Almost every car company does something similar and has as long as they've had on board computers.
VW/Audi/Porche are all the same company and generally share the same electronics. A lot of gauges and features are considered "premium" so they just disable them for VW branded vehicles. There's also regional feature lockouts; IIRC North American VW's can't have their fog-lights and headlights on at the same time but you can enable it through VAGCOM.
Something like 40% of Canadians live below the 45th parallel. Journey sucks at geography, south Detroit would be Windsor Canada.
Its probably worth noting that Europeans get more powerful cars than we do here in the US. I drive a 02 Golf TDI and it was only available as a 1.9L 90hp front wheel drive. The base model in Europe has a bigger turbo and offers 4wd versions.
LineageOS and Grpahene OS exist for some androids. Lineage can be made very private and Graphene is the best for privacy out of the box.
There's another launcher that I'm forgetting the name of that will launch Epic and GoG games. Following that proton guide should make NTFS (windows) drives usable for anything in Linux though. I can boot games downloaded from "alternate sites" if I add them to steam as "non steam games" regardless of how the drive is mounted.
Its just a continued effort to obfuscate modern tech. They discontinued the program then got a rich rube (Tom DeLonge) to foot the bill.
The F-22 raptor was developed to be the most advanced stealth fighter known to man. Its only combat mission it will ever fly was against a balloon, and it missed the first shot.
Seems to me that the US has some kind of new tech that they just don't want to share so they're going hard with this new disclosure movement. Probably something like an unmanned version of the AEREON 26 hybrid airship. Essentially half-blimp half-jet, its close to neutrally buoyant so it could "tumble" through the air like what we've seen in the tic-tac video released by the Navy.
If you use this guide to mount the Windows drives you can run it and Linux side by side. It works just as good as Windows these days for 90% of games. You can add games downloaded from unofficial sites to Steam as a "Non-steam game" and it works. Installing Nvidia drivers on Mint is easier than Windows, there's a built in utility.
The US has a blend of public and private infrastructure. Cities like Chicago sold the rights to their parking to private companies. Red light and speeding cameras are also privatized. Some states have sold their turnpike system to non public entities. Busses are unreliable in most metro areas because bus systems don't turn a profit.
Amtrak, America's only passenger train system, operates nearly entirely on private tracks. Its nearly always as expensive or more for a train ticket than it would be to just fly. At that the system is unreliable with trains constantly having to wait hours for freight trains to pass because they have the right of way on private tracks.
Nearly all utilities (power, water, gas) are ran by for profit companies.
Americas "social safety net" reads like a punishment most of the time. Seniors living on social security eat cat food to get by. Politicians want work requirements on food assistance. Homelessness is at epidemic levels, in a more liberal area there are some depression era hoovervilles built. Conservative areas just buy bus tickets to the liberal areas.
I don't see that happening. The US puts large tariffs on imported cars to stifle competition. That's why if you look at Japanese cars in Japan or German cars in Germany they're often much cheaper and more powerful than their American counterparts.