Agreed, and safety regulators have likewise made a lot of safety features mandatory to compensate for the ineptitude of the average American driver. This is what we get for having a car-addicted culture. If you take away an American’s ability to drive (because they aren’t as good as the typical German driver), it becomes very difficult to get through life unless they live in a city with decent public transit. And so as much as we would like to require US drivers to be excellent, we can’t do that. So instead, we get extra safety features baked into the car itself to try to lower our fatality rate.
For safety-related controls, I agree that there should be some mandatory standardization. I made that same point in the recent thread on a runaway Honda Pilot:
For things that aren’t safety-related, I’m fine with letting the marketplace drive the design decisions.
I don’t know whether there’s enough data (yet) to say whether cars with things like lane-assist reduce accident rates. But if they are shown to be beneficial, they might become mandatory. Electronic stability control provides an instructive example: it was available on more and more cars sold in the US for a couple of decades before the NHTSA made it mandatory for 2012 model year.