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My experience tells me that it's mostly cars from the past five years or so that are vulnerable to this type of exploit. Anything pre-CANbus has pretty much zero chance of having complex interconnections.

You do realize that the earliest iterations of the CAN bus date back to the late 1980s, it has been in the majority of US-market vehicles for more than a decade, and by 2008 was a legal requirement in mass-market vehicles, right?

A heck of a lot more than just the last five years of vehicles use the CAN bus. If your vehicle is made within the last decade it's almost a certainty that it uses the CAN bus.

Auterra has an OBD-II scan tool that runs on PalmOS. One of my friends has it, and seems pretty happy with it.

Get yourself one of these or build your own OBD II interface and use a laptop or a palm for display and control, if you want a /proc or GKrellM interface.

There are Linux OBD II solutions available, google for them if you're interested.

Carsten "Russ" Meyer, editor at German c't magazine, has a few pages (in English) on hacking his Chevy Camaro Z28:

Tuning the PROM
Diagnosing the ALDL

Cool.

I'm not planning to go that far, but I'll be buying an Auterra OBD II Scan Tool interface for my Palm. Lots of interesting information about what's going on under the hood.

Carsten "Russ" Meyer, editor at German c't magazine, has a few pages (in English) on hacking his Chevy Camaro Z28:

Tuning the PROM
Diagnosing the ALDL

Cool.

I'm not planning to go that far, but I'll be buying an Auterra OBD II Scan Tool interface for my Palm. Lots of interesting information about what's going on under the hood.

Auterra is offering diagnostic s/w and an interface cable for Palm PDAs that's compatible with OBD II engine computers (required in the US since '96 model year, I believe). It certainly doesn't address all your concerns, but shifts some of the power back towards the consumer interested in maintaining his vehicle himself.