That is an all around terrible idea. Even in the best environments chip replacement is by no means certain and requires significant expertise. This is in no way sustainable or doable and obviously easily abused by manufacturers.
What if a standardized chip could get some kind of standardized pin out so it can slot into a PCB with a harness or something? Maybe not safe enough without a solid solder joint? Though we use plug-in fuses all through cars. Are they only for non-critical systems?
That is actually the hard part, odds are the chips inside are not longer made. When making ABS controllers the OEM guesses how many replacements will be needed and buys that many extra to put in a environment controlled warehouse - when they guess wrong they run out and if the parts inside are no longer made the rest of us are out of luck. If the chips inside are still made the OEM will generally order more (if they run out before the expected date that implies there is a lot of demand so it is worth ordering more).
The expected date above is for normal care lifespan. If you are a collector good luck.
What do you expect manufacturers to do exactly? They all sell replacement parts, it is good business.
You obviously can't expect them to support models forever. Even right now their suppliers keep open ancient manufacturing lines for the ancient chips used in these controllers.
>If you are a collector good luck.
Good thing that is a small minority of, usually well off, people.
The surface area of each pin of a plug-in automotive fuse is somewhere around 100-150 mm^2. Vibration, thermal expansion/contraction, etc is easily handled with that much area for maintaining contact.
How big do you want your automotive-grade chips to be?
This should be something that is pulled as a package and replaced, why would anyone be soldering anything? Do refurbishing off-site if that makes sense.
And we should trust you because...? I wouldn't trust you because of the way you insult professional technicians that work on your car, and obviously know little about the profession.
That, and if you think replacing these parts would involve soldering and not a complete module replacement, I wouldn't trust your opinion on anything electronics-related, either.
Component-level repairs died in the consumer market in the early 2000s. The only way to bring it back from the dead would be to release the complete service manuals (i.e. https://www.ebay.com/itm/266686900554)
Yeah, this article could also be summarized as: electromigration exists, news at 11. It's literally always been a problem, it just might be exacerbated by increased thermal cycling and increased high temperature conditions of computationally intensive modern vehicles.
Does it start to have an impact faster on smaller nodes? I know automotive chips have been migrating to newer nodes (like 28nm not cutting edge) in response to the chip shortage, and I’m curious if that might impact this aging effect.
Edit: read the article, this seems to be what the article suggests as well
Yes, sort of. Electromigration is well known in the industry and there are extensive design rules around making sure you don't violate those rules and hit electromigration limits within the lifetime of the product.
Most IC designers tend to design for the 100k hours at absolute worst case conditions. What is known as PVT: worst case process, voltage, and temperature corners.
Assuming they do that, the likelihood that electromigration actually being the issue is not a concern. Designers can mess up, but generally they don't want to do this... especially in automotive. Auto manufacturers will ruin them if they determine there's a design flaw like this.
> For a chip designed to last 30 years, high ambient temperatures reduced the life expectancy an extra 10% a year, so after one year the lifespan dropped to 26 years, Pateras said.
If after one year, it should have 29 years of life left but instead will last 26 then it sounds like the chips won’t last 8 years (instead of 30). Sounds bad to me.
If the math is correct, you'd have an expected life of ~10.2 years. (30*(0.9)^n - n) = 0.
That said, when someone says "it reduces the lifespan by 10%", I'm a bit skeptical of the math. Either they are not properly testing it, or the temperatures are exceeding silicon parameters.
Aren’t cars already pretty good on repairability? I know the tools necessary for diagnosing and resetting electronics can be very expensive and are more and more necessary with newer vehicles, but I believe they can still be purchased by independent repair shops. I was under the impression this was protected by law
I spoke with a BMW mechanic who said he wouldn't feel comfortable repairing his own car at his home garage because of specialised tooling they have now.
