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Just as an example, a BY Audi has it's TCM (transmission) module under the us passengers side floor carpeting. It is in 'a box", but the box is in no way sealed

Just as an example, a BY Audi has it's TCM (transmission) module under the us passengers side floor carpeting. It is in 'a box", but the box is in no way sealed. The metal box that is the TCM as a whole is made of metal, and maybe attempted to be sealed a bite but isn't sealed. B6 Audis have a design problem with their sunroof drains. When they clog up, unknown to you, the water will pool in passengers footwell area. It takes a while to notice this as a person, as there is 4-6" of foam padding between the metal floor of the car, and where you rest your feet . The TCM lives between these layers, and eventually, in the lake that will form, submerging your TCM -- leaving you with yet another reason to hate your Audi. This is early 2000's. Late 200* a8 models had I believe 30+ different "computers" living in the same over metal under foam situation. An aside, if you ever wash the engine bay of a car with low pressure water, I'd suggest covering the blatant electronic bits with some plastic bags, and leave the car idling when you do so -- that way if/when it starts to sputter or just dies, you have a general idea of where it all went wrong. They really are not as water tight as we all assume.

linksnapzz 5y ago
B6 Audis have a design problem with their sunroof drains. When they clog up, unknown to you, the water will pool in passengers footwell area. It takes a while to notice this as a person, as there is 4-6" of foam padding between the metal floor of the car, and where you rest your feet . The TCM lives between these layers, and eventually, in the lake that will form, submerging your TCM -- leaving you with yet another reason to hate your Audi. This is early 2000's. Late 200 a8 models had I believe 30+ different "computers" living in the same over metal under foam situation.* I now have secondhand PTSD from reading this, and thinking about the Audi owners who have found out the hard way. Dead leaves caught in your sunroof can make your transmission flake out. I'm sure the owner's manual, on page 935, instructs you to ream out the drains with a pipe-cleaner every 5,000km so that your car can shift properly. The only word I can think of for this is..."perverted".
hansvm 5y ago
It only took one early 2000s Audi for me to swear off German cars for the foreseeable future. I don't know that their questionable design choices are applicable to the rest of the industry's chip practices. Story time: Around that time they saved a few bucks by switching the thermostat housing from metal to plastic and not changing the design at all so that it could be a drop-in replacement. With that distinct lack of engineering effort, they were prone to splitting at corner-induced stress lines in the plastic. In an ordinary car this wouldn't be an issue; thermostats fail regularly, so their housings are readily accessible -- kind of like how most cars make changing the oil filter a manageable task. In an Audi however, the process is to take the front half of the car off to expose the engine, take the front half of the engine off, and then replace the now easily spotted housing. So anyway, I don't know of a better place for the thermostat housing to split in half (leaking coolant out faster than you can pour it in) than the middle of fucking nowhere WY. By this time mobile phones were pretty common, but I swear to God they were sharing a single 1Mbps connection across ten counties; only about every third Google search would succeed without timing out, and as a precursor to learning how to take apart my car it was quite literally faster to code up a crude strip-the-garbage proxy (paginating compressed text and nothing else to send back) and deploy that to a home server than it was to try to surf the modern web over at best a 1k connection. In retrospect the coding wasn't necessary since speeds increased to something manageable in the wee hours of the morning when everyone else was asleep and since it was absolutely not a 1-day job, but it was a bit of a fun experience anyway.

linksnapzz 5y ago

B6 Audis have a design problem with their sunroof drains. When they clog up, unknown to you, the water will pool in passengers footwell area. It takes a while to notice this as a person, as there is 4-6" of foam padding between the metal floor of the car, and where you rest your feet . The TCM lives between these layers, and eventually, in the lake that will form, submerging your TCM -- leaving you with yet another reason to hate your Audi. This is early 2000's. Late 200 a8 models had I believe 30+ different "computers" living in the same over metal under foam situation.* I now have secondhand PTSD from reading this, and thinking about the Audi owners who have found out the hard way. Dead leaves caught in your sunroof can make your transmission flake out. I'm sure the owner's manual, on page 935, instructs you to ream out the drains with a pipe-cleaner every 5,000km so that your car can shift properly. The only word I can think of for this is..."perverted".

hansvm 5y ago

It only took one early 2000s Audi for me to swear off German cars for the foreseeable future. I don't know that their questionable design choices are applicable to the rest of the industry's chip practices. Story time: Around that time they saved a few bucks by switching the thermostat housing from metal to plastic and not changing the design at all so that it could be a drop-in replacement. With that distinct lack of engineering effort, they were prone to splitting at corner-induced stress lines in the plastic. In an ordinary car this wouldn't be an issue; thermostats fail regularly, so their housings are readily accessible -- kind of like how most cars make changing the oil filter a manageable task. In an Audi however, the process is to take the front half of the car off to expose the engine, take the front half of the engine off, and then replace the now easily spotted housing. So anyway, I don't know of a better place for the thermostat housing to split in half (leaking coolant out faster than you can pour it in) than the middle of fucking nowhere WY. By this time mobile phones were pretty common, but I swear to God they were sharing a single 1Mbps connection across ten counties; only about every third Google search would succeed without timing out, and as a precursor to learning how to take apart my car it was quite literally faster to code up a crude strip-the-garbage proxy (paginating compressed text and nothing else to send back) and deploy that to a home server than it was to try to surf the modern web over at best a 1k connection. In retrospect the coding wasn't necessary since speeds increased to something manageable in the wee hours of the morning when everyone else was asleep and since it was absolutely not a 1-day job, but it was a bit of a fun experience anyway.