I have a lot of thoughts about this comment, but here are my two cents.
> There's a market for budget and privacy oriented customers that all carmakers seem to have ignored for two decades now. Give us a simple car with no GPS navigation, ass warmers, tire pressure sensors, telemetry, backup cameras, USB chargers, proximity detectors, traction control, keyless entry, remote climate control, etc.
I feel like you're vastly overestimating the market size. Most non-tech people don't care about their privacy on their phone, their laptop or their TV. Most people don‘t even know that their car actually has the hardware to track them, why would they care about their privacy in their car?
> I understand the re-engineering is a cost. But when you're simply removing existing features, this should be a fairly negligible one.
I would not expect that to be fairly simple re-engineering. Many assistive technologies are mandatory in new vehicles (at least in some regions like the EU) such as automatic emergency calls, etc. Those are not standalone systems but they have many dependencies on sensors, etc. With the supply chains of traditional automakers, chances are the components necessary to integrate one mandatory system aren't even from the same supplier. This makes cherry picking features extremely hard if not impossible.
> these carmakers have decided to throw up their hands and shut down production or pile up unfinished inventory waiting on chips. It makes precisely zero sense.
I don't think it's coincidental that they decide to shut down a plant in Germany (besides the fact that Opel is originally German). In Germany we have something called "Kurzarbeitergeld" which is a support companies in trouble can receive in certain situations to support their employees. Employees continue to work a fraction of the time (50% Kurzarbeit basically means you only work half of your weekly hours, 100% Kurarbeit means you don't work at all for a certain period). The money the employees receive is largely paid for by the Government (the taxpayer).
Usually Kurarbeit comes with a very strict set of rules, but thanks to covid those rules have been loosened a bit and especially carmakers (VW and BMW) take advantage of it (BMW for example sent many of their workers into Kurzarbeit but decided to pay billions of dividends to the Quandt family). So I suspect it was cheapest to shut down the Germany plant.