You probably have to be quite rough with the power to cause corruption of the internal memory, but that was one of the early methods to change the mileage, before the units started checking themselves for corrupt data.
I have a MegaSquirt on one car which is an aftermarket ECU which you can buy either ready made or as a self assembly kit. As a kit it costs about
250 US dollars - little more than the retail cost of the bits. So yes, a factory made unit churned out by the thousands shouldn't cost more than the average laptop. But then car makers are notorious for excessive markup on spares.It's more than just a micro processor, though. That has to have an interface to drive the injectors and coils, etc. Which require high power devices.
Of course they DON'T
they are because they CAN
There isn't the competition
They have you by the bollocks - same as central heating pcbs
Maybe there ought to be a law stating that the sum cost of all spare parts for a Mangle Wurzler cannot be more than 110% of the cost of buying a new, assembled, Mangle Wurzler. The extra 10% to cover handling and packaging.
Ah, snag, the new price of a Mangle Wurxler would just rise to the sum cost of it's spare parts...
The DIN-radio sized PCs used in Scania trucks cost £6k each!
Loot to be made by the manufacturers. Do remember that a fair old bit of their overall revenue comes from parts sales...
I remember many years ago a factory employee was charged with stealing the bits to build an Austin Healey 3000, over a period of months. Round about
1960. He was charged with stealing some 25,000 quid. When the complete car cost under 2000.In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes
Must have been a challenge hiding the chassis under his coat
Like (as I prolly said before) a friend at MSDS in Stanmore who booked in a metal box as a mixing desk ad walked out a couple of weeks later with ... a mixing desk
cracking bit if gear it was too
They're not just PCs and they're not built from ordinary consumer grade components. The component suppliers will have signed up to guarantee long term availability of all components of the order of 10
- 15 years. There are large QA hoops to jump through, and the suppliers will have signed up to potentially massive liability penalties should anything go wrong. It's bad enough supplying into in- car infotainment systems, let alone ECUs and safety critical systems. Sales volumes are a lot less than a PC or mobile phone and a single model of car will call for multiple variants of the electronics.
MBQ
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