Thread: New LRs and electronics

Sounds about right, I had my compressor replaced when the wheel well filled with water because the back hatch leaked during a heavy down pour.

As for the 23 control units, this is only the beginning, you are going to see even more, in a lot more makes, as time goes by.

The cost of the micro controllers that make up the control units is now so low that it’s cheaper to fit these than the cost of the wire it replaces and that what it’s all about. Eventually there will only be something like 4 wires running around the vehicle and these 4 wires will power and control everything in the vehicle.

As it is right now, if you get Land Rover driving lights fitted to your new D3 after you bought it, the dealer has to tell the onboard computer that there are there otherwise they don’t work.

These new electronic controls may or may not work to everybody’s liking but I personally think they will eventually make driving heaps safer and loads easier BUT a lot more costly to fix IF something goes wrong but as electronic replacements for mechanical parts have proven to be at least 100 times more reliable, chances are the replacement costs will be rare.

Cheers.

Well I wonder what the resale and the life span of these new electronic toys will be?
As a young bloke I enjoyed and could afford to work on my Series IIA with a simplistic tool kit and a bit of common sense.
I don't want to have to have a degree in electrical engineering just to self fix my car...I don't know where it is all going but I do know personally I don't like the direction...now where did I tie up my Horse...

I think Drivesafe is right about the way the motor industry as a whole is going. The problem is already with us in a form he may not have thought of - for example I have seen relatively new (5yo) agricultural motor bikes scrapped because the cost of a replacement ignition module is more than the value of the bike - and the only way of testing it is to replace it.

Unfortunately, until these modules become more or less standardised (like light bulbs, batteries etc became in the 1920s) there will be a major problem with supply of replacement parts because as he says, faults are rare, and hence little reason for stocking many spares. And electronics advances so rapidly that there is little chance of it being possible to make a new batch of the modules even after five years, so you will only have available secondhand spares by the time a vehicle is ten or fifteen years old - and since the need for these will be rare, how long will a wrecking yard keep them before they end up in landfill? I think we are looking at a generation of cars that may be literally impossible to keep on the road, unlike all their predecessors.

I think where you have a couple of wires going around the car to the controllers is called multiplexing there was talk of only needing one wire that would supply power and carry the data,there are some heavy machines that use radio controllers between the two halves of the machine(loaders, articlating trucks) this means another battery and charging system running off the drive line.

Hi stevo, the system that just about all the manufacturers have settled on is based on Bosch’s CAN ( Controlled Area Network ) protocol so most of the modules will eventually be available through third party manufacturers and you will see things like the radio control type equipment be integrated with CAN.

Although there are different versions of setting CAN up and communicating with it, there is also a large number of companies manufacturing CAN specific micro controllers and this in itself will bring prices down big time.

It will eventually get to the stage where, when you buy a set of driving lights, the kit will have a module instead of the plain old relay and instead of having to do heaps of wiring you will simply connect the module to a power cable running around the vehicle and you simply run the wire from each driving light to the module. That’s it, no running wire to switches that have to be fitted inside the cab or trying to work out which of the headlight’s wires you have to find and connect to.

Fitting a new sound system with 10 or more speakers and not having to run one single speaker wire.

Need an additional power socket in the rear to run a fridge, fit a module near where you want the new power socket and the jobs just about done.

By the way, these modules will be no dearer than the cost of a relay.

Personally, I can’t wait to see what sort of advantages these new systems are going to bring.

Cheers.

Yeah,

The thought of all those electronics drove me to tears the other day as I cruised along a gravel road sitting in the lovely leather seat at a climate controlled 22deg with the engine almost in-audable through the crisp sound of the Harmon Kardon; before going into sand mode to drive over a deep sandy rural lot.

It was hard to take!

Based on the performance of Land Rover so far, do you really think that they would install thick enough cabling to run a fridge? They have totally ignored customer requirements for oh 50 years , so why would they change now?
I will bet that the cabling will be juuuust thick enough to run what is there eg taillights, and no thicker to save weight, which is after all why they went to multiplexing , LED lights will further reduce power requirements and thus installed cable size..
NO I bet that in the future we will still be running a wire from the battery, and pulling out the trim etc etc.
Driving lights maybe as they will be options on upmarket models.
Regards Philip A

Getting a bit off subject but I beg to differ with you.

Land Rover have continuously lead the way in both mechanical and electronic advances, so much so that at times they have got it wrong but no matter what they did, you always had a safe option. You could go buy a Toyota and I’m not having a dig here because if you look at both Land Rover’s and Toyota’s history you will see what I’m on about.

Every time Land Rover develops something new, whether they get it right or not, about a decade later, good old copy cat Toyota comes out with what is usually an elcheapo version of the same thing except Toyota have taken 10 or so years to get it right.

We would not like it if Land Rover started to do the same thing by delaying new technologies for more development time because everybody else would have copies by the time Land Rover launched the new technology.

It’s a case of “ You can choose to drive the leader or select to trail behind in a poor copy “.

I know which one I want and am prepared to put up with a few teething events.

Cheers