I need to rant/vent about the growing amount of electronics in cars.
As much as some amount of electronics arguably improves safety (eg ABS) and environmental impact (fuel and emissions control), all the rest mostly improve comfort, or just bling! and show-off rights.
Why were the speed and RPM dials worse than the new lcd monitors which display speed and RPM dials? Why are touchscreens better than mechanical push-buttons?
What electronics do NOT improve are reliability, even if they claim to do so (warnings about burnt lightbulbs). Most owners of cars from the last decade have had to return home in limp mode only because some obscure sensor had a bad day.
I recently read a few posts from employees of automotive companies, and they admited that the growing amount of electronics in cars does not really raise their purchase prices (in fact, many cars are sold with hardly any profit), but instead guarantee a growing flow of revenue for authorised servicing. Because electronics tend to fail more often, fail suddenly with no earlier warning, need expensive and highly specialised tools to diagnose and are prohibitively expensive to replace.
And you can no longer perform even the simplest of repairs yourself due to the need of highly specialized (=expensive and/or limited access) tools, both mechanical (allen, torx, torx with hole, triangular, etc.) and electronic (dedicated software with subscriptions).
Add to that the increasing trend of "subscriptions" to get better performance, or even to get basic features, like being able to use the radio.
And the risk of the OEM remotely limiting access to your vehicle on a whim (see
OEM bricking of vehicle software).
So why are we buying cars which make us more dependent on expensive maintenance? Because we do not have any option. How many new cars today still have manual windows? How many models in the USA do not even offer an option for manual transmission?
Having discussed this with the wife, we have decided to invest in maintaining our present car, instead of researching a potential newer replacement.
Sounds like a good plan, but...
[Conspiracy theory - start] Governments are on the OEMs' side by introducing laws which favour frequent replacement with brand new models. Other than incentives for big companies, which help bring down the initial up front cost, there are laws about penalties for emissions. Some of these laws do not even check whether your car is presently tuned properly or not, they only limit your access to certain city centers based on the emissions class (eg EURO4, EURO5, EURO6) of your car when it was produced - and this class more or less implies how young your car is. It does not matter how dirty it runs now, or even if you've blocked your EGR and removed the DPF.
So this leads to absurd situations where a properly tuned and perfectly hypermiled EURO3 car would be classified as "polluting" and would be restricted from entering many areas, while a 2024 fuel-guzzling 400hp V8 would be labelled as EURO5 or EURO6 and would have no problems with polluting those areas restricted to others.
[/rant]
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