Are you seriously under the impression most of the computers in a modern car have anything to do with safety?
My car has a full blown ECU for my seat memory. And a second one for the passenger seat memory. Another one for my soft close trunk. One for my HUD. One for my gauge cluster. One that exists entire for... playing fake engine sounds. One for the head unit, which is a separate ECU from the one for the amplifier, which is in turn separate from the DVD changer ECU. One climate control... but only in the rear! Front gets a separate ECU for AC. One for interior accent lighting (not lighting your dashboard, I mean dim lights around your door handle).
And if you think ECU is a stretch here, these are individually versioned ECUs all residing on a shared bus. If my amplifier ECU dies, the optical fiber ring it's connected to might go down. Things connected to that bus include 911 emergency dialing the headunit's RTC...
Climate control is a largely overcomplicated system in many cars, using everything from humidity sensors to skin temp scans and then refusing to work when any one part stops working
Adaptive suspensions have left entire generations of vehicles pretty much unusable as they slowly fail and essentially "total" perfectly good cars
Even if they're wrong on one or two counts, the point is clear enough...
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Also anyone who knows cars knows when ECU is referring to an Electronic Control Unit from context...
It's been a few decades since anyone really got confused by that one.
The ECU in charge of the engine in this car is called the "Digital Motor Electronics" ECU or DME.
They are proper ECUs with a lot more complexity than a single MCU. Every single one is a node interconnected with separate firmware versions that need to sync up in certain ways.
The DME in charge of the engine is treated with exactly the same as the ECU in charge of accent lighting when it comes to manufacturer tooling, the tooling simply enumerates over these ECUs and provides an identical interface to them.
My car has a full blown ECU for my seat memory. And a second one for the passenger seat memory. Another one for my soft close trunk. One for my HUD. One for my gauge cluster. One that exists entire for... playing fake engine sounds. One for the head unit, which is a separate ECU from the one for the amplifier, which is in turn separate from the DVD changer ECU. One climate control... but only in the rear! Front gets a separate ECU for AC. One for interior accent lighting (not lighting your dashboard, I mean dim lights around your door handle).
And if you think ECU is a stretch here, these are individually versioned ECUs all residing on a shared bus. If my amplifier ECU dies, the optical fiber ring it's connected to might go down. Things connected to that bus include 911 emergency dialing the headunit's RTC...