I used to make third party scan tools. My advice is don't drive a BMW farther from a dealer than you will pay a tow back. Not that they are unreliable cars, but that our tools were far better than our competitors at BMW and I wouldn't give them a passing grade. (BMW writes their own tools). Of course I left that job in 15 years ago, maybe things have changed.
For other makes of cars third party scan tools work pretty well at diagnostics.
Commodity hardware that you can replace in the field. When they're saying 3nm-whatever node chips, they mean "We put a $250 Jetson SOM in the car, but fuck you, you can't replace it without replacing a $5000 "Ai CoNtRoL sYsTeM"
For mechanical parts cars are very good. For electronics not so much. It seems like you could repair a chip with an electron microscope and other similar tools - but I've never heard of anyone trying. I have heard of taking the case off to look at the inside of chips (for processes larger than current 3nm); but not repairing issues and putting it back into service.
Electronic parts tend to go out of production. If nobody makes the failed chip anymore what can you do to repair it? If you can get the correct chip we can put the software back on it (well good luck getting that, but it is possible), but all too often parts are not available at any price.
“Our automotive customers are now at the leading edge with 5nm and 3nm chips.”
This is the problem. We know that the number of problems with silicon goes up as the feature size goes down. The older nodes are much more reliable. Not putting something on an AIC is often easier to fix, too.
The solution is to keep cars simpler so that they can use robust nodes. as a consumer, by the dumbest car that you can buy. You also want this little proprietary addons as possible so you don’t have to replace a whole module because a chip fails.
I’d like to see a whole, new, auto company funded the bed makes nice cars that are easy to repair with minimal electronics. Maybe customizable with different skins on the outside. Open interfaces in format so that they’re easy to customize on the inside.
Can't read the article but it does make you wonder.
How would they know this unless they were already making them barely good enough to last beyond the warranty period in northern climates?
Or maybe one day the only vintage cars will be same ones there are now, only the ones made without chips at all might be capable of operating beyond 30 to 50 years ever again.
The people up north may have fair warning decades later when the collectors having something like a mint 2025 Mercedes in places like Texas or Florida start having theirs die for this reason.
>How would they know this unless they were already making them barely good enough to last beyond the warranty period in northern climates?
Life time estimation for parts has existed for over 100 years. It is not a novel science.
Also a fun little exercise, what do car companies sell, besides new cars? That is right, they all sell used cars. For most car companies used cars are a huge part of their businesses model, their ideal customer buys new cars often AND sells their old car to the manufacturer, so they can sell it again.
>Or maybe one day the only vintage cars will be same ones there are now, only the ones made without chips at all might be capable of operating beyond 30 to 50 years ever again.
All cars are made to die, there is no alternative. If the owner wants to avoid that, they will have to do constant maintenance. Vintage cars do not exist because rust didn't exist in the 1990s, but because they were extremely well cared for and had significant replacements.
Car makers need cars to last for a while. That someone can trade in their 3 year old car means and there is value means that someone can afford to spend more on the new car they are buying. However they also need old cars that the poorest drive to die eventually so that there is someone all the way down looking for a different car once in a while.
Many of the parts of the car are bought from a third party who gives a discount to the OEM because they can sell replacement parts later. (put my alternator in your car, and when it wears out in 5-10 years they will buy a new one from me)
While true, classic cars are "simple" in that all of their parts can be replaced and remade in people's home garages with commercially available tools like lathes. If a chip breaks down, I doubt even in 100 years someone can make a replacement at home. In theory there will be a manufacturer or market with replacements, but it won't be easy.
It is substantially easier to replace the entire computer system of most gasoline engines if something critical like the ECU is no longer commanding the engine to deliver fuel or spark. In the US this constitutes a "defeat device" and is prohibited by federal law
It is possible to retrofit many old engines that didn't have an ECU with a modern fuel injection system.
My son drives a 1996 Buck Park Avenue which dates from the beginning of the ODB II era. We got it for about $4k but it has been through a few difficult repairs that took my son or auto techs a while to figure out. For instance the immobilizer system failed with the result that we couldn't start the car, it took a tech a lot of investigation to realize this, but once he did it wasn't hard to disable.
