One explanation why it happened in cars, beyond the direct cost of the buttons: the cost of managing the button sets for all the possible combinations of opt-in

One explanation why it happened in cars, beyond the direct cost of the buttons: the cost of managing the button sets for all the possible combinations of opt-in features. Perhaps the option space is a little smaller in export markets, but when you look at the combinatorial explosion of feature options you can pick for your average German car in Germany, it's just mindboggling. All that money that didn't go into the drive train (because all the parts of a high performance ICE drivetrain aren't that much different from those of, say, a Dacia), it went into maintaining an absolutely large zoo of upsell options.