The analogy is definitely a bit outdated now, what with Windows 8 then 10 then 11 getting aggressively less user-friendly each year.
The Takata airbags that inflated at random, killing 26 people, seem similarly harmful (if to a far smaller number of people), but that's an unintentional defect. Unlike the recent Windows 11 screw-tightening, Takata responded by recalling the product, not making it explode more frequently.
I've ridden in people's cars that are still displaying "agree to the terms of service"; I think a number of cars are starting to become far too much like computers.
But now that we've trained users that they'll need to click accept on the screen, we can sneak any conditions we want in there about how we collect and use their data...
Sadly, the most reliable signal american tech companies send is that they are primarily concerned with building a surveillance state. Whether this is for the US government or just their own fiefdoms (franchulates?) seems to vary a lot both within and between them, but neither prospect is particularly appealing to me as a prospective customer and/or target
Sagacious point. With emphasising. This is how non-European web business look to everyone.
This bit of libel needs to be put to bed. The Pinto did not have a greater propensity to explode than other "in-class" cars and arguably had a better safety record than Beetles or Corollas of the time. Nader made himself a nice career of this libel, but it does not make it true. Of course, other cars didn't have a "memo" but that's beside the point.
The 'crime' of the pinto was not that it was an unsafe car (it wasn't), it was that it could have been safer with a minimal (even by my standards, and I'm on the record as being opposed to mandatory backup cameras) increase in cost - that was why it grew the reputation, it was pure cost engineering (aka, cheapness - on the same level as the ignition switch failure issue GM had in the 2000's).
People died, a fair number of them - because Ford didn't want to spend an additional amount of money - less than 50USD in today's money - on a car that retailed for 15,000USD in todays money.
Just give it a couple of years.
I don't have that rosy 50's Chevy picture, it's more like a luxury coupe with a tighly locked hood. Sleek, desirable, you pay through the nose for every upgrade, and don't attempt to fix it yourself.
... that someone occassionally decides to wrap with a shiny covering to make it look like a luxury SUV. The covering sometimes peels off when travelling on the highway.
I didn't have it crap on me ever, since about two years, by choice of a so called 'rolling' gamer distro.
Looks very nice and comfy to me with KDE Plasma, and its Breeze (light) style, which is "automagically" applied to apps written for other toolkits/DEs like GTK/Gnome. Everything of what I do(mostly just browsing, some LibreOffice, remoting into other systems) is running ultrasmooth without lag, or stuttering, while almost always some music plays via YT in the background, without resorting to solutions which would pipe that via yt-dlp into mpv. It isn't necessary for me. On obsolete systems with Kaby Lake Core i5/7t :-) The only thing which could be called special or unusual about them, is that they have 32GB RAM. That may help, too. Oh, and the BIOS/UEFI/Firmware, from Lenovo.
Just don't buy crap.
That's a city-driver, never-gonna-see-mud truck owner thing.
Roads? In my daily computing I don't use roads. I just shift between portals (IRC/Bitlbee, Gopher, Gemini, AWK/TCL/Lisp, SLRN+mbsync+msmtp...)