybe we need one for crappy UX

Do you have some examples of makes/models that used potentiometers for volume control?

That's because the switch happened earlier than that. Go back earlier than the "DIN size" head units of the '80s and '90s to the "shaft" style radios with two large knobs flanking a center section with an analog frequency display and maybe some preset buttons if you're lucky.

Also a rotary encoder doesn't age in the same way as a potentiometer. A potentiometer can wear out the area being used most heavily while simultaneously developing oxidation on the areas not being used. Eventually this leads to crackling, dead areas on the dial, and other misbehavior.

A rotary encoder on the other hand doesn't wear out in a practical sense. The only part that even could wear is the bearing or bushing supporting the rotating assembly, and if that's specced appropriately for the application it's effectively a lifetime component. It's possible to build a crappy rotary encoder that falls apart earlier than desired, and of course they can still be damaged by abuse, but a well built one should outlast the useful life of the device it's installed in by multiple orders of magnitude.

Good old reliable polling. That's where it's at. 2 second response for a volume knob should be quick enough for anyone!

"I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests." -Rasmus Lerdorf

"We have things like protected properties. We have abstract methods. We have all this stuff that your computer science teacher told you you should be using. I don't care about this crap at all." -Rasmus Lerdorf

I'd much rather that than an analogue potentiometer that is guaranteed to be scratchy in a couple of years. Also you won't get steering wheel controls to work with a true analogue knob.

If you have any hope at all for Subaru to get better at software development, abandon it here. Subaru is a high watermark in my career for:

- "us-vs-them" fighting between "IT" and "Business"

- Siloing of teams within IT

- Team bloat / retention of non-operative team members

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXYKVfoJ2Gs

Most of the time it works fairly well, I can perceive some latency but I'm pretty sensitive to it -- my wife can't tell at all.

But when the car is first starting up the infotainment is clearly overloaded and the volume knob is suddenly a gentle suggestion. This is particularly upsetting if it decides to switch to a different input like Bluetooth then starts blasting at the last volume level of that input, and it takes a good 2 seconds to respond to the counterclockwise turn input.

My 2015 Ford Fiesta had a more reliable volume knob, and it was as bargain bin as they come (manual windows!).

If I do the same movement but in 1 second it'll only move up the volume by x/y where y > 2.

That doesn't explain the initial latency. It's probably being posted to a queue which no-one is handling.

It depends on how the physical button works. You functionally don't get tactile feedback if the response time isn't good. You don't actually always know that you've activated a control (e.g. Did I not press it hard enough? Did I need to rotate it further?) Cheap buttons or knobs or dials can often feel mushy and be unclear as to whether you've fully turned them or pushed them.

Not taking eyes off the road is definitely better, but general distraction is still a problem even if you don't have to look away.

I can triangulate my way to the right button on the dashboard with just my fingers without ever taking eyes off the road.

I can touch and feel a button without "pressing" or activating it. Impossible with a touch screen!

Buttons can be differently shaped to make this even better.

Touch screens invite and allow bad ux with nested menus. You need to know which screen you're on, which menu is activated.

I know distinctly if I pressed a button once or twice or thrice, or long pressed it. No dice with touch screens.

No software update will ever change the physical layout of those buttons. Period. So much simpler.

And if buttons are more expensive, well thats good ! Make it harder to put more buttons. We don't need more.

Anecdotally, my 2006 prius had a touch screen. Always worked as expected, no lag. I could never, through 5 years of ownership, change the temp, or start the defogger without looking at the screen. A nissan I drove last week with physical buttons, took me a day to get used to with physical buttons and knobs for these functions.

I dont see a single end user benefit for touch screens. I see a bunch of reasons for the manufacturer tho.