Honda has Acura, Nissan has Infinity, Toyota has Lexus.
But all this is down to economy and emissions, someone up there mentioned the complex designs to keep emissions low with good fuel economy whilst maintaining the culture of expectation of increasing other figures like torque and 0-60, etc.
The problem is that we are now getting into another era in the design/manufacture process, if you all think back to the late eighties/early nineties, car used to be badly built, some manufacturers still have the stigma of bad builds in terms on electrics (fiat/pugs)/engines smoking (fords), built quality(fiat), etc, then in the mid nineties the "productivity revolution" happened, it happened so quickly that only industry experts and analysts coined the terms and realised it, it took nearly 10 years for most manufacturers to implement these ideas (productivity revolution) of documenting more, adhereing to minimum standard, following iso standard more closely, building for economy and profit, more emphasis on health and safety and use of machines to minimise human contact with the work... which in turn leads to less monday morning cars vs. friday afternoon cars, i.e variance in quality... which leads to the fact that when something goes wrong, or there is a design fault, it is present in a range or a batch of cars, as opposed to how it was in the 80's (hand build, human error factor).
Also, these new ideas are built around or on top existing (old) designs and systems, which is where the electronic failures may come about. When new cars are built or designed, it takes millions of pounds to do so. So it is cheaper to build cars around new physical designs and materials with better build quality than to completely redesign an electronic circuit that could detect the possibility of a mechanical failure (although they are designed like that), but this analogy isn't stretched far enough to accommodate possible failures in these complex new designs that may not be tested as creatively as customers would over a long period of times, i.e the tests are extreme and short lived (time contraint due to competition to get the next design out), but in reality these failures aren't designed into the electronic circuitry of the control systems enough. I think in the next ten years or so, when the 'internet of things' will happen (more fundamental parts will communicate with each other to monitor things better on mechanical machines). It's just a matter or times when the process of human thought (even collectively) will catch up with the complexity of the control systems in mechatronic devices, it's just that we haven't anticipated everything yet.
Where did I get all that from? I had a lecture on these issues last semester, it was very interesting, I can post the link to the slideshare if anyone is interested. I am curently 2nd year mechatronics and robotic systems student at Liverpool.
