I hardly ever touch my AC, I just leave it on auto and the car does the rest to get it to the right temperature as quickly as possible.
I suspect this is what most automakers think the real solution should be, just make it easy enough to set a temp and leave the rest to the computer.
I regularly cross our (small) mountains on holidays and that means temperature and humidity outside can change every 20 min on a trip as you go from a depression to a mountain pass and back to a different depression with a different weather.
The target temperature control stays unmoved, but i randomly have to turn on and off the defog, for example. Can't keep the defog on all the time because it pushes a ton of hot air to the windshield and then in my face, rather keep it off when i don't need it.
Hey speaking of fog, do Teslas even have fog lights? How many layers of menu do you have to go through to turn them on and off?
I have found even the best ones though, to get the rear defrost right, but fail to get front defrost correct in high humidity conditions that aren’t just normal rain. (Very dense fog, snow, sleet ).
In theory the computer knows when it needs defrost.
A couple months from now, I'll have the same situation, except it will be 95 F outside after a long, hot work day and I'll jack the AC up to get down to a comfortable body temperature. Once I cool off, the AC on full blast will be way too cold to tolerate.
Thankfully, I've got an 8-year-old base model car that allows me to do all that with physical dials that don't take my attention off the road. I can't imagine what it would take to program an "auto" mode that knows how long it takes for my body to reach a comfortable temperature after being out in the elements. I think I'd lose my mind if my car just blithely set itself to 70 degrees and assumed that would work for me. That may be an option for office workers in milder climates, but they're not the only ones buying cars.
On the other hand, my sense with how I use temperature control in my car is that most of my interactions are (a) set mode at start of driving (b) incrementally turn the temperature dial a notch or two without looking at it.
Sometimes, I do mash the defroster button when weather commands warm/dry air on the windshield and it's easy enough to find that with muscle memory.
Otherwise, in normal seasonal weather, it works well and I don't change modes or temperature. Windows up, down, hot, cold, sunny, cloudy, dark, whatever -- it all works about the same.
Previously, I drove an older version of the same vehicle. It also worked well until it forgot how to figure out what day it was due to a software issue. After that, it kind of had a mind of its own.
(Now, a sane person would ask why that would have to do anything to do with HVAC performance.
It gathered the current date, time, and position from GPS, the bearing from the nav's compass, and the solar intensity from a sensor on th dashboard.
A bit of math and/or an almanac lookup later, and it also knows the position and angle of the sun relative to the car.
So it knows when sunlight is streaming on through the driver's window, and adjusts automatically to compensate by providing relatively cool air from the dash vents only on that side. It also knows not to do this on a cloudy day as well as other things that seem obvious once a person starts thinking about them.
Which is a magical kind of automation -- until the calendar is off by both years and months because Honda broke the clock and its understanding of the sun broke with it: https://didhondafixtheclocks.com/ )
My temperature adjustments are the old fashioned "what temperature air to blow" and not "I want this end result temperature", so my previous comment is a whole different paradigm. Thinking about it, with more recent rentals, I haven't messed with temperature controls much either.
I still think that Skoda has much better controls, though. They also look and work quite similar to the control in OP.
