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Notes -
The main advantages to carmakers is that it's a lot easier to make and especially to scale across multiple products and that it's easier to make changes after production, etc, even if you don't add any new functions or telemetry vs, say, 90s cars.
For a car to drive smoothly requires a lot of things to happen just right at the right times, in the right way, like a complex ballet performance. You can get there with exquisitely engineered mechanical parts, electrical parts, electronics, discrete computers or centralized computers (and yeah in a physical way, computers are electronics which are electrical parts, but the degree of complexity and flexibility is different). Having mechanical parts do all of this complex ballet is possible, but difficult; tolerances have to be extremely precise, the materials quasi perfect... It's slightly easier to fudge some of the things with simple electrical parts. For instance, instead of smooth high quality gears and cranks just put an electric motor and limit switches to control a window (it's also easy to make a cheap, bad window crank tho). It's even easier to have electronics like purpose made chips do some of it instead; a servomotor doesn't need to have as much complexity built into it to avoid decapitating a child whose head was out of the window when it started closing. And a computer makes it all even easier, you can start producing the car first and worry about how much strength the motor for the windows are able to push after, and if a regulatory agency changes it (or if different jurisdictions have different limits) you can still use the same part and just change the programming.
The big change from the 90s and early 00s to now is that we're going from multiple discrete computers, which can be limited and hard to access, to less, but more powerful, central computers. That's easier for the dealership to access (according to the industry though, giving independant mechanics access will get women raped in parking garages*).
For consumers, there's some advantages. You can have "modes" that change the throttle response of the car, you can have simulated shifting on CVT transmissions, you can have more complex features for controls like locking window controls for the back row from the front row, more complex security and safety features, a mechnical or electrical car is trivial to hotwire. You can also have features like accident detection that can, on top of calling emergency services on your behalf in some of the more advanced cases, in simpler cases it could automatically unlock the door so it's easier to evacuate. The cases where the consumers are (rightly) complaining is when manufacturers, following Tesla's lead, are replacing physical controls that are easy to use without looking with modal touchscreens (which require more attention from the driver to use). Part of this from the manufacturer is because it's cheaper, part of it is because there's the impression that futuristic means clean means no buttons.
And then of course, they like getting their telemetry data.
*Sadly I can't find the actual ad anymore.
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