Originally Posted By: JennyHemi
This bums me out. First, because there's no way I could change a flat on my car (or truck, for that matter) by myself, and B) I already had to change out a TPS on my car and it has ridiculously low miles. And there's no reason given as to why it failed - " the computer just says it failed, we can't tell why".
Yeah, thanks.
I miss the old days when we didn't need an artificial brain to take care of our cars. I adore my Challenger, but there's an effing sensor for EVERYthing. It's tedious.
Determining a reason for failure is a big issue with any solid state part, it can easily take thousands of dollars worth of analysis to MAYBE find an answer for a single return. Maybe a quarter of the parts in FA will be destroyed by the analysis before an answer is found. I have seen getting a couple of dozen returns out of some hundreds of thousands or millions of parts sold to a key customer turn a company upside down, product development grinding to a halt as all hands on deck are called in to find the problem (hopefully, there is just one). A company I worked for a while back had a few hundred returns out of many millions of parts sold over a couple of years and they ended up selling themselves off to a larger company that could handle such expenses.
It is becoming more common to add Built In Self Test (BIST) to such parts so they can possibly tell you what is wrong with them if they are still alive at all, but it is an expensive add-on with sometimes questionable benefits for the cost. After all, as you have seen, it is pretty easy to tell the end user the thing just broke. It might save the vendor if it helps them tell their customer what is going on without expensive FA, but then the customer will complain right off the bat about the increased part cost to get the BIST and maybe go somewhere else. Some standards are making BIST a requirement, which removes the need to do a cost/benefit analysis and drives us to just figure out how to do it economically and effectively.