On the other hand, there will be fewer crashes due to the driver having to take his/her eyes of the road in order to squint at which identical button out of 25 turns the blower down one notch.
Were there fewer crashes when these cars were the norm? No. [1,2,3,4]
The number of crashes per year has remained remarkably stable year over year, despite the number of driven miles and number of cars rising enormously. Conversely the number of fatalities due to crashes has dropped considerably.
So despite driving many, many more miles then they did previously, people aren't dying in crashes at a greater rate (total crashes is harder to track due to intermittent and inconsistent reporting data).
One of the contributor to low fatalities-per-mile was congestion, my guess is that while miles driven per year increased every year average/median driving speed decreased due to traffic up to 2020 when congestion decreased for the first time.
