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They definitely need a senior executive to stand up and say, "The Customer wants us to be transparent in billing, fix that now."

Then they need to start a team dedicated to finding a good way to let customers halt spending at a given limit with minimal impact on their operations.

They already win on UX (okay, okay, it's an opinion ffs), but unlimited liability makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Those two actions would go a long ways towards demonstrating good faith in that area.

If it would cost too much, maybe they could present it as an easy way to cut expenses at the same time that they introduce a small price increase. This is a common and long-standing complaint/feature request.

Well, safety features also benefit the people who ride in your car with you, and those people weren't necessarily involved in your purchasing decision.

There's a happy medium somewhere. In an ideal world, we would regulate what is really important and ignore what isn't, but we're still figuring things out.

Personally, I like the idea of universal sunsets to deal with the difficulty of repealing old regulations. Codes could be reviewed on an N-year basis, with old rules requiring a cost/benefit analysis and 'yes' vote to renew. But in practice, those kinds of processes seem to end up with people rubber-stamping "last year++" revisions, like with the USA's defense re-authorization acts.

Unfortunately, modern regulations forbid manufacturers from easily making a "dumb car". For example, backup cameras are required in new cars.

It's the same deal with avoiding wire insulation that rodents enjoy eating. Your only option is to buy a car from before 2000-ish.

I'd actually like to find a DIY subculture of taking old car frames and swapping in newer features a bit at a time. People do it with electric motors, but it still seems hard to get decent range/mileage/etc on a DIY EV project.