I'm struggling to understand your point. It's a different threat model; of course it will manifest differently, no? A mothership-style model seems much more vulnerable to every node being compromised than the decentralized vector Win95 botnets have to go through.

I could see arguing with the inevitability of the exploit -- Win95 botnets seemed much more inevitable to me than this Tesla mothership threat does. But it seems like you're arguing that they will both have similar impact if exploited. That doesn't make sense to me, because they're completely different threats, but it's possible I'm misunderstanding your argument in some way.

I would disagree, sure botnets can't be used for threatening life directly; but botnets have been proven to be quite effective in attacking services and do denial of services attacks. The one thing we can take from botnets is, vulnerable and unpatched devices can be infiltrated in high numbers and attackers can lie low until they decide to pull the trigger.

Imagine even 0.1% cars being controlled, the mayhem and loss of life that they can cause is just immense.

Power plants are also dangerous targets in a similar sense, but hopefully there is network separation for control services.