Does too much technology make a car artificial?

Two trends are interacting in the car world right now, and I'm fascinated by the questions being raised as a result. First, people are keeping their cars longer. At the same time, new cars are more like mobile computers than the purely mechanical machines most people are familiar with—Ars boss Ken Fisher told me once that cars would be the first properly successful wearable device, and I think he's being proved right. This often results in a degree of culture shock when people used to the old way of doing things get exposed to a new car, particularly if they didn't see anything wrong with the status quo.

Computers are in control of everything, modulating our control inputs and interpreting our intent. For example, between your foot and the pedals of a hybrid are complex software routines that decide how to juggle internal combustion engines and conventional brakes with electric motor-generator units when it comes to stopping and going. Cheap, rugged, and powerful electronics can let an engineer solve a suspension or engine problem with some code instead of mechanical fix. Is that a good thing, or is the solution an artificial one?

Americans are spending more time away from car showrooms than in the past. I'm one of them; my newest car is a 2005 Saab 9-2x Aero (one of the finest examples of badge engineering out there), which shares a garage—or would if I had one—with a 19-year old Mazda Miata. I doubt there's a single defining reason for this trend, more like an interplay between better reliability, less cheap credit, some degree of economic uncertainty, and probably a few other factors I haven't thought of.

Meanwhile, cars have been starting to change quite dramatically as a result of the technology boom. The transformation from analog to digital actually started quite a while ago. We made computers responsible for looking after the engine, the brakes, and the gearbox, then we leveraged those computers to assist drivers. Traction control. Stability control. Cruise control. All of these will be familiar to you even if you last drove a new car in the mid-2000s.

Then electronics took over the throttle and the steering, and now you can reprogram a car's mood with the scroll of a jog-wheel. Set a car to "Sport" mode and suddenly the gas pedal remaps; now you get 100 percent throttle when the pedal is only 50 percent through its travel. Tweak a control and now the steering firms up. It means that GM can build aggressive 650 horsepower Corvettes that are friendly enough not to kill the car's traditional audience of older people who like a gentle cruise. It's not just the feel of the ride, either; we can even augment a car's engine note with speakers that cancel out unpleasant harmonics.