Buttons are surprisingly expensive; not just the button itself but the wiring and the labor. Let's WAG at $20 per button. $20 * a few dozen buttons is real money.
The big reason touchscreens are so favored is because they don't require that you finalize your user-interface design decisions so early in the design cycle. With physical buttons, you have to design molds etc. to have the parts ready for final assembly. What if you want to make a change? Whereas with a touchscreen UI, you can worry about UI details any time and just make changes in software, even after the car has been sold if necessary. So for the early design process, you just specify the size screen you want, and design the molds for the bezels etc.
If the added expense is so onerous to the automaker, then they can raise the price of the car to make up for it. I'd buy that, where I won't buy a car that has inferior controls. Why would I, when there is still a plethora of older cars available that better meet my needs?
But it doesn't matter how many are willing. All I'm saying is that this is a thing that matters a great deal to me. It's pretty close to a dealbreaker. Even if I'm the only one that feels that way, it's still how I feel.
The auto industry appears to not want to make cars that I'd actually want to buy. Fair enough.
But I do find it interesting that one of the things that I was always taught was a strength of our economic system is that it will produce a wide enough variety of goods that pretty much everyone will find a version of a product that they'd actually want. That it appears that it can't looks like a kind of failure to me.
heck, finding a sub-6" cellphone is next to impossible, outright impossible if you want high end features. and phones are way easier to create in different configurations than cars are.
I don't think I'm alone in this.
I would definitely pay an extra $1,000 for a version with actual buttons... and a smaller screen.