I suppose that hasn't been explored in the legal system currently. Most electric cars would be considered a zero emission vehicle. If you bolted a generator to an electric car that'd change its emissions. One could argue this defeats the original emissions target, but that sounds like a stretch.
Overall if the car has some sort of devices that limits, mitigates, or eliminates emissions then any modification to it can be considered a defeat device
I read it as agreeing with you by adding an interesting anecdote. Ie “yes, the old systems are easier to keep on the road. It would be possible to keep newer systems on the road with custom built parts (aftermarket ECU) but unfortunately that is illegal “
Carburetors are one of the most complex parts of a classic car and thus a bad example. If there are major carburetors problems it is probably simpler to replace it with fuel injection. (but only if a community of people work together - all the different maps and such in the ECU need to be created before you can make a useful fuel injection - this is long tedious work)
The ECU has fairly standardized interfaces, mostly CAN or just simple switching circuits on or off. You can just get a replacement ECU. These replacement ECUs generally don't do things like using the O2 sensor to adjust the fueling, so they can burn dirtier than the original ECU.
CAN is just the physical and framing layer. The data that goes over it is a whole different matter, and it's proprietary to every vendor, incompatible and generally undocumented.
For a lot of cars you can't even swap the exact same ECU between vehicles (due to bullshit like the VIN being written into it for no reason, and often no official way to change that other than "buy a new module" - so you have to hack around with reverse engineering & EEPROM programmers), let alone mix and match completely different parts.
There is good reason for this: theft protection. A long known crime model is the "chop shop" where they tow away a car, then cut it up for parts. Because the VIN is in the ECU a chop shop has less incentive to exist since there is less money in it.
It does of course make legitimate repairs harder, and probably there should be a process to write a new VIN in - but it should only be available to someone who can verify the ECU wasn't stolen (which isn't free).
EEPROM programmers and various other ways of rewriting this VIN (turnkey tools using undocumented diagnostic commands giving you unauthenticated read/write access to memory) means it's just one insignificant expense for the chop shop (as it's amortized over all their cars) vs a multi-thousand-dollar investment in money for a legitimate vehicle owner or part-time mechanic.
Neither case is easy. Making something "simple" like a new control arm or connecting rod is way beyond a typical garage shop. The electronics are not a home shop item either but replacing parts with work-alike modules is already something people do with aftermarket ECUs etc. As long as there is enough demand people will find a way to make the parts (to supply aftermarket), for example I expect the first gen NSX to be repairable for decades.
I very much doubt cars with a lot of electronics and reliant of software and increasingly network connected are going to last that long anyway. The manufacturer stops updating software after 10 years if you are lucky and then its EOL and increasingly unsafe and insecure.
While true, classic cars are "simple" in that all of their parts can be replaced and remade in people's home garages with commercially available tools like lathes.
I've an '81 VW van in my driveway that begs to differ. It's got a bad idle stabilizer. The vehicle won't start unless that electronic idle stabilizer is bypassed. It runs fine in the bypass state, and good thing, because NOS parts ran out a few years ago. There might be efforts to create a clone (haven't checked thesamba.com in a while). I'm sure a clone is doable by someone that paid more attention in electronics class than I did, but no one is going to pop one out on their garage lathe.
And that's just the electronics. It has mechanical fuel injection (fuck you, Bosch), but good luck making injectors in your home workshop. I'll not start on suspension parts whose manufacturing require a far larger hydraulic press than anyone is likely to have in their garage.
It will require different skills though. One of them may well be reverse engineering, it's not as if the owners manual for a modern car includes schematics and source code.
Because the physics is fairly well know, as I understand it. See for example these[1][2] articles from Microsemi and TI respectively, or this review paper[3] for power electronics.
