I can report the same good reliability experience with the engaged-by-default wing levelers which came as standard equipment on both of my 1960’s vintage Mooneys. In fact, in the < 170 kt speed range, I'd call them ideal. Extremely easy to use and transparent in what it was doing, one shed a substantial part of the hand-flying workload with zero reduction in situational awareness. While it could take input from VOR/LOC signals, what worked far better was to steer it with the heading bug on the HSI. Established on course, that automatically gave you the proper wind cut to track and made on/off transitions trivial. And you'll never find these models in the continuing and depressing reports of pitch trim runaway fatal crashes, because there was none.