Software in Japanese cars is terrible from European point of view, yet people are buying them because of the hardware (reliable engines).
And anyway, Toyota's most innovative and market-making vehicles, like the Prius: software plays a pretty big role no? I don't think you can reduce a complex product like this, but I'm not wrong: a car with great user-facing software is pretty exciting to consumers. The Apple Car would probably be pretty successful, the Tesla has pretty innovative software that differentiates it from other EVs, the deployment and preferences for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto enabled cars... it can be true that someone buys something despite the software being bad, but that's not where the trend is going.
Because Honda also exists. I kid, I kid..
A lot of Americans buy American cars simply because they're loyal to American brands, or European cars because they want their neighbors to be jealous of their ability to buy such overpriced transportation. I think software is low on the list.
There was a meme a while ago where thing thing people used to want out of their car's entertainment system was satellite navigation and fancy everything, whereas the thing people want now is a dumb standard plug to connect their phone to the car's speakers.
So is software in European and American cars. Testing is expensive. (the overall quality of software has gone downhill in the latest years)
How did you manage before smartphones and even email/text for meeting people and generally coordinating activities generally? People managed.
I guess that could change at some point but would guess that there would be a lot of pushback to Operating this vehicle requires a working smartphone especially given there's no cellular access in a lot of places.