Technology

You know how expensive it is to mold unique dedicated physical buttons for every function and then wire them all over the place?

Not expensive. You don't have to "wire them all over the place", you just put them on a PCB and connect them to the nearest CAN bus, or similar.

Cars cost way too much for me to care about this excuse.

You can even have that single display collect so much car user data and sell that too

As well as the pure cost saving there was also the notion that it was a futuristic look that would sell, and so boost profits that way, too.

And probably it did sell and market well - for a while.

I feel that consumers had become too trusting of carmakers - after all, cars have been getting better and better in terms of their usability for decades, so when carmakers went touchscreen everything, the first instinct of the average consumer would be to trust it and assume it represented an improvement."They wouldn't do it if it was worse, right?"

And so people buy the fancy futuristic car with no buttons, and only after driving it for a month does it sink in how much they truly hate it, and that they got sold a lie.

So there was always going to be that one generation of touchscreen-everything, before the people who got burnt by it are now the ones thinking "I won't buy anything again that doesn't have some buttons!"

Without actually knowing how much constructing the physical buttons cost, I would guess that the real savings are in process optimization - if all you have for the interface is a screen, then you don't need to have the interface design done before constructing the car - you can parallelize these tasks.

Insufficient as far as justifications go, but understandably lucrative.

sure, but they could have programmed a stick with haptic feedback to help navigate the screen so you can navigate radio, gps, contacts or whatever else while driving. Slower than touching or the old buttons but as safe as old buttons.

Fair :)