One car gets a feature that is popular and next year all similar cars have that feature. Good design is spread across "species" suddenly in a manner that would disrupt phylogenetic trees.
Couldn't what you are calling "similar" in cars correlate to "species" in life forms? Hence no spreading across species?
No. I was really only querying the logic of the analogy. What constitutes "similar" and "popular" in nature, and does that translate to "sudden horizontal transfer across species"?