Touch screens are great in cars! For one purpose. The navigation. The touchscreen should only display navigation and function as a keyboard to search it, and only while the car is stationary. Everything else should have a physical control, at bare minimum as "backup"
Bring back the standard DIN design. Then we can all change out our head unit with something that has Garmin but doesn't affect the physical buttons on the dash below it.
My 2012 Pathfinder was the last year of that generation and had navigation designed before UX was really emphasized. It mainly relies on physical buttons and it's overall terrible. Part of it involves an iPod-like scroll wheel, which is actually kinda nice to control zoom but that display is another kind of terrible.
Mate there's like, a whole paragraph left in my comment. You can't safely type any navigation information while driving. If you want to use voice control to navigate, it doesn't really matter if it's physical controls or a touch screen. Maybe read the whole comment where all of this was already addressed.
And of course, we can rely on the universally true mutual exclusivity of always having a passenger when we need to navigate, and never needing to navigate when we don't have any passengers. As constant as the north star, that one.
You're rightfully getting downvoted because having a passenger is not at all a given and before the days of navigation systems you had to handle physical maps at the next red light or pull over, but there's a kernel of truth to your statement:
A passenger who can actually navigate is a godsend. I learned how to do it properly during my draft time (civil defence) and a proper navigator takes so much load off the driver it's not funny any more. Incomparable to a computer navigation system. The driver is getting instructions exactly when necessary, confusing situations get called out and clarified, and when the driver makes a call "can't drive left here" it's the navigator's responsibility to re-plan. You can actually focus on the road because the navigator takes on full responsibility for the route. It's how you can get fast to a place in an area unknown to both driver and navigator, and with "fast" I mean with or without sirens, without that navigator backup sirens would generally be pointless, no brain cycles left to care about routes when you're "breaking" rules of the street and dealing with apparently deaf and blind drivers left and right.
The average passenger, though, is magnitudes worse than computer navigation. And I don't just mean people who need to rotate the map to not get disoriented, I mean practically everyone.
I was getting down voted because apparently everyone thought I means have a passenger do the navigation?
I meant that the driver should NEVER do navigation whilst driving because that kills people, there is no discussion there. So you either pull over, set the navigation computer and continue, or if you have a passenger, that passenger can do the navigation computer while you are driving.