Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Chris_H]

Automotive electronics do have to survive in a very hostile environment but I am sure that manufacturers don't want your car to go very far without you having to pay them some wonga!

[Marks DTM Calib]

Don't dissagree with you on cars doing galactic milegaes without breakdowns. When I was young a journey from Newark to Scarborough  you expected to break down!

However having had DIS pack, ABS ECU, knock sensors go in 150k miles, I do feel that the electronics aren't that trouble free. Perhaps a bit of design failure is built in to keep the auto industry going!

Knock sensor is close to un-heard of (normaly only after poor spanner twirling)

DIS pack slightly more common but, no more common than an old coil setup

[Chris_H]

Don't dissagree with you on cars doing galactic milegaes without breakdowns. When I was young a journey from Newark to Scarborough  you expected to break down!

However having had DIS pack, ABS ECU, knock sensors go in 150k miles, I do feel that the electronics aren't that trouble free. Perhaps a bit of design failure is built in to keep the auto industry going!

Knock sensor is close to un-heard of (normaly only after poor spanner twirling)

DIS pack slightly more common but, no more common than an old coil setup

Not sure if you're just talking Omega but I have experienced quite a bit of trouble with modern coil packs.  Far more than on the traditional single coil.

Things like "Don't run them with the spark plugs out or the leads off".  Sensitive or what?

[Kevin Wood]

Remember the old fashioned motor engineer!

Yep, we have one just up the road from us.....alas a MIG auto gearbox (or rather, the electronics) f**ked him completely.

That seems to be the problem with modern cars, it is the electrics that cause the problems and these need more specialised fixing.....

IMHO, it's more the case that technicians of the "old school" actually understood how a car works. You can take a distributor, or a carb, to bits and see how it works, and often why it's not working any more. They also had more practice because cars were much less reliable!

These days, the diagnostic procedures they are taught are all wrong. Plug in a code reader and replace whatever is inferred by the fault code.

The reality is that an EFI engine is not that much more complex than a carb-and-dizzy engine of a few decades back, and you have the wonderful diagnostic capabilities offered by the Tech 2, etc. of being able to see practically every parameter in real time.

With a carb and dizzy engine there's no way of knowing how much fuel is going in, or what's coming out of the exhaust, or which cylinder is misfiring, etc.

The problem today is that technicians are not equipped to use the information that's available to them because they are taught to diagnose by swapping parts at random and ignore the live data.

Kevin