People seem to be afraid of treating their people like idiots; when it comes to airplanes, you cannot be ambiguous when it comes to emergency / unexpected situations.

With cars, I've had the privilege of driving cars with automatic lights for a while now, I don't have to think about it anymore. On older cars, my dad used to fiddle with the wiring a bit and install an alarm if he turned the engine off or opened the door with the lights still on. That was just the one alarm though.