As others have said, Subarus and Hondas are fairly easy to hack if you want to change existing ECU's.
But if you want a car the way you want it, and are going to do more work, look for older cars.
I have a 1975 Triumph Spitfire. I added electronic ignition, replaced the mechanical speedometer and tachometer with electronic ones, and am working on a custom fuel injection setup. If I want to put seat heaters in the car, removal of the seat pan doesn't take any bolts at all. It takes four screws to pull the door apart.
The problem, of course, is that I have to do ALL the work myself. There isn't anyone else doing stuff like this, so every project is brand new.
But there are precisely zero software or firmware barriers to doing anything I want, and the only hardware barriers are my skill limitations.
It's an easy way to sink 3000 hours into a car only worth $2000USD, though, and at the end you still have an old car with very dubious reliability.

You probably already know all this, but for what it's worth, Gary Klein's realization that you can build a stiff frame out of anything if you just increase the diameter enough is completely apropos for wooden bike frame design. The problem, as the Renovo guys have found, is that you need like 5" diameter tubes to get even acceptable stiffness, since stiffness rises as the third power of diameter for tubes. But at those diameters, for a competitive weight, the walls have to be like sub-millimeter in thickness, making for an incredibly delicate bike. (Even old top-end aluminum Cannondales were notorious for having holes punched right through the downtube when the bike merely fell over in a garage and landed on some heavy steel thing.) So Renovo's going down the route of making egg-crate-like tubing with huge amounts of milling to form internal honeycomb structures. Most everyone else in the wood/bamboo bike frame world has shrugged and accepted a more flexible frame as the cost of aesthetics, but in some cases like triathlon bikes it's okay to have a flexible frame as long as it's aerodynamic.
Of course, making a wood frame and then wrapping it with a layer of something with a really high young's modulus gets you a great frame... but then it's really a composite frame that uses wood rather than foam as its form, so that hardly counts.

There has never been a time when wooden bikes weren't being made. As late as the 1930's, people were making bikes with wooden compression-type spokes, rather than steel tension-type spokes, and currently there are piles of amazing wooden bikes being made.
This Owen was used as a triathalon bike, with some very respectable finishes (race finishes, not varnish finishes): https://www.flickr.com/photos/...
Satoshi Sano has been building spectacular bikes using traditional Japanese boatbuilding techniques: https://www.flickr.com/photos/...
and
http://sanomagic.world.coocan....
Note internal cabling in steam-bent frame elements, and a wooden seat on a steam-bent seatpost.
And since bamboo is wood, there are at least a dozen companies using bamboo as the primary frame material.
Calfee started it, as far as I can tell:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

But there are many others, like Panda and Boo.
Bamboosera makes a great Cannondale-shock mountain bike:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/...
and Hero Bikes make work and utility bikes:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

Hero (and at least two other companies) go so far as to offer classes, where over a weekend you start out by harvesting bamboo, and end up making a complete ready-to-build-up frameset.
http://www.herobike.org/collec...

I don't know if she's already looked (so to speak) into this but she sounds like a possible candidate for vision therapy. They're pretty good at dealing with exactly this sort of problem without surgery, and through use of cleverly designed exercises, training eye muscles to consistently maintain image fusion. It certainly has limitations: they can't fix problems because of nerve palsies or damage that leads to muscles that simply don't work. But if the muscles work at all, they can often do some pretty amazing things.
It's expensive and most insurance plans don't cover it. But what price would you put on having good depth perception?

Even cooler -- or, really, hotter -- is thermoregulating plants. The sacred lotus maintains a nearly constant, well-above-ambient temperature in its flowers for several days while they're most fertile.

Consider things that grow much, much more slowly. They're already finding chemolithoautotrophs living in rock 4 km beneath the surface of the earth, that reproduce over the course of years, rather than in twenty minutes like the bacteria we're used to working with. If there were organisms that didn't have DNA, but did have some sort of body that could maintain chemical gradients, allowing it some sort of metabolism, and reproduced on the scale of centuries, we'd have trouble ever noticing it was there because we haven't made the tools to find it, for lack of knowing what we're looking for.

To be fair, some of the places they've raided appear to have been selling, whether knowingly or not, fairly large quantities of pot to people who were then taking it to Kansas and Wyoming and reselling it, and interstate transport of illegal drugs is absolutely part of the Federal Government's job.
However, it's not clear to me how sellers can tell where the stuff is going, and why should they be required to? They're selling what's legal here, and it's not really their business what the buyers do with it.
The obvious answer is getting our neighbors to legalize pot as well, but that's going to be a challenge. My recollection is that any quantity of pot whatsoever is a felony in Wyoming.

