Yet the cars are more expensive than ever. Nah, it’s a bet by the management that people don’t actually choose a car based on the polish of the infotainment system.
Maybe not, but I've done the opposite. The BMW, Subaru, and Fords I tried had terrible interfaces and I ruled them out. In particular BMW's i-drive seems to be hated by many.
Tesla on the other hand has buttons for many things, horn, turn signals, activate the windshield wipers for a moment (I use auto that handles most needs), engage cruise control, set following distance when using cruise control, high beams, pause music, music volume, etc.
Sure seat heaters, interior temp, ac, defrosting etc require touch screen use (or leaving them on auto), but those are emergencies and not much different than having to hit one of 8 buttons/dials on a center console. Especially since most are single touch, not touch -> select menu -> hit button.
While I find the above not annoying I really love the 15" screen that devotes the majority of the screen to things around the car (lane markers, cars, motorcycles, traffic cones, trucks, pedestrians, etc) and the map (with traffic). If the car sees a problem it blinks that object red, which I find helpful. Sure if I want I can get an inch for the current song. But generally I feel more situationally aware with a nice big nav screen up. On more than one occasion I've seen motorcycles splitting lanes behind me because of motion on the screen before I notice the noise or see them in the mirrors. I also really miss the current speed limit on the screen when I switch cars.
I also really like being able to say "play pink floyd", or "navigate to ...".
The logic is that removing buttons would make the cars cheaper as they have historically had buttons up until very recently. I imagine it did, by several dollars, but it was overwhelmed by the increase in other features. Now with touch screens they are able to iterate even quicker and add more features of dubious quality, but it looks better in comparison checklists.
