Capitol wrote:


Andy Dingley wrote:

_Why_ a washing machine (or CH boiler) controller PCB has less
complexity than a Tamagotchi, yet requires more maintenance overhead
than a space shuttle, is still beyond me.


IMO this is because they are not designed for the US market, where
when it breaks too readily, the lawyers file a class action and the
resulting publicity kills the company. IME US cheaper, white goods,
products are relatively reliable and very cheaply repairable, compared
to their European counterparts, performance can be another matter. I
suspect (based on experience of designing mass production items for a
couple of US companies) that they also do more product abusive life
testing. The US also employs older design engineers, who have already
made a lot of their mistakes and learned from them. The European ideal
is to make older engineers redundant as they are too expensive and then
to subcontract out the design and manufacturing to the cheapest source
with no back up in the form of tough product testing. Some European
products, I now note, have longer warranties, so we will see if the
product life actually improves.

This almost sounds like the moans about electronics in European cars!

Regards
Capitol


hmm, but what about the affect on Mercedes of being merge / bought out /
? with Chrysler. Now Mercedes cars are near the bottom of the
reliability stakes, because of the use of American design models!

Having said that, America does generally have a good reputation for
engineering.


--
--
Peter D

The information contained in this post may not be published
in, or used by http://www.diyprojects.info