It was an incredibly frustrating drive -- I could barely successfully navigate the radio using the screen or the wheel buttons. I'm sure I would have gotten more used to it but it just wasn't what I was looking for. I'm a software developer, I deal with this technology every day, and I just didn't want that to be front and center on my drive as well.

Now that being said, the commander nob on the older Mazda cars is also a terrible user experience. Turning and pressing physical nobs to change the climate control, volume, or radio stations is very satisfying and user-friendly. But the commander nob is a joy-stick for controlling an on screen cursor -- so you both have to be constantly looking at the screen and you have to translate nob motions to the movement of that cursor. It should be unsurprising that simply reaching up and pressing an icon on the screen is significantly easier and less distracting.

Luckily I'm almost always in Carplay / Android Auto so it's best of both worlds -- you can press physical buttons to do most of the major tasks (open music, open maps, select favorites, volume, climate control, etc) but then press the screen when that makes sense.

With physical parts, the development process is highly sequential. Pick the look, design how it fits, engineer what parts are used, manufacture tooling etc etc in a waterfall. If a revision needs to be made, the whole process needs to be re-started adding a huge amount of delays.

With a touchscreen, the physical touchscreen and the software that runs on it are parallel threads. You can make most UI changes without impacting the manufacturing/design pipeline at all. You don't even need to have planned what the interface looks like before you finalize the parts needed.

Touchscreens are modal. If I want to control the climate, I first have to press the Climate capacitive button or scroll through the screen to find climate. That takes my hands off the wheel and my eyes off the road for longer than just tapping the fan-up button.

As for the cost, I will _happily_ pay the $100 more to have a more premium and tuned interior. Heck, I chose to step up an entire trim model to the top of the line trim just for the fancy LCD screen mirror. I'd happily pay extra for better buttons.

IMO touch screens are great for rarely used features, but anything that gets clicked on most drives should be a dedicated touch point (capacitive button, physical button, steering wheel control, whatever).

Give me multifunction displays from aviation. Touch screen in the middle, rows of modal buttons along the bottom and left side. You can use muscle memory to find the button.

But when Mazda unveiled their button-lite 2026 CX-5 about a year ago, I started investigating.

I'm pretty convinced that touchscreens today are primarily a cost-saving measure, and every other justification is secondary. I hope I can convince you, too!

That’s why I think it must be a legal requirement for any car with touchscreen controls to operate car functions must have driver assistance features enabled, no exceptions.

A concrete step I take to push this along: I mention physical buttons as a dealbreaker to car dealerships when I shop. Of course, I'm only speaking to dealer reps and not the decision makers at $CAR_CO, but if enough people do this, it does get back to the them and will make a difference.

Apple and Google have spent untold amounts of money developing iOS and Android. CarPlay and Android Auto are really nice.

Tesla has spent gobs of money on its touchscreen software too. It's the only native car touchscreen UI I've tried that feels smooth, snappy, responsive, simple.

I've tried the native touchscreen UI of quite a few US and European carmakers. All of them fall short. They feel janky, clunky, obtuse.

Physical buttons are much, MUCH cheaper than high-quality touchscreen software.

Not quite true because automakers can satisfy the rear-view camera requirement with very cheap screens, e.g. integrated into the rear view mirror.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/83QAAeSwizNpjhlB/s-l400.webp

1. Usually they are high on the dash, higher than where conventional controls would be

2. You cannot rest your hand on the surrounding panel to press them, because this will cause unintentional presses on other buttons

Resulting in two problems:

1. Because of the above, you must activate more muscles to steady your hand and arm in a moving car to accurately press them. This is less comfortable and leads to frustrating misclicks

2. This increases the amount of time required to use the controls, which is annoying for infotainment, but dangerous for anything safety related

Now, I know it's not a very representative car. But nobody said the buttons need to be as flashy or as numerous.

It has Carplay/Android Auto, naturally, but it also has physical buttons for play/pause/previous/next and volume, and physical buttons for A/C control. All buttons have a single (sometimes dual) fixed purpose, they don't change purpose depending on whatever mode something is.

It is, in my mind, an ideal amount of buttons compared to, say, the Honda CRV or Toyota RAV4 at the time that had extra buttons around the screen for flexible features, meaning those buttons had no fixed purpose.

I hear the Escape was actually designed for the European market (as the Kuga), which may explain its design sensibility.

Unfortunately, the Escape has not been a roaring success, and Ford will discontinue it in the US market in favor of the Bronco Sport which has, you guessed it, a huge touchscreen and few physical buttons.

Those rear hatch motors are amazing and most have indexing.

same way people just talk to claude code via whisper