How car electronics change your daily life, on the road and in the garage
You’re driving to a friend’s house and the airbag light is flashing: then you remember that it always does this when you have your dog Max in the back.
· You grab the door handle to open the door and your car alarm goes off, everyone looks at you and you feel like a thief.
· You are approaching a stop sign and your car suddenly idles low and comes to a stop.
· You open your car and roll down all the windows. This only happens on cold winter trips.
Weird things are happening with your car and you have no idea why. Gone are the days when Do It Yourself could solve many car problems. Vehicles today are much more like spaceships or at least an airplane. In fact, your car can contain 60 to 80 separate small computers that provide more computing power than the 1982 Airbus A310 or Apollo Moon Lander had.
Because modern cars are more like complex electronically controlled spaceships, their interiors don’t look much like cars from twenty years ago. Instead of things like a carburetor, you’ll find lots of wires under the hood of your car, connecting sensors to computers and providing the status of the car’s vital signs. The electronics enable unprecedented functionality, such as hybrid power or safety features such as airbags, ABS or stability control, just to name a few. Maintenance jobs, like a tune-up, used to mean getting engine performance back on track. Today, built-in software takes care of that by constantly checking thousands of sensor signals compensating for worn spark plugs, clogged filters, etc. The so-called emergency function allows you to drive with limited power when your engine is in trouble. In the old days, this could have meant a break up.
If your car is as complex as a spaceship and makes you feel helpless every time it plays weird tricks on you, maybe you’d like a space-age preventative maintenance solution. How about piloting like a real spaceship pilot and not worry about unexplained crashes? That’s what professionals in mechanical workshops take care of. They don’t just inspect, repair and replace the remaining 5,000 moving parts; they also understand the side effects of electronics, run complex diagnostics and test sequences to correct and prevent failures. Since electronics mask emerging problems, so there’s no detectable signal to you until much later, your shop technicians need to find the root cause in time. When it’s too late, you may need to replace expensive parts. A failing speed sensor that is compensated by software could start burning transmission oil long before the check engine light comes on. Ask the experts at your store about space-age maintenance for your vehicle. Let them get you the right schedule to meet your service priorities (and don’t forget to ask them about Max and the airbag light).
PS: Max is indeed the cause of the airbag flashing light. The airbag software detected the occupied seat. However, the person seems to be moving very erratically (Max is jumping in the back seat), which is not what the software expects humans to do. Therefore, it concludes that a faulty wire is the cause and causes the airbag light to flash.
PPS: Did you experience cool and/or weird things with your car? Leave a comment in the section below. I would like to help you explore what is possible through electronics.
uwe kleinschmidt
