3 ms·
This has been going since forever. It has been slowly gaining ground through the development and inclusion of non-serviceable components. Take for example the b
by bliti 12y ago
This has been going since forever. It has been slowly gaining ground through the development and inclusion of non-serviceable components. Take for example the body control module that resides in most cars today. It manages the power windows by using solid state electronics. Before you had some relays and switches. Which was easy and cheap to fix. Not to mention that you could pretty much fix it with almost any 12v relay. Now days you are stuck with an smd board with multiple microchips and tons of miniscule resistors. Who in their right mind could repair that? No one. That's why a $20 fix turned into a $500 one.
- kragen 12y agoIt's a good example for another reason, too, though: switches and 12V relays are inherently unreliable devices that vaporize a small part of their contacts every time they turn on and off, and so while fixing the system is indeed easy and cheap, it's also frequently necessary. Meanwhile, it's pretty easy to build solid-state power electronics that with MTBFs and wearout times in the billions of cycle times, far longer than the rest of the car. (Not to say automakers don't ever biff it and build shitty solid-state power electronics that break all the time, though.)
- bliti 12y agoI'm am ex mechanic and I hardly ever replaced a relay. Even in the old Porsches I still work on as a weekend. The few I did replace were due to a fan motor going bad. Which made the relay overheat. But I did replace many solid state boards that would die from vibration or regular under hood heat.
- kragen 12y agoWhile I believe you, I continue to insist that this is a problem with shitty solid-state boards, not with solid-state electronics in general.