its a sad time in automobile history. unfortunatly incompetant vehicle owners have brought all these nannies and warning systems upon themselves and thus everyone suffers in the end. traction control, locker nanny, swaybar nanny, tpms, parking sensors, neutral safety switches, daytime runnig lights.......the sea of idiots have forced manufacturers to impose all that garbage
I actually feel the opposite. Having started my wrenching days on 20R engines with adjustable valves, carburetor, distributor, points, and an emissions system vacuum hose nightmare I gotta say that current day wrenching is greatly simplified by the electronics. In most cases it's a matter of pulling a code and replacing a part. The time spent searching for the problem is greatly reduced.
Similarly, I'm very grateful for things like ABS, stability control, collision avoidance, traction control,, and improved emissions. While I don't dispute the pleasure of occasionally driving an old-school analog automobile, for the majority of my uses I'm very happy to have the electronic comfort and assistance. Save my bacon more than once to be sure.
IMO, the downside isn't the electronics, it's the turnover and lack of training and experience of the people in the mechanical bays. There are often a dozen oil changers for every true mechanic. As Deming said, 'Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets'. In this case, the shop repair system is designed to allow a new mechanic to quickly repair a vehicle with the absolute minimum cost in training and shop time. This doesn't always play well when things get more complicated than what the computer says. And there aren't enough experienced mechanics in the shop to diagnose problems that live a layer below the surface diagnosis. But then we're also not willing to pay the shop rate that would encourage career employees to stay. Same as complaining about the pitch of airline seats when we show almost zero preference when booking. And so we're left with a system that solves the easy problems efficiently but allows the more complex to linger until there becomes sufficient motivation to really understand what's going on.
