Haha touché. However unintuitive as it may seem an ethernet based trunk latch could be overall cheaper from a system level than a straight relay based system or

Haha touché. However unintuitive as it may seem an ethernet based trunk latch could be overall cheaper from a system level than a straight relay based system or even CAN system. Especially with the newer two wire ethernet with power via 10BASE-T1S. The connector likely costs more than the ethernet chip, and microprocessors can be had for nickels. So at large manufacturing scale it could easily cost less to share a single ethernet and power line and save on wiring, connector complexity, etc.