And Yeager had good reason to say this: airplanes do land on top of each other, especially when a high-wing plane is doing a low approach and a low-wing plane is doing a steep approach. It's also a somewhat common midair collision scenario, of a high-wing plane climbing into a low-wing plane, because of the same visibility problems inherent in the two designs.

Until as late as the 1850's, there were as many German speakers in Pennsylvania as English speakers, and until just before WWI it was common to hear people speaking German in the streets of any of the large cities. (There are still about a quarter million people in Pennsylvania who speak a version of German as their primary or daily-use secondary language, apparently.)
Likewise, in Colorado, there were so many German speakers that when Colorado became a state in 1876, the laws of the state were distributed, by law, in English, Spanish, and German, until 1914.
Those are the two states I know best: I presume many other states had similar situations.

Plus one of the major things lower-income families argue about is money and how it's going to be allocated. More money, less arguments.
In our neighborhood, we can roughly estimate both income and how long a family's going to stay together by how often we hear screaming arguments coming from their houses.

I'm not a phosphor chemist so I may not be right on this, but it's my understanding that despite the word 'phosphor' the coating that downconverts light in an LED is actually a fluorescent phenomenon, meaning the metastable states have lifetimes on the orders of tens of nanoseconds. Actual phosphorescent phenomena have lifetimes long enough to make a visual difference but because they stay in an excited state a lot longer they have a lot more time to engage in non-radiative relaxation, so their conversion efficiency is like 10x lower.

Strobing is a huge problem, and the easiest way to fix it is add big output caps to the switcher... which costs money.
It's sad to hear they did that. I will chat with someone who gets to make these decisions for them at the end of the month.
Strobing's even worse with car taillights because that's when people have the highest saccade rates and cars are moving quickly, so surprisingly high frequencies are clearly visible as strobe flashes.

The big open question for our time: how do we tell if stuff is quality?
Stuff that has the same manufacturer's SKU number, you open it up and it has all different guts than last year's because they've changed subcontractors.
They come out with a new version every four months, so by the time reviews are up on one you can't buy that model anymore.
Manufacturers have adopted influenza's tactic: change so fast that the system can't keep up with you and fight your badness.
Since us consumers need to buy stuff, we have no choice but to buy what's being offered, with only lemon metrics for judging.
Cree is an exception to this (in my experience), and I hope like mad that they stay that way.

Buy Crees. I work in LED driver design, and Cree, who I don't work for but I work with, seem to do a good job of making sure their LED's don't get associated with junk. Philips similarly, to a lesser extent.
So, from the inside, it's not that manufacturers generally scrimp on bulbs to make them fail faster so they can sell more. The economics of light bulbs don't support that business model. It's that people are crazy reluctant to pay $15 for a lightbulb when an incandescent costs under $1. So manufacturers engage in heavy-duty Muntzing until the bulb will just barely run, and they've cut the BOM by $1.45... and then it dies quickly. It's called value engineering, which as far as I'm concerned means removing all the value. They use cheap input filter caps, and scrimp on those, and they use cheap heatsinking which is poorly thermally coupled to the LED's, so the LED's operate at a high junction temperature and don't live very long.
Incandescents have visual inertia, for lack of a better term: if you pour a 30 hz square wave into one, it'll still look pretty good. LED's react in nanoseconds. Crappy dirty line power combined with dimming makes for a really demanding design, and designers and apps engineers have to work with a huge variation in dimmer designs. Consumers don't see any of that: all they see is "no way I'm paying $25 for a lightbulb" so they buy the crap ones and then get infuriated with them because they're visibly flickering and only last five times as long as an incandescent. I can't really blame them, either. There are really good lightbulbs out there. They're expensive. They should last 50,000 hours. But it's hard to tell what you're getting if you're not in on the design.

We largely agree that it sucks to be stuck drooling in a nursing home. But the reason people are keeping strict diets, exercising, and doing math puzzles is almost certainly not to live longer, but to live better during the time that they have. I want to die the moment living isn't fun anymore, but I want to delay that moment as long as possible. That's why I spend time and effort on keeping healthy: not because I simply want to live forever, but I want to feel like I'm able to have a really good time forever.