[andygates]

"Cars these days are too complex" ... said everyone, at every stage in the history of motoring. We get comfortable with a certain level of complexity and after that, change is get-off-my-lawn bad. But it's a human thing, not a tech thing.

[dsfyu404ed]

There wasn't much to complain about when going from flathead to OHV, OHC and adding basic EFI and maybe forced induction because those things were relatively small and self-confined changes that created large benefits. Now they're using technology to tie subsystems together and fine tune the vehicle system as a whole. The problem with that is that it creates inter-dependency within the system. How are you supposed to adjust your power mirrors|seats if the wiring for the courtesy lights keeps blowing the shared fuse.

Unless a major breakthrough in drive-train technology comes along that can be taken advantage of we're in the long slow march of the optimizing process where you spend 90% of your resources to get that last 10% of performance.