Does anyone proofread these?<p>"GM confirmed the price of the taillight to Car and Driver and explained the reason: each light has a microconductor in the housing that allows the individual lights to perform their respective animations."<p>Not sure what a 'microconductor' means, but any reasonable microcontroller that exists on the market for controlling something as simple as headlight automations shouldn't cost more than a few dollars, even in an automotive variant. Sounds more like price gouging to me.
Bill Gates wrote a book about how cheap computers were saving us so much money that we ought to let them do everything. Now we know why.<p>Automotive retail and repair is not a pretty business if you follow the money. The full dealership retail price of some of the plastic parts with no electronics in them can be over 95% markup. The logic is that because there are so many dealers and so many brands of almost identical cars, the honest dealers need to make money on repairs or starve, and cars are getting so reliable that they have to make so much money on so few repairs that you don't even want to know how much.