@Jantje
The bloke's car was limited to about 20kph in limp home mode, so yes it would take a week to get back to a large enough town (Cairns) to get the vehicle fixed. See this map to give you the context
The shorter black line is the trip in question, tip of Cape York to Cairns, roughly 800k.
The long line is the distance I drove after my bull incident mentioned in post #10. It's 3000k and in those days (mid 70s) a lot of it was gravel road and when there was bitumen it was rough as guts and single lane.
@Constantin
I got to thinking about things and realised that despite what I say we almost never fix anything these days, even in the old cars I rabbit on about. 99% of the time we replace things. I can no more carve a new crank shaft from a bent sapling than I can diagnose a CAN link with a piece of string.
100 or 200 years ago you did really fix things, in theory if an axle broke on your wagon you could chop down the nearest tree and make a new one. Look at how the sailors used to half rebuild a ship when they were stranded on some deserted coast.
We are already well past the point of being able to really fix things ourselves unless maybe you have your own machine shop. We can however diagnose problems, go get the parts and stick them in to "fix" the vehicle. But we didn't fix the part itself and normally have no chance of doing so.
So in that respect we are no worse off with modern technology as such. If we can diagnose that a black box ECU or even an ARM-based networked indicator light is busted we can get a new one and plug it in.
Which means we have to have the means to diagnose the problem and access to the parts to replace the faulty unit.
with car companies arguing that it's perfectly OK to charge $20k+ for a OEM diagnostics tool that no independent shop can justify while dealerships get them virtually free.
So that does seem to be a large part of the problem then, you need cheap diagnostic tools and access to parts. If either are locked up by the car manufacturers then you are stuffed.
So if/when you can buy a cheap diagnostic device and cheap replacement black boxes I'd say I would be happy to have the modern tech in a car. I would be no worse off with regard to replacing broken parts and in fact better off because they almost never need replacing in the first place.
like Bluetooth integration for the phone so that you can call people if you're stuck in traffic.
One man's nice to have is another man's total waste of time. It's really interesting to see the obvious differences in our lifestyles. I often turn my phone off to save the battery and realise a week later that to forgot to turn it back on 
Mind you I seldom go for 10 minutes without checking my email, I'm pretty hooked on the internet and it kills me when I'm out of range.
I do have a new car these days but here's my last car, pretty much like yours I suspect
Petrol consumption was diabolical (I carried 8 jerry cans in the back) but I bet you can't carry your firewood on the bull bar like that
Damn that was a good car, I wish I never sold it and am seriously thinking of looking for another one.
Rob