In the end when most vehicles are electric, I wonder if manufacturers will continue making niche "mechanical" cars for motoring enthusiasts, not unlike how mechanical watches survive to this day even with digital and more accurate ways to keep time.
I often think about it too. The car seems to be much more complex than a mechanical watch. The watch can perform very well without regular maintenance but car cannot. And the latter can be very dirty, with all the oil, gasoline, dirt, smell, etc. Cars run on much much more harsh conditions with lots of exposed parts , one of whose failure can lead to the car being useless. Whereas for the watch basically everything is in an enclosure. It can go for decades without the need of opening.
Looks to me as though mechanical watches are doing better than surviving; they seem to be flourishing. Especially some of the more ridiculously expensive ones that have elaborations and complications such as tourbillions, etc.
Although the cryptocurrecny shakeout seems to have dulled the high-end watch market somewhat.
Of course they will. These threads are all so car-centric. Motorcycles are still a popular option, for the very reason you ponder. And most of them are still manual.
An alternative would be a system like M-Pesa. It's based on your personal phone line using the SIM toolkit, though there's also an app. Transactions can only be carried out on the phone with the SIM installed though.
It's great for personal transfers, and many in Kenya already use it to pay sex workers (usually cam girls selling nudes).
Corporates can have numbers (called paybill) where payments are made, though they are vulnerable to government interference. Safaricom (the network carrier running the M-Pesa platform) has already been ordered to shut down accounts belonging to betting firms. But for personal transactions, regulation is hard since nobody can tell why you sent a certain person money.
M-Pesa has never quite gained traction outside Kenya though.
