Question: You can believe that there will be no recalls — only lawsuits!
>> The longer that time passes without any definitive statements by key auto >> industry officials, the more suspicious I become. Vehicles now contain >> dozens of microprocessors, most of which are dumb as dirt, but it only takes >> ONE (in an engine management system, for example) to halt a vehicle.
>> The evasiveness of the entire industry tells me that they are hiding >> something — probably not much — but SOMETHING nonetheless. I gave up my >> freelance investigation, but I would like someone else to take up where I >> left off (and to keep me apprised of your findings).
>> Keep the pressure up — the facts _MUST_ be exposed.

Answer: Gee, and I thought that every car made since the late 70’s had a timer chip that expired after 5-7 years. Wait, that was a mechanical timer built into the body someplace. On my ‘87 Escort-GT, it was located someplace on the firewall… when it expired, I got an inch or two of water inside the car every time it rained!
Seriously though, the embedded microprocessors in today’s cars are very different from today’s PC’s…. They primarily deal with time periods much smaller than a second. Sure they may store some time related information, but unlike a general purpose computer, a car’s microprocessor doesn’t need to represent any dates/times before the car was built. Who in their right mind would store the date as seconds since 1970 in a car manufactured 10 (or more) years after 1970? GM? Ford? Chrysler? Toyota? Nissan? Kia? Maybe if management was in charge of programming the engine controllers. We’re all lucky that people who know better are the ones doing the engine controller programming :-)

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