I doubt the move was "data driven". Elon has made it very clear his vision is to make the car automated enough that the driver doesn't need to interact with the UI. If anything, he's intentionally trying to change user behavior and train drivers they don't "need" these controls.
I don't very much trust Elon's vision in this regard, with respect to the near-to-medium term (say, the next 5 years or so). It seems very unlikely that within the next 5 years technology will have advanced sufficiently to enable that level of automated driving in day-to-day traffic.
He might have intuition in this area, but one individual's intuition is a poor substitute for actual data.
