Pretty much all Lagunas are keyless these days, but not sure how that affects the SL.

It's more likely the hydraulic power steering failed when the engine stoopped and he failed to account for the extra effort required to make the turn.

Errr, polyethylene terephthalate = PET. The stuff they make Coke bottles out of. Should be ok in most environments and it's cheap.

Teflon is poly(tetrafluoroethylene) which is very chemically stable and has excellent temperature resistance. However, even if it offered the same resistance to the high voltages in the system as the PET, it would probably make these things prohibitively expensive.

I'm not sure that's a very good analogy to be honest. Cell phones are based on technologies which are decades old, well understood and have been incrementally advanced. It could be argued that it has taken half a century to realise the telecommunications systems which we have today.

In the field of nanotechnology there are many barriers to progress. One of the main ones as mentioned above is accurate measurement (metrology) of the substances and products which are being manufactured. The recent advances (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/ 04/0344203&tid=126) in superlenses to beat the diffraction limit may help advance optical techniques and advances are being made all the time in complimentary methods such as AFM and electron based methods, but these are all incremental too.

One of the most exciting aspects of nanotechnology is also one of the current barriers, which is the fact that everyday, well understood materials can behave COMPLETELY differently at the nano-scale. For instance, clusters of 20-80 gold atoms have experimentally been shown to posess totally alien chemical and electrical behaviours when compared with the properties of the material that we are familiar with on the macroscale. This means that it becomes difficult to predict how materials are going to behave working on these length scales and extensive experimentation is required.

For this reason too, I strongly hope that nanotech does progress at a slower pace, as that will give us time to develop strategies for health and safety concerns in tandem with the 'cool' technology. Radical changes in material behaviour may well realise some fantastic new devices which will revolutionise modern life, but toxological and bioactive properties must also be well understood, particularly in the nanobiotech areas.

Working in the area, it is also vitally important to educate the general public about this branch of science and help to reassure them that the nanorobot invasion/grey goo armageddon predictions from some branches of the media aren't likely to happen. Otherwise the science will follow Genetically Modified foods into the dustbin of history.

Of course, if this does occur, each nanotech area will simply revert back to their respective disciplines of materials science, molecular biology, etc etc. It would just be a shame to lose such a lucrative funding source ;)