In article ,
Parish wrote:
Yes, thanks Clint - and everyone else who replied - it seems that for
once something has been done that actually benefits the motorist. I
certainly remember when electronics first started appearing in cars that
they were proprietary and so tied you to the main dealers;

They didn't necessarily as early electronics had little or no built in
diagnostics. It was just that they were (and still are) so foreign to the
average mechanic. I've got an old Rover SDI which was one of the first UK
cars fitted with electronic fuel injection, and pretty well all the
testing of the components can be done with a decent DVM that includes
dwell measurement. Of course at the end of the day, things like the ECU
can only really be verified by substitution. However, the failure rate of
these is very much less than the average mechanic might believe.

I didn't
realize things had changed. Duly noted for future reference.

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*Why is "abbreviated" such a long word?

Dave Plowman London SW
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