Great points, Dirk. I think even the most libertarian and privacy-concerned among us would be hard-pressed not to admit the advantages of some of this technology. The ability to track a car that's been stolen, steer first responders to an emergency as well as diagnosing problems in real-time are all pretty hard to argue with. If they want to make it more attractive, they might consider an app that would allow you to share or not--having the ability to disable the data feed might help alleve the concerns of some detractors.

I had to laugh when you pointed out that many of our cars' functions are controlled electronically. As someone who learned to drive in the muscle-car cheap gas '60s (and a pretty fair former shade tree mechanic and hot-rodder), I was pretty sad when they started building cars with no room to work under the hood (and no way to recognize what was there, either). So I was surprised one day to hear a couple of my students in a class talking about modifying a car for street racing. I jumped into the conversation and asked what they were going to do--add headers, a cam, high-rise manifold?

The look they gave me was like the look on my kids' faces when I mention using a slide rule. As it turns out, they had a laptop and had bought an interface to the car's computer, and they had downloaded some apps that they could use to tweak the engine for more torque and horsepower!