Is this my car or a space shuttle?
How Automotive Electronics Change Your Daily Life, On The Road And In The Auto Shop
You’re driving to a friend’s house and the airbag light is flashing: So you remember it always does 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 and stops.
Open the car and roll all the windows down. This only happens on winter trips.
Weird things happen with your car and you have no idea why. Gone are the days when Do-It-Yourself could solve many car problems. Today’s vehicles are more like spaceships or at least an airplane. In fact, your car may contain 60-80 separate little computers that provide more computing power than the 1982 Airbus A310 or Apollo Moon Lander had.
Because modern automobiles are more like complex electronically controlled spaceships, their interior does not look much like automobiles from twenty years ago. Instead of things like a carburetor, you will find many cables under the hood of your car, connecting sensors to computers and giving the status of the car’s vital signs. Electronics enable unprecedented functionality like 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, the embedded software takes care of this by constantly checking thousands of sensor signals that compensate for worn plugs, clogged filters, and more. 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 breakdown.
If your car is as complex as a spaceship and makes you feel helpless every time you play tricks on it, maybe you’d like a space age preventative maintenance solution. How about piloting like a real spaceship pilot and not worrying about unexplained glitches? That’s what auto repair professionals deal with. They not only inspect, repair and replace the 5,000 moving parts that remain; They also understand the side effects of electronics, run complex diagnostic and test sequences to correct and prevent malfunctions. Since electronics masks emerging problems, so there is no detectable signal for you until much later, your shop technicians must find the root cause early. When it’s too late, you may have to replace expensive parts. A malfunctioning speed sensor compensated for by software can start to burn the transmission oil long before the check engine light comes on. Ask the experts at your workshop about maintaining your vehicle in the space age. Let them provide you with the right program 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 move very erratically (Max is jumping in the back seat), which is not what the software expects humans to do. So you conclude that a bad cable is the cause and causes the airbag light to blink.
PPS: Did you experience wonderful and / or strange 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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