[captainslug]

It's really not complicated.
The people that the industry has been relying upon to design most of the cars made in the past 20 years are industrial design students with no formal training in practical engineering. In effect they are nothing more than glorified conceptual artists, so it's no surprise that the designs they have come up with have nothing to do with improving anything tangible. They are only there for satisfying the needs of a focus group positive result that makes the marketing department and management happy with potential sales figures.

R&D is primarily a sector used to shoe-horn in gimmicky features added in successions that give the marketing department an extra bullet point to add to the brochures of each successive model year.

The bulk of the "advancements" that the automotive industry has added to their product lines in the past 20 years are nothing more than creature comforts like iPod docks, GPS, OnStar, and so forth.
It stopped being about the car itself and instead became more about how many gizmos they could cram into the interior.