Your post conveniently ignores the fact that over the last 20 years cars and trucks have become physical delivery vehicles for software. In fact, the complexity of the software running in any manufacturer's modern car dwarfs the complexity of the hardware in the car itself.
So, if you have a car manufactured any time in the last 25 years, you're running software that hasn't likely been patched in years, has a ton of unknown defects and bugs, and might kill you if you hit an edge case that wasn't tested before it was shipped to you.
I much prefer Tesla's ability to fix software defects remotely than driving a defective piece of software. For example, I had a 2009 Hyundai Genesis that worked great until I had about 75,000 miles on it, then it mysteriously started losing engine power and I had the entire computer reboot a couple times while I was driving. Imagine your entire instrument cluster going dark and losing engine, braking, and steering power while you're traveling 75 mph on the freeway. The Hyundai dealership said the only way I could get a software/firmware upgrade was by purchasing a $500 maps DVD and having them update my system manually, which takes several hours, for which I'd have to pay one of their trained technicians to do it. Fuck them.
I vowed after that to never buy a car again that can't receive OTA updates. Would you buy a smart phone that can never get security fixes or updates? Given the tech in our cars now, why would you buy a car that wouldn't either?
This is why I do not have a car that was manufactured any time in the last 25 years. You can't trust software, and you definitely can't trust software developers.
This is probably going to sound outlandish to the majority, but I take it a step further and don't trust any car (+driver), period. Including drivers with massive amounts of experience or skill (even the best have failed spectacularly).
So what do I do instead? I mostly cycle and ride where motorists don't drive and set the largest possible safety margins. I recognise this is not immediately practical for everyone but I'm fortunately set up in the right place with the right knowledge to achieve this.
So far this year, I've been in a car four times, a train twice and a plane twice. Musk is pushing for a world where everyone is dependent upon a form of low-occupancy heavy motorised transportation (including wanting to reinvent the train). Naturally, I recoil at this and so should more. More cars will never save the world.
We already live in that world (or country, at least). Your situation is an outlier, unfortunately. I'd personally rather have those cars be electric than burning fossil fuels, and if anyone can reinvent mass transit and make it available to people outside of major cities I'd happily take a train.
So you're trading off the theoretical unsafeness of software (how many car accidents have been caused by faulty software?) against the huge improvements in crash safety (engineered crumple zones, AEB, etc) in the past 25 years
So, if you have a car manufactured any time in the last 25 years, you're running software that hasn't likely been patched in years, has a ton of unknown defects and bugs, and might kill you if you hit an edge case that wasn't tested before it was shipped to you.
I much prefer Tesla's ability to fix software defects remotely than driving a defective piece of software. For example, I had a 2009 Hyundai Genesis that worked great until I had about 75,000 miles on it, then it mysteriously started losing engine power and I had the entire computer reboot a couple times while I was driving. Imagine your entire instrument cluster going dark and losing engine, braking, and steering power while you're traveling 75 mph on the freeway. The Hyundai dealership said the only way I could get a software/firmware upgrade was by purchasing a $500 maps DVD and having them update my system manually, which takes several hours, for which I'd have to pay one of their trained technicians to do it. Fuck them.
I vowed after that to never buy a car again that can't receive OTA updates. Would you buy a smart phone that can never get security fixes or updates? Given the tech in our cars now, why would you buy a car that wouldn't either?