The problem with touch screens is that they're lazy design.
If you have to design an interface with physical buttons you need to fully design that interface because you can't easily or cheaply update it after you ship it. This is expensive. This is in addition to physical buttons themselves being expensive.
With a touch screen a UI change is just a software update. The net effect of this is you can be lazy about UI/UX development because hey you can always fix it later.
For cars in particular, physical buttons allow some use without looking at the display. Touch screens do not.
Phones went touch screen because of their limited size, so much so that on iPhones we even lost the home button (which I still miss). Actually the home button is a perfect example because the swipe up gesture is strictly worse. Example: which direction is "up"? It depends on orientation. Also some apps are only in, say, landscape orientation so "up" is actually "right" from the user's perspective.
Driving with a giant iPad is generally suboptimal.
If you have to design an interface with physical buttons you need to fully design that interface because you can't easily or cheaply update it after you ship it. This is expensive. This is in addition to physical buttons themselves being expensive.
With a touch screen a UI change is just a software update. The net effect of this is you can be lazy about UI/UX development because hey you can always fix it later.
For cars in particular, physical buttons allow some use without looking at the display. Touch screens do not.
Phones went touch screen because of their limited size, so much so that on iPhones we even lost the home button (which I still miss). Actually the home button is a perfect example because the swipe up gesture is strictly worse. Example: which direction is "up"? It depends on orientation. Also some apps are only in, say, landscape orientation so "up" is actually "right" from the user's perspective.
Driving with a giant iPad is generally suboptimal.