Arduino and tachometer from 12V car battery gen

No No no, that is bad bad bad.

It is close to impossible to argue against taking protective measures except with your wallet and there is also a short and long term side to that argument going both ways.

Nevertheless I'm curious to see/understand the technical justification as to why additional protection is needed. Keeping in mind also that the built-in diodes have a forward voltage of 0.3V whereas whatever external diodes you add are likely to have a significantly higher forward drop.

There's also an application note from Atmel where they suggest to use (or abuse if you like) the protective diodes for a zero-cross mains detection (one mains phase connected to a digital input pin with only a a high series resistor). In this note they state that the protective diodes are good to 1mA.

So then why should we add additional protection?