Elio Electronics?

[2barrel]

It won't matter because as Gas-Powered Awesome said, cars of today are disposable

1. I've already run into the issue of note being able to repair a mid-80's motorcycle that I restored mechanically to perfect working condition but it still didn't work well because the brain box was malfunctioning. New brain boxes don't exist and reverse engineering either doesn't work because the original parts aren't made any more, or more to the point, it would take far more sophisticated knowledge than I have. The bike went to scrap
   
   
2. The "disposable" notion is really an unfortunate comment on our society. We really don't build things to be used perpetually and people are so focused on the latest thing that they really don't care. From this we end up buying stuff that is either no fully baked or that is already technologically out of date. It is very sad that Paul can use the Ferrari story about MP3 players as an example of how short sighted our society has become.

 

[2barrel]

It really depends on supply and demand. When ever I brought an item for repair to the electronics department at my vocational school they would say it's broken you need a new one. When I visited a vocational school in Paraguay in 2004 the students were troubleshooting and repairing televisions, radios, microwave ovens, vacuum cleaners, toasters, power tools and believe it or not VCRs. When is the last time you heard of anyone repairing these in the good old USA? Maybe during WWII!! I did not see Walmarts

 

[2barrel]

It really depends on supply and demand. When ever I brought an item for repair to the electronics department at my vocational school they would say it's broken you need a new one. When I visited a vocational school in Paraguay in 2004 the students were troubleshooting and repairing televisions, radios, microwave ovens, vacuum cleaners, toasters, power tools and believe it or not VCRs. When is the last time you heard of anyone repairing these in the good old USA? Maybe during WWII!! I did not see any Walmarts[ while I was there. /QUOTE]

 

[Lil4X]

There is an upside to replacing a "body computer" (containing every function except the engine/transmission parameters) . . . My wife's old '92 Caravan was purchased from her sister because it's bluebook was practically zilch, and we needed a stay-at-home grocery-getter. We knew very little about the van but its age and condition which was pretty decent, considering it had shed most of its paint due to a miserable factory primer. Enter Earl Schieb, and for a couple hundred bucks we not only stopped the peeling paint, but with a little detailing, returned the old box to daily service.

Then the cruise control started to act up - failing to hold speed for more than a few minutes. Then the instrument panel went wonky, gauges failing to register properly and the gas gauge falling to zero at random intervals. A/C developed several problems, de-clutching the compressor from time to time. Finally when the gas gauge quit altogether, I went looking in a junkyard for a replacement body computer.

Installed by my son as I was unwilling to stand on my head in the driver's footwell, we swapped the old computer for a new one. Suddenly everything came back - gauges, A/C, cruise, even the constantly mystifying "Engine" warning light went out. We discovered we even had a couple of features like an incremental change in the cruise settings, 4-way flashers, and several warning chimes appeared out of nowhere. Never knew we had 'em.

It served well for years before the little V6 let go on the freeway one Sunday morning, and it turned into junk within a few seconds.

 

[McBrew]

Of course there will be individual cases that back either side of the argument, but I have owned quite a few cars built from the 1970s on up to 2015. The least number of miles I have Putin a vehicle is about 75k. I also had a car go well over 400,000 miles. Many of them were over 200,000 miles.

I have had very few issues with electronics in cars. I did have a 1998 Benz that had a few electrical gremlins, but they were all known problems with that particular model. More a problem of how the electronics were implemented rather than a problem with electronics in general.

I have had WAY more problems with manual crank Windows than with power windows. The cars that had problems with power windows were from the late 70s/early 80s and it was always the ones that didn't get used as much that went out.

It still tends to be the same old things that go wrong with cars: wheel bearings, shocks, blower motors, starter motors, alternators, etc.

Even with the '98 Benz, half of the electronic problems had to do with a door switch (simply plunger that the door presses in on) that wasn't going in all the way then the door closed. This affected all sorts of systems, because the car thought a door was open. It was a really simple fix once I diagnosed it. The hardest fix on that car was getting the rear hatch to close and local... Which was an entirely mechanical issue. I ended up replacing the rear hatch with a junkyard piece that I had repainted to match. The side mirrors were held on my stainless steel wire and pixie dust. All of the cheap pot metal hinges on the side mirrors crumbled away from age. The electronic bits (power mirrors, heated mirrors, self-dimming mirrors) still worked... But the simplest parts were crumbling.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Chaz]

Well, my 2004 Tacoma bit the dust tonight on the way to the dog park. I was traveling 40mph when an idiot decided that I was not there and turned left in front of me. It did not turn out well, my truck is totaled. It was running perfect, never burned a drop of oil in the almost 149,000 miles. The electronics worked fine, had a bit of a problem for a few weeks that the tach and the fuel gauge would not go over halfway on the dial. That turned out to be a loose connector on the cluster. Electronics normally either work or they don't, the Elio seems to be pretty basic nothing ground breaking so it should last for years.

 

[Lil4X]

That's one of the attractions the Elio has for me. In standard trim it's a worthy successor to the Model T - so simple it's about as foolproof* as a vehicle can be.

* Note: whenever you think you've designed a system that is foolproof, nature provides a bigger fool.