Yeah, historically that's how it worked, fewer features meant less money. The difficult part today is, the cheapest products are being subsidized with these "smart" features. For cars, as well as most other products, they are able to charge less because they can harvest your data, or lock you into their repair shops, or show you ads. We're now at the point where it costs more to have a bare bones device, and it's cheaper to sell your soul to the company.

And unfortunately, buying second hand doesn't get you out of it. Just like how digital purchases can't be re-sold or traded, "smart" cars can be remotely locked down if they determine it's been resold.

This twitter post used to be a story of a person who resold a tesla, only to have Tesla remotely downgrade the battery capacity because they determined they made a mistake when servicing a previous owner.