I’d rather have a solid state device exposed to vibration and extreme temperatures than a device with moving parts exposed to the same stresses. As a matter of fact, computer chips get pretty hot in normal operation and it doesn’t hurt them. They’re designed to operate that way. Ironically, many PC failures happen as a result of the cooling fans on the processor’s heat sink or in the power supply failing.
Compare the failure rates of solid state hard drives to traditional hard drives and you’ll see what we’re talking about.
Like a car’s computer (which is completely solid state), the only disadvantages of solid state hardware seem to be the cost to make it and, when rarely necessary, replace it. That alone isn’t enough to make me want to trash a successful innovation.
It seems that the storage drum (the device used for storing data before disk drives became popular) was down.
Disk drives were around when drums were. Drums were mainly used for speed. They had fixed heads (16 or 32) of them. The drum just spun around.
I saw the aftermath of one of them that broke off it’s axle. Went right through a concrete wall…down two stores and destroyed a car. Luckily no one was injured or killed.
Compare the failure rates of solid state hard drives to traditional hard drives and you'll see what we're talking about.
The parts that fail the most in almost all computer systems are the hard drives…followed by the BlueRay/DVD/CD drives. Next is the Fans. WHY??? Because those are usually the only mechanical devices in a system.
You had problems with earlier electronics that were designed with Vacuum tubes. But once SS and then Chips became the norm…the failure rate of the CPU went to almost nothing.
The only other failure I’ve had besides hard drives was with the connection between a stick of RAM and the main board in a Micron pc, caused some odd problems.
I WANT the vent windows back for so many reasons!!! LOVE the bench seats too!!! WAITING to buy cars that HAVE them!!! My two cars are 1997 & 1999. What do you say to that folks???
Air conditioning kind of makes vent windows obsolete, doesn’t it?
When I was a smoker, it was nice to be able to flick my ashes out the window without having them blow back in, but I’m not a smoker anymore. (BTW, I never threw my butts out the window. I refused to treat the world like it was my ashtray.)
“I WANT the vent windows back for so many reasons!!! LOVE the bench seats too!!! WAITING to buy cars that HAVE them!!! What do you say to that folks???”
I say that you better not be holding your breath until those features return, as they are long gone. Well, it may be possible to buy a new car with a front bench seat, but…vent windows? Nope!
I hope that you really maintain those old cars that you are currently driving, because you likely will never find the combination of features that you want in a new car. But…please don’t feel too bad about this issue. My great-grandfather refused to buy shoes other than high-button shoes, and he eventually had to go barefoot, so if you think that you have problems, think again.
When I bought the '65 Cutlass a year ago and started work on it, (This thing is a poster child for why it’s a bad idea to just leave a car sit for 5 years. Anything that could leak, has.) I discovered I needed to order pretty much everything online. Same thing for my '67 Cutlass convert. No retail parts store has parts for them. Fuel pump, water pump, hoses, even the air filter had to be ordered from Rock Auto. The only thing they had in stock was the oil filter and shock absorbers.
Those cars have a lot of personality. I love them. They’re fun to drive and really attract attention. I also really love my 2011 Cruze. It has personality, it’s comfortable on long trips, it’s fun to drive, handles like it’s on rails, and with the six speed stick and turbocharger, has more than enough grunt to get my license yanked on the spot, should I so choose. I’ve owned a lot of cars over the past 40 years, and it’s become one of my all time favorites. On top of all that, it averages 40 mpg driving to work. How can you beat that?
@oblivion: How much vibration, moisture and road salt does V1+V2 endure? What price point were they built to? (LOL.)
If electronics are so reliable, then I guess nobody here has had to fix a broken TPMS component, have they?
I have personally lost 3 substantial purchases to electronic glitches: a '95 Sentra that wouldn’t exit “open loop” mode, an '88 Dakota that over time ran progressively leaner until undrivable, and a Fisher/Paykel washer that had a “drum sensor failure.” This makes electronic failures by far the most common cause of me driving a lunk of steel to the scrap yard.
The sad thing is that it doesn’t have to be that way. All cars share most of the same componentry, and ECMs could easily be made “generic,” with mfrs able to tweak parameters (See also: Megasquirt). Also, since the task of systems management is technologically static (for the most part), backwards/forwards compatability could be engineered into it, too.
It’s a combination of corporate greed and a lamentable throwawy ethos among the silicon set that makes electronics such a bane to durability…
A couple things you have to remember on electronics and space flight is that the consumer junk electronics may not be the same as the hardened electronics used on multi-million dollar equipment. The other thing is redundancy. Every electronic or other system has at least one or triple back up systems in case one goes down.
Back in the days, we put in our own phone system instead of renting lines from Ma Bell. We installed two exact computer units as redundancy. Both operated all the time and when one went down, the entire calling load seamlessly went to the other system. It was nearly double the cost, but when you have to be up and running 24-7, that’s what you do. It took me 30 minutes to decide it was a good investment from a reliability standpoint. The same thing could be done for cars and to some extent is, but consumers are not willing to pay the price for that level of reliability.