But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t HIGHLY engineered.
“Highly engineered” to me means lots and lots of engineering. The logical way to leasure such a thing would be the number of non-redundant engineering hours but into the thing. I sincerely doubt the Cassini probe is in the top 100 of single objects - sure, the “power grid” or “sewage system” are heavily engineered, and continue to be so, but none of those things are “objects.”
The most engineered object ever built might well have been the first atomic bomb. It is a single identifiable object, which had years upon years upon years of dedicated engineering, specifically orchestrated for the creation of that object. Even if you divide those hours in half between the Trinity bomb and Fat Man (the two implosion bombs, and hence more complex; Little Boy, a gun-type bomb, was simpler and thus no test was bothered with before using it) it’s way ahead of Cassini, that’s fr sure.
Maybe I missed something, but it looks like the first flywheel- and capacitor-based KERS systems came from track applications (Peugeot in the WEC, McLaren in F1, and Toyota in various domestic “stock” racing series).
Anyway, the fact that things are constantly being adopted from F1 for road use is irrelevant; we don’t know which F1 technologies of today will be on the road tomorrow.
Off the top of my head, carbonfibre chassis, ceramic brakes, various suspension designs, active suspension, manumatic/Tiptronic/flappy-paddle gearboxes, active aerodynamics and traction control all came to the road from F1. Granted, not all of those have made it into everyday road cars (though I suspect carbonfibre construction will eventually as costs come down).
If new inventions and innovations are first used on F1 cars and later applied to road cars, then it means road cars are more highly engineered, not less. The F1 cars are acting as testbeds for prototypes of these technologies before they are further refined, to the point where they are reliable enough for production cars.
In my field (space science), new technologies are usually first used on high-altitude balloons or sub-orbital rocket flights (sounding rockets) before they are used in satellites and deep-space probes. Nobody would ever say a sounding rocket experiment is more highly engineered than a satellite. Quite the opposite. You could even say that the sounding rocket experiment is part of the development process for a satellite.
p.s. This article says about the development cost for a new road car:
“It can be as much as $6 billion if it’s an all-new car on all-new platform with an all-new engine and an all-new transmission and nothing carrying over from the old model.”