The best interface is no interface

Hell yes. Whoever decided to put touchscreens into cars deserves the Darwin Award.

We live in a bit of an unfortunate age where perfectly time-tested interfaces are replaced with inferior touch-controls left and right, just because "we can".

This applies even to the canonical application; the phone. It's great how many things we can do on our phones now, but the core feature (telephony) has suffered badly. I can't take a call without looking at it anymore, much less place one. In the winter every incoming call turns into a little challenge (how quickly can I rid of that glove without dropping my precious $600 slab-of-glass onto the icy concrete?)

Rewind to the 1990s. Many people could tap an entire SMS on their Nokia without taking it out of the pocket. We could dial numbers without looking because we knew a contact is "four taps down" in the address book, and the buttons gave us a reassuring "click" when they were pressed.

The industry needs to re-discover tactile feedback and predictable latency as desirable traits. Early androids had a jog-dial (sony) and dedicated camera-buttons (HTC), but they largely disappeared for stupid reasons.

I really can't wait for Apple to re-"invent" physical controls in one of their future models. Perhaps the telephony-experience on our expensive pocket-computers will then finally catch up to what we had 20 years ago...

The Mercedes proximity based, keyless entry system is actually a complex digital abstraction over a mechanical key/lock.

Mercedes has to address a bunch of security concerns such as preventing an adversary from sniffing my key information through my jacket pocket, digitally cracking codes, etc. Since the system tries to protect you from locking your key in the car, more technological components need to be thrown into the mix to detect if the key is inside the car. If the driver has to reach into his pocket to turn on the ignition it would defeat the purpose of going "keyless" so presumably the ignition system also gets a few layers of complexity. The cost of whole system would also go up. Repair and maintenance don't sound so appealing either. The whole thing can fail in a lot more ways.

I am not inferring it's a bad idea. It very well might become commoditized technology some time in the future and pave the way for other interesting possibilities.

I prefer utilitarian design which is more concerned with simplicity through and through rather than just minimizing the footprint for the user interface.

You can pretty easily turn any set of gloves into touch-capable gloves using a small amount of conductive thread and sewing it through the pad area on the primary finger you use for touch.

I dunno. If service and food was good, I like commending the staff about it. It would feel awkward to approach the staff without any reason, because I paid earlier already. Granted, I think this is the metaphor breaking. Interacting with the staff isn't just an interface, it's interacting with humans.