I think what the author was getting at was things being unnecessarily electronic, such as door locks or even the glovebox (seriously, why do we need a push-butt

I think what the author was getting at was things being unnecessarily electronic, such as door locks or even the glovebox (seriously, why do we need a push-button to open that?). Manual, mechanical devices are fairly reliable and if they fail, you can poke a screwdriver into the mechanism to get around the issue. Now imagine a bad firmware upgrade breaks the glovebox button on your Model 3 and your AAA card is in there...