Firstly, I do not believe the D3 to be the first electrical gremlin vehicle, take a look at the P38 for that. I have been going into the electronics of my landrover (said P38) far deeper then any mechanic should and probably would, perhaps only matched by the designers of the bloody thing :) and I have made some observations. Vehicles are very noisy environments (electrically) and most electronics do not like that. This is the main reason CANbus as a protocol exists and is used within cars as it uses differential voltage which can handle, in theory, the higher noise levels for example.
What landrover (and lucas by extension) seems to have gone for however is that they use 12v systems to reduce electrical interference, ie in simple terms: the "arduino" or micro-controller and it's constituent parts work on 12V rather than 5v or even 3v. This in turn means that any voltage drop below 12v has serious consequences for the various components in the car. The japanese were way ahead on electronics in the 90's and have probably used the experiences they acquired during that time in modern vehicles whereas landrover does not have that benefit it seems. In other words, landrover did what was reasonable at the time and like every choice, every up has a down and they chose this. :)
Also, having worked for and with several car brands and embedded developers let us not underestimate the complexity of modern vehicles. An average BMW these days has around 80! "ecu's" and literally has what you could see as a network with vlan's to separate critical components like ABS and airbags from the less critical stuff like lights to the "optional" stuff like your car stereo. A modern car is a driving datacentre...
Anyway, does not mean that jaguar/landrover or any other brand is to be excused for their crappy quality in electronics but arguably they have been overdoing the plumbing lately :)
Back to the ineos; since imho the most important component of the vehicle (the engine) is made by BMW and that comes with it's own set of ECU's over which ineos has virtually no control whatsoever other than get a customized fuel map perhaps I guess this is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing would be that the engine/gearbox combination is used very ubiquitously and we get a lot of R&D and bug fixes for free. The down side is that this combo was never meant to be used the way it will be in the ineos and if we (or rather ineos) wants improvements they will have to go through the business orifice that is BMW who is probably less than impressed by the sales figures of ineos.
To drive this point home: LPG was very hip in my country some 30 years ago and we had loads of cars driving around using it. Honda back then was still a hugely popular brand but their cylinder heads were not keen on the use of LPG which burned hotter. So the national branch of honda contacted Japan to ask if they could please fix that for our market. They looked at the sales figures of a mere 100k cars and decided that it was cheaper and more worth their while to just deal with the handful of warranty claims and leave it at that.
tl;dr The reliability of electronics has vastly improved. Ineos has the advantage of "a high tide lifts all boats. Unless they start selling real numbers any bugs will be hard to deal with. Hardware (drivetrain etc) components with defects or weak spots will probably be dealt with in the second version.
Cheers,
-P