>Can't read the article but it does make you wonder.
How would they know this unless they were already making them barely good enough to last beyond the warranty period in northern climates?
Sorry to be a stick in the ass, but RTFA. The Arrhenius equation is mentioned and is quite interesting.
Chips should be standardized and easily replaceable. Have a replacement schedule during regular maintenance. Problem solved.
That is an all around terrible idea. Even in the best environments chip replacement is by no means certain and requires significant expertise. This is in no way sustainable or doable and obviously easily abused by manufacturers.
Trust me, you do not want your average grease monkey soldering a new bga while doing an oil change.
I trust you but don’t like the way you call my fellows workers.
What if a standardized chip could get some kind of standardized pin out so it can slot into a PCB with a harness or something? Maybe not safe enough without a solid solder joint? Though we use plug-in fuses all through cars. Are they only for non-critical systems?
PCBs are cheap to manufacture and are usually coated, to ensure longevity, requiring significant effort to replace any parts.
Do you want your ABS controller to be seated like that? Seems like a genuinely terrible idea.
Just sell me the whole ABS controller then.
That is actually the hard part, odds are the chips inside are not longer made. When making ABS controllers the OEM guesses how many replacements will be needed and buys that many extra to put in a environment controlled warehouse - when they guess wrong they run out and if the parts inside are no longer made the rest of us are out of luck. If the chips inside are still made the OEM will generally order more (if they run out before the expected date that implies there is a lot of demand so it is worth ordering more).
The expected date above is for normal care lifespan. If you are a collector good luck.
What do you expect manufacturers to do exactly? They all sell replacement parts, it is good business.
You obviously can't expect them to support models forever. Even right now their suppliers keep open ancient manufacturing lines for the ancient chips used in these controllers.
>If you are a collector good luck.
Good thing that is a small minority of, usually well off, people.
The surface area of each pin of a plug-in automotive fuse is somewhere around 100-150 mm^2. Vibration, thermal expansion/contraction, etc is easily handled with that much area for maintaining contact.
How big do you want your automotive-grade chips to be?
This should be something that is pulled as a package and replaced, why would anyone be soldering anything? Do refurbishing off-site if that makes sense.
Trust me
And we should trust you because...? I wouldn't trust you because of the way you insult professional technicians that work on your car, and obviously know little about the profession.
That, and if you think replacing these parts would involve soldering and not a complete module replacement, I wouldn't trust your opinion on anything electronics-related, either.
Component-level repairs died in the consumer market in the early 2000s. The only way to bring it back from the dead would be to release the complete service manuals (i.e. https://www.ebay.com/itm/266686900554)
They already do this at the module level (besides the 'regular maintenance' aspect). No reason to change that.
This is common knowledge among chip designers...
Yeah, this article could also be summarized as: electromigration exists, news at 11. It's literally always been a problem, it just might be exacerbated by increased thermal cycling and increased high temperature conditions of computationally intensive modern vehicles.
Does it start to have an impact faster on smaller nodes? I know automotive chips have been migrating to newer nodes (like 28nm not cutting edge) in response to the chip shortage, and I’m curious if that might impact this aging effect.
Edit: read the article, this seems to be what the article suggests as well
Yes, sort of. Electromigration is well known in the industry and there are extensive design rules around making sure you don't violate those rules and hit electromigration limits within the lifetime of the product.
Most IC designers tend to design for the 100k hours at absolute worst case conditions. What is known as PVT: worst case process, voltage, and temperature corners.
Assuming they do that, the likelihood that electromigration actually being the issue is not a concern. Designers can mess up, but generally they don't want to do this... especially in automotive. Auto manufacturers will ruin them if they determine there's a design flaw like this.
> For a chip designed to last 30 years, high ambient temperatures reduced the life expectancy an extra 10% a year, so after one year the lifespan dropped to 26 years, Pateras said.
Doesn’t sound too bad?
