this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2026
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Yes, that's exactly what it is, savings. Cheaper to just make the screen bigger and get rid of all buttons since there's gonna be a screen anyway.
It's not in any way "premium", regardless of what they advertise it as.
I'm a Mercedes guy at heart (yes I know what community I'm in, but this is one of the points I agree with all of you on). Here's the interior of the 2005 Mercedes S-Class:
There's physical buttons for all the climate features and some other stuff. The infotainment has a keypad and multiple physical buttons in addition to a multi-axial knob used to navigate the actual screen. There's NO touch capability on that screen, even though competing manufacturers were already adding touchscreens (you could get a Ford Fucking Mondeo with a touchscreen that same year).
Now here's the 2020+ model (currently still in production):
Basically everything is touch and the screens themselves look like a complete afterthought, which might be because... they kinda are. They no longer have bespoke designs that fit the screens into the dashboard, they just have screens and they have dashes which are not designed to be integrated with eachother but rather as separate objects.
These aren't exactly cheap cars either. The three pointed star itself costs a ton of money even in entry level cars, but the S-Class is the flagship, it sits ABOVE their large SUV (GLS aka "the S-Class of SUVs" like they call it). The absolute cheapest S-Class sold by the dealer is 141k EUR and I believe the only thing that has a more expensive base model is the AMG GT sports/supercar.
Now a comparison, here's the C-Class, starting at around 55k EUR
Can you even tell the difference? The cost-cutting measures have gotten so bad that a car nearly 3x more expensive has pretty much the same interior as their entry-level sedan. Yes there will be more space, more rear seat amenities, etc in the S-Class and the chassis itself is different, but they look so similar getting into them that people buying the S must be feeling cheated by now. And this is pretty much the same for all the big manufacturers.