Paying extortion to get more speed? That's just a cash cow.
2. design costs with tactile controls maybe a little higher for the first stage of a new design, but its not as if car companies did not have (a) in-house talent for this (b) decades of experience. Contrast with the (amortized) cost of implementing "car OS's" on touchscreens before even getting to "what does the infotainment screen look like".
3. where the screens do potentially save money is in allowing rollouts of new features without requiring new hardware (which in fact would generally be impossible to rely on). Of course, as Tesla found out, this doesn't always go as planned, and the company can incur extra costs because users know the change can be rolled back.
4. as the article you linked to, and dozens of others, makes clear, there is a growing body of both scientific and anecdotal evidence that screens are terrible for safety while driving.
5. whether manufacturers are responding more to consumers' demands for buttons, or the evidence that they are exposing themselves to legal liability for their interface designs is hard to get a handle on at this point, since they notoriously do not speak openly and honestly about such things. Therefore, please do feel free to believe it is an example of corporations responding to consumer demands, while I'll continue to believe that it is corporations covering their collective asses for the design mistakes they've made (preferably before they get sued over a collision on par with the navy vessel one that led to their removal from US navy ships).
You are unfortunately one of the apologetic quote, "dickfucks", endquote the parent was referring too. When all players eventually do this, where will you got to buy?
There is no more free market left in the auto industry after a century of consolidations. We're at the mercy of a few giant automakers who own the entire market and make the rules in their flavor. The current greed-flation is another nail in the coffin of the "free market competition benefits the consumer" trope.
If we had left everything to the so called "free market" our food would have still contained lead, mercury and arsenic. That's why governments need to step in and regulate some things in flavor of the consumer because we can't expect the corporations to do it themselves through "free market" competition, as it's much easy and profitable for them to form rent-seeking cartels and work against us that compete for us.
It seems all lessons from the past have been forgotten.