And I think Tesla could get away with it, because to a point they were trying to be like Apple for cars, and Apple has reinvented some user interfaces very successfully - including touch screen interfaces in favor of physical buttons.
It can work. I remember so many people sticking with their Blackberry for so long because it had physical buttons. And to be honest, I'm still not comfortable with touch screen keyboards. However, I can see a lot of benefits in having a touch screen for text input; predictive text, language switching, character set switching, 3rd party keyboards to combine emoji into monstrosities (https://emoji.supply/kitchen/), etc.
The cost was ergonomics; the gain was dynamic options as described above.
Anyway, I think that's what Tesla was aiming for, I don't know if they or other car manufacturers have achieved it. I don't have experience with it myself, only drove a VW for a while that had a screen for the gauges so you could change the styling and get some sweet animations; I didn't mind that, it was workable enough, and allowed for more efficient use of available real estate.
Dynamic keyboards are great but the main reason physical keys lost out on phones was because the space trade off wasn’t worth the extra screen real estate afforded by virtual keyboards.
That’s not a problem with cars. Particularly American ones. “Acres” of dashboard to work with there.
It can work. I remember so many people sticking with their Blackberry for so long because it had physical buttons. And to be honest, I'm still not comfortable with touch screen keyboards. However, I can see a lot of benefits in having a touch screen for text input; predictive text, language switching, character set switching, 3rd party keyboards to combine emoji into monstrosities (https://emoji.supply/kitchen/), etc.
The cost was ergonomics; the gain was dynamic options as described above.
Anyway, I think that's what Tesla was aiming for, I don't know if they or other car manufacturers have achieved it. I don't have experience with it myself, only drove a VW for a while that had a screen for the gauges so you could change the styling and get some sweet animations; I didn't mind that, it was workable enough, and allowed for more efficient use of available real estate.