If you want to mass-produce housing, you have to get around two very big barriers:
1. Most of the market looks down on mass-produced housing thanks to its association with trailer parks and/or identical condos.
2. Housing is mostly produced locally. Shipping large homes would be extremely difficult and expensive.
> Also, cars have customers which will pay many multiples the normal price for new technology, and that market that lasted for a century.
Sure, but that's equally true for housing. There are plenty of people who will pay a significant premium for a "smart home" or houses with energy efficient built in. This doesn't make mass-manufacturing easier.
> Housing is mostly produced locally. Shipping large homes would be extremely difficult and expensive.
You don't need to ship the whole house in one piece. If you ship premanufactured panels (which is the common method), the price of shipping should be comparable to shipping the "ingredients" to the construction site.
The economies of scale that a manufacturer would get from cranking out hundreds of thousands of the same home a year are "real". There are a lot of reasons the market doesn't support such a business though.
The smarthome market is just not in the same league as cars when it comes to an subsidizing technological development. There is no Formula 1 for housing.
That's similar to cars. The economies of scale are there. You just need to sell 500,000 a year like a car manufacturer does.
Also, cars have customers which will pay many multiples the normal price for new technology, and that market that lasted for a century.