The difference being, there's a mandatory "new user training" before you're allowed to operate a car. Take something like a riding lawn mower that doesn't require new user training, and you'd better believe manufacturers worry about things like "does the user know that letting off the brake means the mower will accelerate to full speed instantly?" You end up with people who know how to operate a riding lawn mower and those who don't, and it explains why many new mowers come with car-like accelerator and brake pedals (with "cruise control" for the classic crowd), and also why mowers will disconnect the battery if the operator isn't sitting in the seat.
If a new computer required mandatory training and a license to operate, these issues wouldn't be nearly as common. Besides, how many people are absolutely flummoxed by a manual transmission?
I don't know about that. It seems like the complexity of operating a car (at least in terms of "# of things you need to know about") is pretty similar to that of a computer (at least on Linux/Mac systems; Windows is needlessly complicated for the non-tech-savvy user imo).
In a car the things you HAVE to understand are the shifter, (P/D/N), the interplay between gas/brake/coasting (which is more complex than it sounds; just ask any new driver), the array of necessary controls for auxiliary devices (headlights, windshield wipers, side-view mirror controls, etc). EDIT: forgot the emergency brake, and all the rules/mechanics of the road (stop signs, parking on a hill, left turns, right turns, etc etc etc etc)
For a computer, for most people's day-to-day usage, the only things you really need to understand are: logging in to the computer, the browser, Google, and the URL bar (technically optional, as many people use Google directly for everything). I understand that, complexity-wise, each of these don't match up one-to-one with the car example, but the fact remains that with very little effort, and almost no "under-the-hood" understanding, you can become what passes for "savvy" these days.
Anecdotally, my dad has always been extremely non-tech-savvy; He had _years_ of being set in his cargo cult usage of his computer (in which he didn't really distinguish between having a browser open and being on his att yahoo homepage, having a window minimized and having it closed, logging into yahoo and logging into the computer, etc). I was able to explain to him the 3 or 4 pieces that fit together using a simple example (e.g. "websites are places you go, the browser is the vehicle that gets you there", etc). He still doesn't necessarily understand anything even marginally under-the-hood; But he understands the operation of a computer (for his purposes) pretty solidly, and no longer has the issue of being helpless when the situation he encounters deviates slightly from what he's used to (i.e. opening the browser and not being logged in to yahoo, for whatever reason).
I think you're glossing over things. How to use a mouse. The difference between moving your mouse cursor and focusing a text field. How to double click. (most new mouse users have trouble with this) How to turn the machine on and off. Clipboard. I don't have much experience with non-Windows OSes, so I won't comment on that. But everything inside a computer is necessarily more abstract than a door handle, since it doesn't physically exist. IMO that makes it harder to understand necessarily.
