Heh your oddly specific example in point 1 makes me smile. I'll just add "can it handle a voltage spike up to 60V for a second or two in the event of a load dump?" to the list of questions hidden in "can your hardware run on 12V?"

Definitely. Along with "How does it handle reverse polarity", or "will alternator noise affect anything", and a couple dozen other factors that all explode out of an innocently asked "Does it run on 12VDC".