God I hate touchpad or touch based controls or whatever the correct term is, even on mobile phones they are almost always terrible to use.
The big difference with a phone/tablet is that you're looking at the screen when using it. That's fundamental to the interaction experience. Cars are _completely_ different: a driver should be looking at *the road*.
Touchscreens as the main control interface for cars were a stupifying dumb idea right from the start. It's as if the alphageeks burst through the design studio doors, shunted the ergnonomicists aside, and proclaimed anything physical was neanderthal and out of date. Behold, the emperor has new clothes! "We can do all this in SOFTWARE, and it's adaptable, we can use clever colours, and look if you just tap this menu three times and slide along here, YOU CAN BOOST THE BASS IN THE RIGHT REAR SPEAKER! Show me how you do THAT with your Victorian buttons!".
Fair play to Mazda for leading the resistance movement here - and good to see VW actually listening and doing something about it. With any luck, touch screen car control will suffer the ignominious death it deserves.
Few buttons and a wheel - all you have to go through the journey to type your start and destination points, amount of people, age, discounts, etc.
for specialized repetitive control, doesn't seem to make much sense to me - certain functions in car, will be super repetitive, AC control, speaker volume, etc.
even for phones this logic applies, volume buttons are still physical
this means that something like navigation is better of with voice/touch (coz who would want physical letter keyboard there) ... but to pull down a window? yeah, hell nah with touch