> You have always had the need to look at the buttons, like reaching out to the radio.
Aside from others' comments that one needn't look at buttons & knobs one has memorized, also:
1) one does not need to look as long at buttons and knobs as a screen to locate the desired control, because they do not change position. One also never needs to navigate a menu to perform a basic task. The closest most come is having a button that cycles AM/FM and channel presets.
2) it's possible to combine the fixed-location advantage of buttons and knobs with visual and tactile differentiation that reduces or eliminates the need to look at the controls even further. Some cars do this, but a really great example is the Nintendo Gamecube controller, which was clearly designed by someone who'd watched a young child try to remember what all the buttons on earlier consoles (SNES, N64, Playstation, perhaps) were used for. Size differentiation, most-used buttons in the most-accessible positions, larger, and highlighted by color, less-used ones smaller with diminishing vividness of color the less-important they were. A clear hierarchy of importance differentiated by color, size, shape, and feel. Auto makers don't ever fully embrace this because it results in a UI that doesn't look they way they want it to, but for maximum safety, they should.
A very, very consistent touchscreen UI could use some of this to great effect to reduce the harm that they cause, but they'd have to almost never screw with placement, appearance, or behavior of UI elements, all of which would need to be perfectly consistent and just about never change, which in practice probably means never receiving updates because there aren't a lot of teams that can resist fiddling with looks & behavior (this is a problem that plagues all web and frequently-updated software, and if you don't think it's a big one or causing some serious irritation and reduced-utility in computing in the wild then try watching someone who's not extremely "computer savvy" use their computer or phone for a while). They'd also need to radically simplify their UIs and work very hard on reducing latency and improving interaction accuracy (touch, then nothing happens for a second or two, is extremely confusing to non-computer-nerds, and it's 100x worse if it's not consistently precisely that unresponsive—sometimes instant, sometimes 1s delay, sometimes 5s delay, is the absolute worst way a UI can behave)