Where is the pro-digital-control constituency hiding out? Surely the manufacturers wouldn’t be going so hard this way if market research bore out quite that degree of resistance.
The reason nobody talks about it on forums like this is the same reason moderate people almost never post online. The internet is full of aggressive people who think it's OK to be a bully if they are morally justified. And this is one of those topics where people feel like they have to "defend" their preferences aggressively.
I've posted about this in another HN thread and got some good discussion going. If anywhere is going to have reasonable discussion, this is likely the place.
On to my opinion: I have a 2022 Model Y Performance and a 2023 Model 3 RWD (base model). I am a personal fan of minimalism and I can absolutely see their "intent" with the minimalist approach, but I do think it needs more work in several areas.
Elon once said, "All user input is error." I can see what he means by this. In an ideal world you don't have to change much in a car as it knows your intent.
Where this works well, it works REALLY well. Stuff like climate control, maps/charging, seat adjustments, and more are just "handled" in modern cars and by putting 10+ buttons that are rarely touched out there, you're cluttering up the physical space and increasing manufacturing complexity.
Where this works poorly, it can REALLY hurt. For example, their automatic windshield wipers that use Vision only. They fluctuate between being acceptable to unusable every other update. They are clearly trying to make it better, but a cheap rain sensor would have likely saved them millions in software engineering at this point. And because the windshield wipers are built to be automatic... the manual controls SUCK on a touchscreen.
Personally, when I get into a non-Tesla now, I feel extremely cramped and the cars feel extremely messy to me. The Model Y has a good amount of interior space, but it feels EXTRA big because there's so little visual noise. And realistically, I probably interact with my touchscreen once per drive on average.
I think people tend to think of worst-case scenarios with minimalist screen-centric approaches and pretend like they are frequent occurrences. For some people they will be. If I lived in Costa Rica in the mountains where it rains 95% of the year, I would be really annoyed to have these crappy auto-wipers. But, a simple rain sensor could have made this so much better.
Though today's interfaces are not perfectly optimized or at their end-state yet, I think Tesla is a good example of where we're heading and I love it. Hopefully within 5-10 years I can get into a car, state where I want to go, and everything else is magically handled for me. That is the ideal end state and I think these minimalist interfaces are a step in that direction.
Whether or not this is the future some people WANT is a completely understandable discussion though.
But, they are. In intermittent rain one wants to be able to adjust the wiper speed, not press a button on the left stalk then have to touch a tiny button on the touch screen. Likewise, if the windshield is fogging up, the last thing one wants to do is to have to look away from the road and navigate the climate controls on the touch screen.
But auto-wipers work GREAT in cars with rain sensors.
So this isn't a critique of screen-only interfaces, it's more of a critique of Tesla's vision-only approach.