Is there an engineering consensus on the benefits and drawbacks of touchscreens in something like a military vehicle, which is kinda/sorta what KITT is?

Because they're another point of failure (a physical switch will always work so long as the linkages are there; a touchscreen can be cracked or shattered, rendering it useless) and are more difficult than a physical switch to use in situations where it might be dark (or there are other vision-obscuring difficulties) and they're harder to "safe."

Flip side, you can condense a giant consoles worth of switches and buttons down into a shiny rectangle with menus.

-Merc
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