I wonder if there's a way to make physical controls feel more premium via materials / design. In other consumer goods, there's definitely a market for physical design that feels more well-engineered with things like using metal and thoughtful trim. It's not surprising that people find black plastic buttons not particularly premium looking.
It's somewhat interesting because I'm finding that I don't find touchscreens particularly "premium" looking. Touch screens and LCD screens seem to be everywhere nowadays in low-class places and look like obvious cost-cutting like Walmart and fast food drive-thru.
Back in the day, you could easily tell the difference between an expensive high-quality amplifier and a molded piece-of-plastic mass-produced boombox.
I think the way is to make them configurable. When you first setup the car you decide which controls will be "exposed" to the hardware knobs. In the winter time you may configure a knob to give you heated seats, during the summer you reconfigure it to provide max AC in one touch.
Car companies are already kind of doing this, usually just a button or two on the steering wheel. But IMO the entire dash should be a bunch of blank configurable buttons.
BMW did this in the 7 series and I think some 5 series. A row of buttons in the center console that you can choose what they do. Unlike old style "preset" buttons they have a sensor in them to detect your finger being on the button before pressing it, and then it shows at the top of the iDrive screen what that button is programmed to do. I thought that was quite an elegant way to fix the "can't remember what I made this one do" issue you get with programmable buttons.
The complexity of modern car interfaces--including those that use random buttons--is already a massive pain in rentals. At least for nav, things like CarPlay standardize to some degree. But I frequently find myself hunting for all sorts of things on a rental.
Definitely, I believe BMW for example had a big knob that just feels padded and luxurious. Same with car interiors; thicker padding, better noise insulation (e.g. when closing a door) makes things feel more premium.
