Parts that tell you when they are failing

Maybe five or six years ago I a radiator hose blow-out, just beyond the top of the "grapevine" pass on California's interstate 5. Apparently the radiator hose had been weakening over time and eventually split down the middle. A few years after that, the same thing happened again, just driving around town. I started to wonder why we don't have car parts that notify you when they start to fail.

For example, the government is working on clothing for military personnel that can identify when they are torn/pierced due to a fine mesh of wires or fiber optics. Some kind of simple version of this, built into parts that frequently fail (fan belts, radiator hoses), would save a lot of grief for just a few more cents of cost per part. The system could use passive RF for communication (ala RFID) with the car so no wires would be necessary. If the belt/hose expanded and broke the wire mesh, the part would report back possible failure to the car when queried. The mechanic would be able to identify the failing part, back in the shop, using the same mechanism.

Possible problems include ensuring the failure warning system itself does not become a source of false positives. Also, possible privacy concerns from RFID, but I think there are ways to solve this using proximity and/or generic part IDs rather than globally unique IDs. Cost of the monitoring system in the car would need to be low.