I have an example of that. In the late 1980's early 90's read an fluff piece in Product Design News or some such about a team of engineers at GE that got an award for designing a washing machine tilt sensor. The article then gushed that the reason this was wonderful was the tilt sensor would allow GE to replace expensive metal washing machine drum bearings with inexpensive plastic ones.

Without a tilt sensor they needed to use metal bearing because an out of balance load would break plastic bearings. But now with the tilt sensor plastic ones could be used.