How well does it fail? Before I left Boston, I spoke with some other Extreme Blue interns about why anyone would ever want their car to talk to their phone. They spoke about all this wonderful, seamless interconnection that would make my life easier, but I remained skeptical. These days, I've been struggling to connect my Mac to my dad's PC using a USB interconnection cable with no luck. I think frustration is the more usual experience people end up having with technology products, so frankly I don't expect car+phone to work, or to be worth the inevitable aggravation.

On a related but disimilar note, here's a great Bruce Schneier piece on how the value of electronic security systems depends on their ability to fail gracefully. He refers such systems as "ductile", as opposed to "brittle". I thought it was very insightful.