It definitely fails Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." As long as you assume "stupidity" to include st

It definitely fails Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." As long as you assume "stupidity" to include stupid things about the mathematics of our universe like coordination problems, design by committee, and the tragedy of the commons... There's a very slow, very week feedback loop that may be too weak at the moment to fight against this trend: the customers who are dealing with and worry about perpetual sensor failures and computer issues at 150,000 miles are not the same customers who are buying the car off the dealership lot. Meanwhile, the people with brand new vehicles are not worried about those problems, they're only slightly (and only long after it's too late) worried about the eventual resale value. I trust that my old Toyota and Subaru will still be dependable and repairable for many years, but I won't buy an old BMW or Mercedes because my family and coworkers have too many horror stories of expensive, exotic gadgets that have gone bad in mysterious ways. But we're 40 years removed from the bad old days of the 80s and 90s when those imports were decimating the lethargic Big 3 in quality and cost, which is more like the time scale on which consumer attitudes like that began to be formed. 2018 laws regarding rearview cameras are really new in comparison to a cultural thing like that.