Leaving safety critical functionality to chance is bad engineering, it's not some ubermensch societal design or whatever you're going for here.

Existence proof: Every time you see a car driving at dusk (or later) without lights on is an instance of this technology failing.

Beyond that, a significant percentage of all drivers cannot or will not manage high beams correctly.

That's not the technology failing, that's the users failing. Technological failure would imply that manually turning your lights on and off somehow breaks them or renders them otherwise nonfunctional, or the lever/switch itself breaks.

If someone got in a car and tried to put it in drive without starting it, would that be a technological failure of ignition switches?

You are correct that I was a bit sloppy with terminology, but the point is it is not a user failure, but a failure in design. If your users consistently fail to execute an action with your product correctly, it is a failure of the product, not the user. You can mitigate sometimes with training, but if a better design is available, that's usually the best course.