Maybe not electronics, but I beg the technicality of "etc", and there is a pretty good cycling link:
I'm also nostalgic for one of the most unreliable cars ever made, the Citroen SM, a 16ft long grand tourer which had a Maserati V6 motor cut down from the exemplary V8 (I had several of those, and they lasted and lasted) so tightly into so small a space that there was no adjustment on the valve timing mechanism. But when it was new it was the most comfortable touring car ever made, capable of crossing Europe from London to Nardo in the boot of Italy in less than a day without stressing either driver or passengers, at near 100mph averages; you couldn't do that in a Porsche and stand on your feet at the end, or hear anything except bzzzzzz; as for a Ferrari, you'd arrive three days later on a tow truck, and in a Mercedes those days you'd be dead, caught out by the swing axle rear end, and even my next favourite tourer, the Jensen Interceptor, with 7.2 litres of Chrysler engine, couldn't match it because the brake balance wasn't quite so certain and the suspension nowhere near as coddling. There wasn't a touring car that fast by comfort until the Turbo Bentley got the cheaper Eight's sportier suspension in the middle 1980s. The Citroen wasn't actually fast by modern standards -- it could touch the mid-130s, same as a straight-6 Maserati two decades older, same as the best but much smaller Porsche of the day, and it was too big and heavy to handle like a sportscar in narrow lanes -- but driving it at elevated speeds on its hydraulic suspension was so vibration-free, so quiet, so stressless, that you put more miles into the hour than you realized, often amazing passengers whose previous experience of ultra-fast transcontinental journeys was extremely stressful.
It's in a large part my experience with my SMs that gave me such an instant bond with my favourite bike. When I first unboxed my Kranich, which I bought sight unseen in Germany on the advice of the famous Boeing machinist, Chalo Colina, I groaned. The thing was nearly seven feet long; it looked like an old man's really, really slow bike. Then I took a ride on those 60mm Big Apples and the first thing I noticed is that it was so comfortable, I soon stopped paying attention to irregularities on the road surface that on my previous Marathon Plus would have thrown me off. By the time I returned home from my first ride, I knew it was the bicycle equivalent of the SM: huge, not quite as heavy as it appeared, extremely comfortable and thereby, through lowering all kinds of stresses, so deceptively fast that even my first ride, for less effort, was faster than on my previous bike, a rather fast sporting Trek.
The SM and the Kranich is why I'm always trying to persuade those with roadie/fast tourer backgrounds to use all that space Andy Blance gives you in the fork and the rear triangle and fit the biggest low pressure tyres you can: they make you faster by a greater margin than you would expect from just considering the physics of tyres (though by those as well).
