First, it’s not like
everything is done on the screen. Blinkers, wipers, volume, cruise speed, skip track, horn, gear select, can all be physically controlled.
The only thing that I’ve ever felt was a little distracting is climate control, because you’re adjusting individual degrees with a fairly small touch target. However it’s also a totally non-time critical adjustment.
Defog/defrost is a 3-state toggle control so it’s easy to tap with minimal distraction. I find it’s strictly better than the physical toggle I had in my previous car, which I also had to look at to press because it was in a field of identical buttons, and which didn’t provide the same functionality with just two taps (going from cool defog to hot defog)
I think people dramatically overstate the idea that people are adjusting climate or radio channels without looking, unless it’s being done on the steering wheel. If you have to reach the dash, most people are going to look at it.
What’s great about the responsive touch screen is that there are activities which are massively faster to accomplish (like pinch-zooming GPS maps) which are significantly slower and more arduous on other cars I’ve driven with physical controls. There’s also a lot more functionality that can be provided. And providing remote control over the same functionality becomes a lot easier when there isn’t a physical switch that could get out of sync, or where your physical switches all have to be “soft-toggles” so they can’t physically get out of sync with the current digital state.
Honestly the HCI group at Tesla has really done some very impressive work overall. The design is quite beautiful and extremely functional.