Do you really believe that you can close your eyes and touch the "Start" button on a windows machine at arms length every time? Try it throughout your day. I doubt it.
The tactile feedback is important to know that you're making the adjustment you want, and to help you find the right control input.
Since my screen still has a bezel, there's a high likelihood, though perhaps not without spurious touches. Anything more than half an inch off that bezel? No chance.
We're both aging ourselves with "Start button", by the way.
They should have said it's not just about touch. There are two components to not having to take your eyes off the road: first, you need to be able to find the controls. And second, you need to know exactly what the knob that you find will do when you change it.
A dynamic tactile touch screen solves the problem of finding the controls, but if the knob that you find could be the volume or the temperature depending on the mode the UI is in, you're still likely to look down to check which one it is.
Edit: And even some clever solution like giving different shapes to different modes doesn't help a ton, because that still uses more brain cycles and time than "reach for where I know the volume knob is and turn it left". You'd have to reach out and feel the control, and if it's the wrong one then reach for the mode switcher and then find the correct control. That's distracting regardless of whether the eyes can stay on the road, and you're very likely to pull your eyes down instinctively to help with that complicated process.
I could do that with a touchscreen if I didn't need to look at it to know what was where.
There's two problems with this. Firstly it's generally unknowable what will appear where on the touschreen. Secondly even if you just want to know exactly where the touchscreen is then you need to look at it.
it's both.
I need to be able (and I am, on my parents' old fiat) to tune without leaving the eyes from the street. This means I can dedicate at most 5% of my brain and the touch feeling of one-maybe two-digit
>It's not about touch nor physicality of a button or knob, but about a control that is not dependent on UI state
No, I disagree.
The heterogeneity and tactile response of the UI is fundamental, at least for me.
Which quadrant of the display is the control in? You flick your eyes to check. Ok, now is my finger in the right place? You need to check again. Is it at the right level…
For the terminally space-brained like me, buttons and dials work much better. You flick your eyes and can see where the control is and in relation to what. Now you can trace with your finger to the area of the controller, and feel around to locate it in relation to the other controls. If it is ridged, you have tactile feedback on its orientation.
It's not about touch nor physicality of a button or knob, but about a control that is not dependent on UI state