Peak Technology Some time ago I had car trouble. My Mazda suddenly wouldn’t go beyond second gear, and because I live an hour’s drive from the city it was a big problem. So I visited my local garage, who passed me on to an automatic transmission specialist. He diagnosed that there was nothing actually wrong with the gearbox. Instead the sensor was malfunctioning, giving a faulty signal, and the car had gone into “limp-home mode”. Then he laughed and said, “Yeah these days we make most of our money fixing sensors. We hardly working on actual transmission systems.” Limp-home mode. Great. I started brooding on how in my younger years there was no limp-home mode in my old Austin A35. You could crank start it if the battery died, and it could be worked on and parts replaced with a socket set and a jack in the backyard. You didn’t have to have expensive, fragile, electronic systems replaced, and it didn’t talk to you. Sure, someone might be able to use a bent coat-han...