Also: When your phone or computer is hacked, most people think "Wow, the device is flawed." But when your car gets stolen, most people think "Wow, we should stop those criminals." Apple/Google are incentivized to give a damn about security because incidents reflects poorly on their products. We need to start making thefts via security exploits reflect poorly on the car manufacturers and their products.

Economic incentives.

People will buy a $150,000 SUV for 50k and they can still make money. Phones have less incentive and Apple is going to be better at bricking the phones than carmakers will.

Apple and Google don't sell insecure cheap phones, but lots of other manufacturers do.

I suppose organized crime doesn't systematically take advantage of that because cheap phones are cheap, and the people who own them are poor. You don't get that much benefit from pwning them.

Alternatively, maybe organized crime does take advantage of them but we haven't heard about it. They could have a giant botnet of them for all we know.

a couple of years ago it wasn’t uncommon for victims of phone theft in the UK to end up flooded with iCloud phishing messages to try gain access to their iCloud account and unblock the device so it wasn’t totally worthless for resale.

I still see a lot of iCloud phishing messages, but also understand that Apple has made this vector harder.