In the Eastern Bloc, in 80’s, having such manuals available for cars was pretty much a norm. Our first two family cars had such books coming with them for certain.
You could’ve got schematics and service-level documentation for the locally made televisions and stereos as well.
So there were places and times when this WAS a norm, and it should be a norm again.
That’s a money-grab then, not a sensible design.
This ambiguity is a major problem with this idea. One of many.
Why the assumption the driver/owner does not have the expertise? There are people who won’t be helped if they were beaten to death with a full-thickness dead-tree service manual, but there are also many others who know enough to make their own decisions. It’s not some arcane magical art requiring forty years of studying of ancient moldy scrolls in a temple basement, followed with a blood-involving ritual, it’s just a car. A c-a-r!
Okay, a computer on wheels these days, but my point stands.
I believe that everybody should have a full access to the insides of their machines. The ones who aren’t knowledgeable enough will not touch them unless instructed, those who falsely think they know enough will make mistakes (which is entirely normal), and those who really know will not be hindered in their ability to do with their property what they have a right to.
Then there is the issue of remote support. With a detailed error code, you don’t have to have the knowledge yourself - you need only a cellphone and somebody in the know to call and ask. And then there is the Internet and the support servers and discussion forums. And there are many many other ways to turn an arcane-looking alphanumeric string into understandable information.
No such option with a single light in a mocking shade of orange.
Same goes for just leaving it shining, or not undestanding a more descriptive code/message. Your point is what, again?
With spare parts, there are plenty of them, for a plethora of car brands and models. The only exception is the specific one you need at the moment.
I am not against the concept of the ECU. I am strongly against the concept of the ECU as an undocumented black box that has to be treated like it contains a magically bound soul of a damned engineer. Just give me the API and the schematics and I’m happy, okay?
And then you don’t have the schematics and finding that one shorted $0.15 Zener diode that makes the whole thing more dead than a week old roadkill is a reverse-engineering ordeal, instead of a look-and-see endeavor. Many faults are of a pretty simple nature.
And it is not confined just to cars. Some days ago I was repairing a washing machine that died in the middle of the work. Totally bricked. After some tracing of the board lines I found an interrupted 10-ohm resistor (after finding that there is no voltage on the chip’s input and tracing why). After replacing it, it burned on power-on. That proved the culprit was a $5 switching power supply chip. It was ordered, received, replaced; the thing worked but now is resetting itself when the heater switches on. As by now I am only remotely supporting the repair, and the problem is a voltage dip when the relay actuates, we’ll likely not track the reason but just replace the relay with a SSR. The chip is some odd crap, I don’t know why the Poles didn’t put in something better, e.g. UC3844 (and more common and cheaper, too; probably the crap they used was cheaper in 10,000 pieces and is more expensive in single-piece than the alternative).
(Edit: I think I see why. They were too cheap for the extra FET, and used a chip with integrated one, with poor thermal specs. No wonder it dies so often, according to the forums…)
The cost of the washing machine, 400 euro. The cost of the replacement board, 140 euro. The cost of the chip that went wrong, 4 euro (10 with postage and some spare resistors). The cost of the work, greatly inflated by not having a schematics to work from and having to wing it from experience and a chip datasheet instead of look-and-see. (But we had a good chat and I got a yummy dinner that would take me about the same time to make as the repair itself. Still, the lack of the manual added to uncertainty of the result.)
And this is not limited just to washing machines. All the household appliances now have a computer inside, and are prone to its failure or failure of the supporting circuitry. And as it is often all on a single board, you are supposed to have no other choice than to replace the entire board with a spare part, for an absurd cost.
The power supplies are the most commonly failing parts of such boards. They are quite similar, various flavors of switching power supplies, and can be even replaced with something else; I was for a while tempted to just put in a 5V/12V ATX power supply, though that’d be quite an overkill for the few milliamps for the electronics and some more for the relays. Or tack in a 12V wall-wart and a cellphone charger.
In the old times, you could often encounter a piece of paper with the thing’s schematics attached to the inner side of the chassis lid, or other suitable place. Nowadays the complexity would not let the component-level schematics fit (with a readable font), but that is not an excuse for not at least offering a PDF to download.
A racket it is, I tell you, a racket!
