Hell, if somebody made something new like a base
model 90s Civic into a $15k EV without extra
luxury nonsense I don’t actually need
They could strip all that stuff out, but it wouldn't really reduce the cost of the car by as much as we want it to.
The cost of much of the "luxury nonsense" like power windows and heated seats is heavily amortized since the tooling etc. is shared with the more expensive vehicles, and the actual material costs are low.
Think about it; heated seats are just some simple heating coils. You can get something functionally equivalent that plugs into your cigarette lighter adapter for like $10 from Amazon. It ain't adding that much to the cost of your car.
I sometimes think about power locks. I usually drive alone, and only lock/unlock the driver door. I had no problems flipping the little lock switch, and using the key outside was no problem because it’s right next to the door handle I’m going to use anyway.
Electrifying the locks led to the idea of RF transmitters as a secondary switch. Now there’s hardware for that, and a radio receiver. Gotta make it flash the lights, so that’s another relay and a wiring harness to the lighting system. Gotta beep the horn too, more wires. Maybe make it so you can hold the button to crack the power windows on a hot day; it’s just wire.
Fast forward 30 years, now everything talks to everything and I’d argue they don’t want to have to maintain a bunch of different firmware configurations to support fine-grained dealership options.
Not only that, but there's a cost to variable manufacturing. It's easy to build thousands of the same thing. It's harder (read: more expensive) to build a thousand of one thing, and another thousand of a slight variation of that thing and yet another thousand of another variation...
The cost of much of the "luxury nonsense" like power windows and heated seats is heavily amortized since the tooling etc. is shared with the more expensive vehicles, and the actual material costs are low.
Think about it; heated seats are just some simple heating coils. You can get something functionally equivalent that plugs into your cigarette lighter adapter for like $10 from Amazon. It ain't adding that much to the cost of your car.