I just want a coffee table book with pictures of these stupid executive's faces who approved the original all touchscreen versions that were becoming ubiquitous.
You could make money from that. Trace the execs, get nice shiny photos to the tech, write some good copy, and publish "The Encyclopaedia of garbage tech" so that people in the future can ridicule and possibly learn from their stupidity.
Importantly you need to trace the execs who copied it, not the ones who decided to try it the first time. Giving things a try and not immediately throwing it away when it isn’t perfect is a good thing and behavior that needs to be encouraged. The problem is when others start copying it blindly because it is new before it could demonstrate benefits. It’s the people jumping on hype that are the problem, not the people giving new things a try, even if they may fail.
Having worked with people in that industry they don't care. They always just want to shake things up then move to next thing to say they did something at their old job. Then forget all about it once they did the next thing.
Plenty of responsibility for elmo, but don't remove shared blame from the many layers of individual greedy cowards beyond that who used this as convenient cover to approve changes in their own org's designs. Anything to make their extra pennies and not pass any of those savings on to the consumer (also so much easier to enable subscription car features, can't make a physical button disappear over the air)
I want to see some videos of salesmen trying to sell touchscreens like they are cars of the future and so great. Followed by the same salesman selling the return to tactile buttons as a big step forward because of how bad of an idea the touchscreens are.
Most likely the first one will be older, but I bet there's many that could be lead to do both in the same day by two different people showing interest in the same model but different year of a vehicle.