We at Autocar talk a lot about buttons and other physical controls in cars and how having at least a few well-chosen ones for essential functions is important.
The good news is that it does seem manufacturers are slowly getting it. Volkswagen, one of the pioneers of touch-sensitive nonsense, recently let me have a poke around an early prototype of its ID Cross EV, which featured a compact array of physical buttons in the centre console and on the steering wheel. Hurrah!
A button that's less discussed is the one to turn the car on and off, which is strange because it's the one that is actually contentious. Most people agree that having buttons rather than touchpads on the steering wheel is a good thing. Dials for the interior temperature and fan speed are uncontroversial too.
And having physical controls for the indicators is so universally agreed that even Euro NCAP has decided it won't award the full five stars to cars that don't have any. I'm fairly sure that was the reason for Tesla's mirror-signal-U-turn on column stalks, rather than any naturally acquired common sense.
Start/stop buttons in EVs, though, are another matter. There are those who think that they are completely redundant because there's no engine to start and therefore the car should just 'energise' when you get in and power down when you get out; putting it into drive should be enough to tell it to go.
They also argue that such functionality is a safety feature: it's good that the car will automatically turn itself off because, with no engine noise, you might forget.
Modern EVs are split roughly 50:50 between ones that have a start/stop button and ones that don't. Probably half of those that do will actually ignore your commands and turn themselves off when they deem it necessary. The disobedient ones are the worst.
On the face of it, having EVs turn on and off automatically makes sense. After all, there's no engine that should or shouldn't be idling. But as with every instance of a machine trying to guess your intentions, it gets it wrong too often.
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Worse still, electric cars don't actually turn off- there's always something going on in the background. I was horrified to share a ride in my daughters electric car recently and have her tell me that the battery is significantly depleting overnight and the car is doing something she doesn't understand. It's actually a car she is not in control of! No thank you- I want something I am fully in control of, and shuts down when I want it to!