Valotonin wrote:When I buy a car at some point in the next 2-3 years will it even be possible for me to buy something that is a purely mechanical machine?
I'd imagine you're way past that point already, depending on how literal you mean that - everything already has an ECU, and a bunch of other smaller embedded sensors and whatnot. A friend of mine's dad was a - not even a mechanic, but an auto electrician, (so he did mechanic stuff but pushed a bit more over to the side of working on the electrical stuff in cars). Anyway, he'd often come back from the garage at night ranting after yet another car he couldn't fix because of "little tronic boxes". This was in the early 90s, it's obviously come on bounds since then. Bunch of tiny computers speaking to each other down the CAN bus (literally, Car Area Network, it's not just one computer you're driving but a network of them). With a little $15 dongle you can listen in on the messages over bluetooth to your mobile phone, and they give you a whole scad of information. There are some great, scary videos out there on car hacking - something that's going to become much more prevalent in espionage, law enforcement, even crime - where the relatively insecure nature of all of this shows it's open for exploitation.