I truly don’t understand how in 2023 with all the digitalization we have cars with backup cameras from at best a 2015 mid range smartphone. What’s preventing a manufacturer like bmw for an example from putting a high end sony sensor like the one on the iPhone 15 into their camera modules?
Yep this is right. And it stacks even further: they sell the same model for years.
So, think of a person with a 3-year-old car. That’s pretty new. But maybe that model launched 5 years before that, and it was designed ~3 years before launch! (The average age of cars on the road today is 12.5 years).
So your “new” car was actually designed maybe 11 years ago, aka 2012~2013! That’s like when smartphone cameras were just starting to get very good.
Of course, this isn’t always the case. But unless you’re regularly driving different new cars, it’s easy to lose perspective on how old the hardware actually is.