[lazide]

For a given feature set.

Anyone that has had to deal with a carbureted engine, or old school hydraulic ‘computer’ based automatic transmission is never going to extol their reliability or ease of repair.

Those also are doing 1/10th of the work (for things like automatic engine tuning, wear adjustment, on the fly power band adjustment, altitude adjustment, anti-pollution adjustment, etc).

The reason why people complain about modern cars is because computers have made it exceptionally easy to add massive amounts of new (and poorly tested, in many cases) functionality.

And even the equivalent of DRM.

If if you used current tech to implement the old feature set, and spent even a little effort making it open instead of DRM-ish, it could be even simpler and more reliable. But no one is doing that. Because it’s more profitable using it ‘for evil’, as it were.