who is this magician and what is his secret formula? sounds too good to be true, but still distracting.
Back on point towards your comment, maybe "touch" timing wouldn't work. But phones have something in-dash systems don't expose to the end-user: accelerometer. If you could detect a tap from the accelerometer instead of relying on touch, you'd be onto something (of course, you would have to filter out road noise, which is not trivial, but probably doable).
On my car stereo, for example, I have 6 buttons for pre-programmed stations: [1][2][3][4][5][6]
Without looking, I can put my finger just to the left of [1] and select a station by feeling my way across. There is no way to do that with an in-dash touch screen without looking. Maybe you could play a sound to designate which button your finger is currently on, but what if you don't want to press that particular button (i.e. you land on [2] and you want to select [3] instead, but -oops- a bump in the road caused momentary disconnect between your finger and the screen [make no mistake, this sort of thing happens often])? Then you need a way to "confirm" a selection, and we're back to the original problem.