Less of that seems to me to be a problem with over-regulation than a problem with current financing games and not competing with each other as much on price, because the average car buyer is expected to buy a car a third of the cost of their house mortgage for a third of the term because that it is what banks want and what banks give a generous cut back to dealerships and sometimes to manufacturers to help entrench it as the way to sell cars.

GM alone has spent most of its history waffling between whether it wants to be a large bank itself or not. (The "GMAC" division has threads back to 1911, was spun out in the '00s as "Ally Bank", has been mostly repurchased with others to reform a larger "GM Financial" starting in the 2010s.)

The other part of it is that marginal costs are weird in the modern software-defined world. Motorized windows are cheaper today than the plastics and mechanical parts of roll up windows. Similar for the mechanics of manual mirrors. An electric motor tuned precisely for that mirror is fewer parts than a manual mirror. A camera system is sometimes even cheaper than mirrors today, which is wild.