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Following in from wnut's points one might observe that any car that can be stolen from outside a house without the need for a key or some sort of in car activation device might be considered to be too clever for their own good.
Or, as my elder daughter related this evening, her husband was meeting up with someone and heading off to a meeting and she went along to drop him off.
Keyless entry and push button start, he drove there, she drove back. He still had the fob in his pocket. The car had not been stopped when they swapped over.
There was a spare key (and a spare car) at home. However she had been intending to stop for fuel on the way home but changed her mind. Just as well because absent the fob she would have been stranded at a fuel station, blocking a pump and with a baby in the car.
Which story, no doubt not uncommon these days, might suggest that a large number of not very special cars on the roads are too clever for our own good let alone theirs!
And all of the electric wizardry, endemic from around 10 years ago in even relatively modest vehicles, is very likely to make something with a body construction capable of lasting around 20 years with average treatment fall foul of engine and other electronics obsolescence (based on cost of spares) well before their main component design life is achieved.
So, for example, all of the "carbon" investment in the metal quality and the additional weight and safety components has to be written off because a few bits of electronics, designed to reduce "carbon emissions" allegedly, become obsolete or expensive much earlier in their shorter life cycle.
How wasteful can "clever" become?
But I think I am digressing from the central concept of Mike's original question.
At the risk of drifting off into "Glorious Failures (Commercial)", how about the Maybach of recent times?
I might also offer the Fisker that was around, briefly in a few well healed locations, a few years ago. But that was probably more a commercial problem then too clever engineering.
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