Is this my car or a space shuttle?

How automotive electronics change your daily life, on the road and in the garage

You’re driving to a friend’s house and the air bag 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 sounds, everyone looks at you and you feel like a thief.

· You are approaching a stop sign and your car suddenly slows to a stop.

· You open your car and roll down all the windows. This only happens on cold winter rides.

Weird things are happening with your car and you have no idea why. Gone are the days when DIY could solve many car problems. Vehicles today are much more like spaceships or at least an airplane. In fact, your car may contain 60 to 80 separate small computers that provide more computing power than the 1982 Airbus A310 or the Apollo Moon Lander had.

Because modern cars are more like complex electronically controlled spaceships, their interiors don’t look much like the cars of twenty years ago. Instead of things like a carburetor, you’ll find plenty 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 like airbags, ABS or stability control, just to name a few. Maintenance work, 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 that compensate 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 might have meant a breakup.

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 worrying about unexplained failures? Professionals in mechanical workshops take care of that. They not only 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 electronic components mask emerging problems, so there is no detectable signal for you until much later, your shop technicians need to find the root cause early. When it’s too late, you may need to replace expensive parts. A speed sensor that fails and is compensated for 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 give you the right program to meet your service priorities (and don’t forget to ask them about Max and the airbag light).

PS: Max is in fact the cause of the flashing airbag light. The airbag software detected the occupied seat. However, the person appears to move very erratically (Max is bouncing around in the backseat), which is not what the software expects humans to do. Therefore, you conclude that a faulty cable is the cause and causes the air bag light to flash.

PPS: Did you experience any 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

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