We don’t have a ton of car-related content on Product Dork, the only thing I could find was this question about review sites for cars. One trend that has always bugged me about cars is the move towards touch screens. It’s incredibly dangerous to have flexible, non-tactile screens with key controls.
Anyways, here are a few paragraphs about why they are removing touch screens.
“Doing our research, when a driver would reach towards a touch-screen interface in any vehicle, they would unintentionally apply torque to the steering wheel, and the vehicle would drift out of its lane position,” said Matthew Valbuena, Mazda North America’s lead engineer for HMI and infotainment.
“And of course with a touchscreen you have to be looking at the screen while you’re touching…so for that reason we were comfortable removing the touch-screen functionality,” he added.
Instead of the touch screen, Mazda has a knob that will cycle through menu items. The screen itself is also farther back and tilted towards the driver.
Also, there’s some interesting conversation about this on Hacker News.