It’s an easy idea to grasp (few people intentionally trash their cars), but fairly difficult to master. It’s pretty obvious that if you drive like a tw*t that you’ll wear components out fairly quickly, but not every stress that you put the car under provides sufficient physical/aural feedback to the driver to help prevent unnecessary wear.

So rig a car with sensors that measure stress on key joints, the amount of jolting and sway that the car is subjected to, the amount of traction available and so on. In short, give it a nervous system.

Now link the nervous system to the cars audio system and make it “groan”, “ouch” and “arrgh” whenever you’re hurting it. Make the level of response appropriate to the level of ‘pain’ the car is being subjected to. Also tie the response to the part of the car that’s suffering:

“Jeez, will you learn to corner? My drive shaft is aching something rotten.”

Use the system to help you learn to minimise unnecessary stress on the car. Eventually, the money saved from cheaper servicing might just help you break even on the cost of this system.

Or, if despite your best efforts you still get stung at the next service, use it to get your own back on the car.

“Kitt, how ya feeling today buddy?”

“Michael, I really wish you’d be more gentle with my big end.”