I grew up in farm country and every farm has at least one vehicle (usually more) just to go from point A to point B for things like getting out to the tractor or checking calves or running to get the mail or delivering a message because the stupid CB is being dumb again. Stuff that doesn't require cargo capacity. A…

I am a huge fan of old John Deere tractors but it seems like the modern Deere company is actively trying to be evil.

That’s going to require state and federal legislation to make right-to-repair a reality. States are dragging their feet though. As “liberal” as my state of California is, it’s showing that its politicians bow to the lobby dollar of big tech companies by trying to shuffle this issue to the bottom of the agenda, year in…

Hopefully this strike puts enough of a dent in their market share that they have to abandon their horrible anti-right to repair practices. I’m sure it won’t, though.

This has me contemplating what it would be like if the people in my office had to build the stuff we make where I work.

But imagine how high the quality of the finished product will be! It’s being made by senior staff, so it must be better, right?

It takes truly insane management brain to think you can just take person with a desk job and put them on an actual production floor and not have it be a monumental disaster.

I can tell you on good authority that is probably the situation here. My first job doing junior engineering was for a dealership group with 25 Ford and Mazda stores across the Mid Atlantic. I managed their inventory across their dealers, and Jim (the owner and CEO) had a ton of exotic cars. When he was done with them…

Pretty much.  They probably put them on dealer tags the whole time too instead of registering them. 

I really want to believe that someone went in to trade their Aventador for like, 40 new Rio’s.

Based on the prices of some of these lightly used vehicles, it would not surprise me if some friend of the owner, or perhaps the owner himself, is buying exotic cars, driving them for a bit, and flipping them through the dealership.

Is there a reason that this series isn’t called “A Valiant Effort”?

It may work logically but there could be electrical differences that have to be tested out and validated. The space shuttle went through this - it used 8086 processors in critical areas. Once those were no longer manufactured, nasa scavenged them on ebay and other places. The cost of redesigning and revalidating new…

There are three technical reasons, at least. One is that packaging methods can change with die size. A second, related issue is that chip temperatures can run hotter (or sometimes cooler) when moving/shrinking circuit traces and components. And a third is that parts of the circuit can interfere with other parts once…

I totally agree. One major part of industrial engineering is obsolescence planning, and there are companies that are...not very good...about this. It’s a major issue, not very sexy, but very much a strategic risk. It’s not a good feeling to learn that one of your suppliers is no longer making parts for that…

I’m not in the automotive industry so this is somewhat speculation, but another reason not to miniaturize is simple robustness.

So, as someone with experience in this, when would you actually start looking to move to newer tech?

This is good stuff.

Yes and no. The high voltage battery needs to be completely isolated from the car when the car is off for safety reasons. So you need “something” to power the relay that makes that connection when you turn the car on. And the simplest and cheapest something is a good old-fashioned 12V system as used in billions of…