Touchscreen trouble

We hired Merc Sprinter a few weeks ago and to turn the stereo off you had to hold your finger on the touchscreen off 'button' and then a small window appeared that gave you 2 further options, one of which was turn it off.
So, 2 presses - the first one for a couple of seconds at least - to achieve what used to be done with a single press of something you could actually feel, so no need to take your eyes off the road.

Add to that the simple fact that the vehicle is bouncing around and you need to look at the screen to ensure you've actually got your finger on the right bit of it and I fail to see why pretty much all functions - including ones you use often - are now on a touchscreen, it's madness and unsafe.

I do miss the excellent voice control in the BMW, the one in the RR just controls phone, media and sat nav which means you have to press buttons to get to info I used to be able to get to more quickly. On the positive side, you can do a lot through the steering wheel buttons and as they are interactive / change depending on what you're doing in effect you have double the number of buttons that would normally fit on one side of the wheel which also helps.

I thought I'd struggle and get annoyed with the touchscreens, but I haven't, really surprisingly . It's still not quite as good as buttons and a BMW style control wheel, but the two things that make it work are the location of the screens mean it is easy to reach on the move (as opposed to a tablet on the top of the dash or a screen lower down) and the lower screen which makes a huge difference. I like the ease in which you can show different things on the 3 screens and the shortcut buttons on the lower screen are large enough to press easily and then you get a large screen just for the seats or climate, which again means the buttons can be quite large and easy to select. If I go for the central speedo/rev counter I end up with 4 different configurable screens, which is more than enough to display everything you need without having to touch anything.

Having a decent glass cloth in the upper glovebox to wipe the fingerprints off is essential though!

BMW are making a backwards step in the last few I've driven. It's no longer possible to select the buttons around the iDrive controller that select media/nav etc by feel as they're all flat plastic with no shapes on them, so you have to look much further away from the road and the 'Hey BMW' nonsense doesn't work anywhere near as well as the voice control did in my car. The displays aren't as configurable either, so you have to go into menus to get different information which could be easily displayed in other cars.

Hopefully it doesn't spoil the iPace for you.  The lower screen in the iPace is similar to mine, but very small so could be really frustrating.  However, you can use the rotary controls for temperature and seat heating/cooling.