And people have spent years learning how to check facebook.

The problem with this pitch is that it doesn't understand the distinction.

By a lot of people's standards, I am a scientist (just not a domain scientist). I spend my life understanding how things work and figuring out ways to further our understanding of those. It is great. If you ask me about how a computer works, I can talk for hours. Physical phenomena? Minutes. Biology? I can make a crude joke

As for a car? I vaguely understand the principles of a combustion engine, but I couldn't for the life of me make one. My understanding is "You get gas into the engine. You light it with a spark plug. It bursts into flames which moves a piston which moves a crank which moves a bunch of gears and eventually moves wheels". I don't know anything beyond that

Hell, another good example is in the realm of video games. Kerbal Space Program is awesome and does a great job of making people remember why they learned physics. But engines are a black box for the vast majority of us and you genuinely don't need to understand how the fuel gets to the thruster or what happens. It is just a black box where fuel goes in one end and fire comes out the other, with fire generating delta V.

And same here. Most people don't need to know WHY an apple falls. They just have to know that stuff will fall. Whereas the physicists and funky table makers DO have to understand why the apple falls and how it can be stopped.

And that’s just learning how to use the car. We’re talking about building one.

I think the car analogy kind of falls apart at this point. Using a computer and writing programs for a computer are both interacting with software. Take spreadsheets, for example: is making a spreadsheet analogous to building a car or to driving one? What about drag-and-drop visual programming?

people don't spend more that a few minutes learning the interface of a car, everything else is learning how not to die or kill other people with it.

Maybe if you drive an automatic. It took me a long time to be comfortable enough with shifting gears, operating turn signals and what not to leave enough attention for the actual traffic around me.

True, I still can't do manual quite right and it certainly adds danger to my trips. But my point was that people put time into learning how to use their cars because they're killing machines, most computers aren't, but the ones that are usually require some sort of formal training and certification, just like cars.