The car industry has an unusual profit curve. They have huge, huge fixed costs. It's not just the factory, it's the testing, compliance, marketing, etc. Howeve

The car industry has an unusual profit curve. They have huge, huge fixed costs. It's not just the factory, it's the testing, compliance, marketing, etc. However, the price you pay for a car is substantially more than the marginal cost of producing it. So that industry is a famine-or-feast industry. Either they are losing money in mind-boggling quantities, or they are making money in mind-boggling quantities. There is not a lot of in between. Unfortunately, the connection to the question the original poster asked is that they basically can't risk not selling a car because it doesn't have some hot feature that most of the market wants, so you won't see a screen-free car made today. Putting $100 of hardware in to seal the deal is a no-brainer in their profit model. (Though they will trim every penny on it, as they do everything else; it may seem like a contradiction but if you think about it enough it'll make sense. Consider the term "bullet-point feature" in our industry.) Until the market as a whole screams for it, it won't exist.