Also more basic things like whether your feet are touching the pedals, that you're gripping the steering wheel at all, and how much force those things are taking.
Touch is extremely important when driving a vehicle. You won't know which controls you're using and how much force you're exerting upon your pedals otherwise.
Unless that smell is oil. Or gasoline. Or burning rubber. Or petrichor. Or just plain old smoke.
Or the touch is the feeling of road surface changing, or the steering wheel getting harder to turn / having no effect at all, or the rush of air if a door flies open...
That's a limitation of us. We need touch and indicators to gauge how effective we are, but a machine can precisely throttle 23% or keep the steering wheel at 19 degrees without need to gauge how hard it is pushing the actuators. Touch is nice, but hardly crucial for driving.
