Clearer accounts of authorship are one of the things I'm kind of looking forward to in a couple of decades when Andrew Pixley finally gets his hands on the production papers. You get the impression that, under Davies in particular, the name on the front of the story was often only tangentially involved with the words on the page which is odd in a lot of ways - it devalues the work of writers who did make a big contribution for instance since the assumption will presumably be that Davies wrote it all anyway. While I think the cars are a particularly good threat I imagine any "apparently innocuous technological object distributed into homes" would have served a similar purpose. Given the "genius inventor" inclusion, my guess would be computers, smart pads or phones.