I think car automation peaked at adaptive cruise control. It's a simple tractable problem that's generally well confined and improves the drivers ability to concentrate on other road risks.
Don't be too hard on Collin. Looking back on the threads it's fairly clear he's been the victim of a social engineering attack on an overworked maintainer. People were pressuring him to hand over maintainership while expressing disappointment at the slow pace of development. The off-list contact by Jia must have seemed like a helpful enthusiastic solution to a burnt out developer.
Well the account is focused on one particular project which makes sense if you expect to get burned at some point and don't want all your other exploits to be detected. It looks like there was a second sock puppet account involved in the original attack vector support code.
We should certainly audit other projects for similar changes from other psudoanonymous accounts.
I just want to buy home automation gadgets that don't need a bloody cloud account to work.