Unfortunately it only had older still photos and videos, nothing from the last dive. Looks like they had the camera configured to send the data to the onboard computers and those were smashed into a soild mass, of which, no data was able to be recovered from.

Exactly

For sure, I agree the phone integration is a better solution and could easily take the place of any connection requirements for the vehicle, was just providing insight into why any consumer might justify it.

Why the manufacturers push it would be a totally different answer…

Do you want realtime traffic updates, live charger status, streaming entertainment, software updates, emergency crash response, Wi-Fi hotspot, remote alarm status and controls, remote telematics? If yes to any of those, then you have your answer.

Of course, simply having a connection opens it up for privacy abuses, just like a smartphone, there are number of reasons why consumers would want a connected vehicle.

Who pays if you get myocarditis from COVID?

You can make it work on 120V, it just uses ~20-30% more energy due to the overhead of running all the vehicle systems for so much longer while charging.

Here is a video demonstrating the lidar killing pixels in a phone camera sensor.

They also tried cameras on other vehicles but those were not affected, only the cellphone aimed directly at the lidar suffered damage.