My major problems with this design trend, in my own (biased) experience:

• Center console entertainment UI is usually the slowest thing ever made, making it an even bigger distraction than needed. I could develop muscle memory for blindly pushing the right virtual buttons, but the slowness makes this impossible. It’s usually wildly under-specced, but what’s stranger is that there’s never an upgrade option you can buy from the manufacturer.

• Can’t use the panel blindly, creating a big honkin’ distraction within reach of the driver. Speed (see above), iffy capacitive touch with no haptic feedback, as well as multiplexing the UI through deep menus, are the chief culprits here. If there were standard controls that were always on screen in the same place, with a suitably responsive UI, this wouldn’t be as big a problem.

• For systems that are fully-integrated, it’s all or nothing. If the panel/CPU dies, you lose your stereo, navigation, and climate controls all at the same time. My car, fortunately, has the A/C physical controls. This creates a distinct point of failure which is nice - I’m pretty sure I will still have A/C if the panel craps out.

• It’s dirt cheap to manufacture and I think we all know it. We’re already paying historically high prices for cars, and cheaping-out on the bits we touch the most is just an extra kick to the junk at this point. To the manufacturers: we have remarkably better experiences on our freaking phones every day, so nobody but your grandma is impressed with the weak-sauce, crippled, bogus UX you bolt into your expensive vehicles. You’re not making cars cooler, you’re just making car ownership worse. Do better.