Instead we got people like VW rigging their firmware to report emissions falsely so they could look better.

>"climate change"

Not really. Personal vehicles are responsible for such miniscule portion of co2 emissions it barely matters.

Emission regulations enjoy popular support because of city air quality, not climate change. Yes, people tolerate taxes on CO2 emitted by their vehicles (do you have that in the US BTW?) because it has a very beneficial side effect of also limiting particulates and NOx CO and such emissions that actually killed hundreds of people every year in major city centers. Also caused lifelong disability for many children(asthma).

You're using a broad definition of "computer". We've had these features for decades now, until recently the logic was handled by microcontrollers. It's not clear that the functionality requires computing devices also capable of data gathering, storage and upload.