The 'Climate' one is a terrible idea. Apparently Apple still haven't learned what Car Manufacturers learned 10 years ago when introducing touch screens - that tactile buttons are always better in vehicles than touch screens, because you can adjust by feel without having to take your eyes off the road.
i partially agree. touch screens are a big burden for the driver.
but this doesn't stop stupid car manufacturers to add it to each and every new car and move certain essential controls over there just to save on manufacturing costs.
my EV has a dedicated climate button, and all it does is to bring up the climate screen on the center touchscreen, where i can adjust settings. i hate it.
yes, there are a few "direct" touch buttons on the main car UI, just like adjusting temperature and activating recirculation, but it sucks. so are the seat heating touch UI buttons: they react slowly, there's no firm confirmation that the action has been taken, so you end up cycling through the levels.
the common thing in these is the badly designed UI, that requires almost precise aiming and very steady hands while your arm is halfway stretched out and the car is moving. terrible.
and of course it looks and feels different on every single car, sometimes not even uniform across the different models of the same manufacturer.
i think apple's take on that would be to build a better, more intuitive, standardised UI, with settings activation tuned to the driver's iPhone, and proper speech recognition and voice activation.
unless these don't work perfectly, almost the same handicaps will apply as with the original manufacturer's stuff. i hope they get it right. then all you need is a single button on your steering wheel to activate the (hopefully much improved) voice assistant in iOS.
still i think this is a big burden for everyone, because you could just use your hands and grab the physical knob or push the physical button to get stuff done - and don't want to argue with a digital assistant about my feet being cold while having a phone call. this concept served us well, and i don't really see how anyone without the ability of tactile feedback is gonna fix this. let's see how apple intends to make car UI at least to suck less.