Without actually knowing how much constructing the physical buttons cost, I would guess that the real savings are in process optimization - if all you have for the interface is a screen, then you don’t need to have the interface design done before constructing the car - you can parallelize these tasks.

Insufficient as far as justifications go, but understandably lucrative.

Anything Turing-complete is a powerful tool, but the reason people are reacting negatively is because of how much of the wrong tool it is.

• Does an excel-based solution offer adequate runtime performance? No
• Does an excel-based solution offer adequate write concurrency? No
• Does an excel-based solution offer appropriate data durability guarantees? No

Basically the only saving grace of Excel-based solutions is that they are built in tools that finance workers comprehend, and that is quite simply not enough. To base systems at this scale on Excel is criminally negligent.