&gt; <i>When you repair your car with a used part or a part from a different model, are you &quot;hacking your car&quot; ?</i><p>If you follow a popular on-line tutorial for that, then not really.<p>But if you find yourself with a broken car, and you figure out yourself that you can fix it by duct-taping some otherwise unrelated component into it, and the resulting solution somehow works better than original, then yes. Hacking is about playful cleverness.