There's a difference between "not needing to" and "explicitly discouraged from", and while I think computers should be designed for the former, the latter is what I find more troubling.
I dunno. If my car were sealed that would be okay with me as long as this development were coincident with less maintenance or lower cost. There's not likely to be many user serviceable parts of an electric car.
If you are a computer person there is more and more diversity of cheap hackable stuff out there today than ever before. The enthusiast market and the general market are not the same and are likely to keep diverging. Same has happened with cars.
