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The safety features are worth millions of crashes prevented and thousands of lives saved, making them remarkably cost-effective.
Capping the luxury features and size of passenger vehicles would do a lot more to bring down costs than removing safety features.
Put yourself in the shoes of one of the far-too-many Americans that have accidentally killed a child because they could not see them, regardless of whether they were driving an F-250 or a Fiat 500. This is a safety problem we faced and addressed with regulation. This is a good thing. The second-order effects are not the fault of the regulators trying to make cars safer, that falls squarely on the auto companies who would have done that regardless of regulation.
This is where you’re losing me. The second-order effects are within the purview of those regulators and should have been addressed in-hand with the mandate.
Why would the automakers be willing to comply with safety regulation but disregard telemetry regulation?
Because it’s hard enough to get regulation passed, and telemetry is completely unrelated to backup cameras.
From an engineering perspective, tying the backup camera to the CAN (and by extension, telemetry units) dramatically increases the possible modalities of failure.
The two are absolutely connected.