It only took one early 2000s Audi for me to swear off German cars for the foreseeable future. I don't know that their questionable design choices are applicable

It only took one early 2000s Audi for me to swear off German cars for the foreseeable future. I don't know that their questionable design choices are applicable to the rest of the industry's chip practices. Story time: Around that time they saved a few bucks by switching the thermostat housing from metal to plastic and not changing the design at all so that it could be a drop-in replacement. With that distinct lack of engineering effort, they were prone to splitting at corner-induced stress lines in the plastic. In an ordinary car this wouldn't be an issue; thermostats fail regularly, so their housings are readily accessible -- kind of like how most cars make changing the oil filter a manageable task. In an Audi however, the process is to take the front half of the car off to expose the engine, take the front half of the engine off, and then replace the now easily spotted housing. So anyway, I don't know of a better place for the thermostat housing to split in half (leaking coolant out faster than you can pour it in) than the middle of fucking nowhere WY. By this time mobile phones were pretty common, but I swear to God they were sharing a single 1Mbps connection across ten counties; only about every third Google search would succeed without timing out, and as a precursor to learning how to take apart my car it was quite literally faster to code up a crude strip-the-garbage proxy (paginating compressed text and nothing else to send back) and deploy that to a home server than it was to try to surf the modern web over at best a 1k connection. In retrospect the coding wasn't necessary since speeds increased to something manageable in the wee hours of the morning when everyone else was asleep and since it was absolutely not a 1-day job, but it was a bit of a fun experience anyway.