What if carmaking went the way of consumer electronics?

CARS AREN’T what they used to be. This is not a petrolhead’s lament. It is a statement of technological fact. These days even automobiles powered by a growling V8 engine contain a few kilometres of electrical wires, up from a few hundred metres in the 1990s, plus a thousand semiconductor chips and millions of lines of computer code to control everything from locks and antilock brakes to infotainment. And that is before you get to the…