It was as though Donatella Versace had been waiting for this moment to project her late brother Gianni's heritage from the hard-edged, metal mesh of the 1980s into the 21st-century digital age.

Spark plugs only ignite the fuel mixture near the spark gap, reducing the combustion efficiency, and the metal that makes them up is slowly eroded as they age.

Some believe that the hardened gray iron used to make the components simply "fatigues" with age-as metal parts that go through millions of stress reversals eventually do.