Many years ago, I saw a video of a touchscreen input demo where the touchscreen could tell how many fingers you were placed on the screen, i.e. track each finger independently. So, for example, you might imagine that two finger scrolling up/down controls the volume, three fingers controls the AC strength, etc.

This also gave you another two degrees of freedom: expansion vs contraction and rotation. So, you might start with three fingers close together and expand out. Or you might rotate three fingers clockwise to proceed to the next track.

This gives you enough degrees of freedom to never need to look at the screen for routine actions! Sadly, I haven't seen anything about it since then. Large changes like this to UX are going to be inherently hard to introduce into cars, but alas, feels like a missed opportunity.

All (multitouch) touchscreens support this. For example, my BYD Seal supports a three-finger swipe, up/down for temperature and left/right for fan speed.

The main problem with this is that people don't tend to remember complicated, unintuitive gestures like expanding/contracting/rotating/etc.