I completely agree. Years ago when smart phones were just emerging, people made the same complaints about them too; saying you cannot walk and text at the same time like you could with the old feature phones with physical keyboards. I believe public opinion was so vocal about this draw back that were some research projects done using gel screens that could offer a tactile responses dynamically. But then all that seamed to fizzle out and everyone stopped moaning about tactile feedback on touchscreen phones.

Fast forward a few years and the Raspberry Pi was released. My first RPi project was to built a new in car entertainment system. I used Go v1.0 (at that time even methods weren’t supported) and built a media player with text to speech. The entertainment system had 6 buttons:

1. Previous artist 2. Previous album 3. Previous song / replay song 4. Skip song 5. Skip album 6. Skip artist

The media centre would then use text to speech to read the artist, album and song details out over the speakers before playing the tracks.

This system was designed so I never needed to take my eyes off the road and it worked amazingly.

Unfortunately I’m not an electrical engineer so the device was ugly and started to fall apart quite quickly. I think it only lasted < 1 year. But I learned a lot from that experiment: there is a lot of missed opportunities for innovation in the car entertainment domain.