Web Directories manually penalized by Google!

It would be ridiculous if we say we did not see this coming but after all we all did not want to believe it will happen. Already a fact - Google started manually removing from rating in the SERPs some of the well known (or not so, at least for me) web directories.
Anyway as it seems in some news posts the specific reason has not come from the inside of the G. Rumors say that Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz), who people know as a complainer against and disliker of link buying, expressed his dislike against the link buying to his buddy Matt Cutts (no need to explain who he is) and the result was Matt Cutts manually penalizing some web directories (not sure whether by himself or not:}) . Very nasty of Rand in my opinion... but anyway here are known directories penalized:

Aviva
Alive
Big Web Links
ewebpages
Directory Dump
Elegant Directory

Google and BMW ?

I guess I should change my concept of accepting new things and innovations, cause this was one of those news that partially shocked me, both pleasantly and badly.
Google and BMW, that's right. Seems like Google have made an agreement or some other type of sign of cooperation with BMW with the main purpose of integrating Search Engine functionality in the BMW cars so you can ggle anything and get the results right in your car on your Navi-screen. This innovative service is called In-car local search and is currently offered in Germany, in process of expanding it in Italy and UK ( no US :} )
As I could guess Mercedes Benz also had a deal process for such a service with Google called "Search and Send". Ok this all sounds great but...
Finally we'll have a G search in the toilet!.. which is not good. I see those G things obsessing many parts and fields of the world society. I am wondering where all this is going to... ?

You can see a commercial about this In-car local search here.