Active aerodynamics on autos has for a very long time. Jim Hall had manually activated wings and other devices on his Chaparral sports cars back in the 1960's. After a major failure of the moveable wing on one of them, the Can-Am sanctioning body outlawed moveable aerodynamic devices. Similar rules exist in nearly every racing organization for similar reasons. Of course, simply allowing the builders to install stronger hinges and other control devices would have mostly eliminated the failures. Even today, there are fixed wing failures on race cars and they cause big crashes if they happen in the wrong place.
One of the active aero devices I really liked on sports racing cars of the '60s & '70s was the flippers on the outer ends of the spoilers/wings. These were controlled by the rear suspension travel. Under heavy breaking, the rear moved up and so did the flippers which pushed the rear end back down. Hard acceleration produced the opposite effect - the flippers flattened out. Cornering caused the rear suspension of move differently on each side and that affected the flippers differently - the inside flipper moved up to help push that side of the car down. All without any input from the driver.
But, there is nothing to prohibit active aero on street cars and many have taken advantage of this. Some are as simple as wings or spoilers that pop up on the back of the car when it reaches a certain speed. Some times, the driver can elect to deploy the spoilers/wings at all speeds. Others are much more complex. And, that's part of the problem - active aero is complex and can have many failure modes. Most current street cars have that have active aero only balance the car front to rear. Splitting the rear wing and the front active components to adjust left and right as well as front to rear would be a real benefit to weekend racers and car control in general.
Active components on the rear of the car require equally active components on the front to keep the down force (I assume you want downforce unless you intend to build a flying car) balanced. And they can't afford to fail.
I think GM and Corvette should move to active aero on the Vette. They'd done about everything else they can do with the current platform.
