It's not even just the automation. There's so little demand that GA is really stuck in ancient standards. I flew 172s for a while and I was really surprised ho

It's not even just the automation. There's so little demand that GA is really stuck in ancient standards. I flew 172s for a while and I was really surprised how old most of the tech was. Built with rivets, engines still using leaded (or lead replacement) gas, still using manual mixture like an old car with a choke. Even the wired microphone in a modern (manufactured in the 2010s) C172 still has this ancient feel about it (not to mention that you couldn't use it anyway as the prop noise is way too loud to use a radio without headphones). The instrumentation side definitely has caught up (like the Garmin G1000 glass cockpit) but the whole airframe + engine combo seems to come straight out of the 1950s. I imagine this adds to the cost as a lot of this tech is no longer mainstream so there's no economy of scale. You can see this in part costs too, and in the price and availability of AVGAS (some airports here really don't want to carry it anymore and if they do it's really expensive). I've heard of C172s been retrofitted with modern turbodiesels with full FADEC but I really don't get why they don't come like this out of the factory these days. I did see that some of the lighting tech was upgraded though: The later ones did have LED beacons. But most of the tech was very old.