If after one year, it should have 29 years of life left but instead will last 26 then it sounds like the chips won’t last 8 years (instead of 30). Sounds bad to me.
I think it does sounds really bad. After one year, 26 years lifespan. We get that by doing:
30 - (30.1 - 1) = 26.
Doing that again for the next year: 26 - (26.1 - 1) = 22.4.
So you now have 22.4 years of life vs an expected 28.
etc...
If the math is correct, you'd have an expected life of ~10.2 years. (30*(0.9)^n - n) = 0.
That said, when someone says "it reduces the lifespan by 10%", I'm a bit skeptical of the math. Either they are not properly testing it, or the temperatures are exceeding silicon parameters.
People typically own vehicles for more than one year.
Do the math. It's bad.
Can you please continue stated math for each year? You reach 0 faster than expected
Remove “auto” from the title and it’s still true
Maybe we could do what we should already be doing for a high reliability system and build the vehicle so it can be:
A) redundant, a chip failure will not cause the car to brick/be un-drivable, spacecraft have been doing this for decades...
and
B) FUCKING REPAIRABLE
Aren’t cars already pretty good on repairability? I know the tools necessary for diagnosing and resetting electronics can be very expensive and are more and more necessary with newer vehicles, but I believe they can still be purchased by independent repair shops. I was under the impression this was protected by law
I spoke with a BMW mechanic who said he wouldn't feel comfortable repairing his own car at his home garage because of specialised tooling they have now.
I used to make third party scan tools. My advice is don't drive a BMW farther from a dealer than you will pay a tow back. Not that they are unreliable cars, but that our tools were far better than our competitors at BMW and I wouldn't give them a passing grade. (BMW writes their own tools). Of course I left that job in 15 years ago, maybe things have changed.
For other makes of cars third party scan tools work pretty well at diagnostics.
Commodity hardware that you can replace in the field. When they're saying 3nm-whatever node chips, they mean "We put a $250 Jetson SOM in the car, but fuck you, you can't replace it without replacing a $5000 "Ai CoNtRoL sYsTeM"
Tell that to the people buying Telsas since 8/24 that have HW4.1.
For mechanical parts cars are very good. For electronics not so much. It seems like you could repair a chip with an electron microscope and other similar tools - but I've never heard of anyone trying. I have heard of taking the case off to look at the inside of chips (for processes larger than current 3nm); but not repairing issues and putting it back into service.
Electronic parts tend to go out of production. If nobody makes the failed chip anymore what can you do to repair it? If you can get the correct chip we can put the software back on it (well good luck getting that, but it is possible), but all too often parts are not available at any price.
Those tools are mostly based on reverse engineering and exploiting security vulnerabilities though.
this was also the case with the defective takata airbags, particularly in warm humid climates.
“Our automotive customers are now at the leading edge with 5nm and 3nm chips.”
This is the problem. We know that the number of problems with silicon goes up as the feature size goes down. The older nodes are much more reliable. Not putting something on an AIC is often easier to fix, too.
The solution is to keep cars simpler so that they can use robust nodes. as a consumer, by the dumbest car that you can buy. You also want this little proprietary addons as possible so you don’t have to replace a whole module because a chip fails.
I’d like to see a whole, new, auto company funded the bed makes nice cars that are easy to repair with minimal electronics. Maybe customizable with different skins on the outside. Open interfaces in format so that they’re easy to customize on the inside.
Can't read the article but it does make you wonder.
How would they know this unless they were already making them barely good enough to last beyond the warranty period in northern climates?
Or maybe one day the only vintage cars will be same ones there are now, only the ones made without chips at all might be capable of operating beyond 30 to 50 years ever again.
The people up north may have fair warning decades later when the collectors having something like a mint 2025 Mercedes in places like Texas or Florida start having theirs die for this reason.
>How would they know this unless they were already making them barely good enough to last beyond the warranty period in northern climates?
Life time estimation for parts has existed for over 100 years. It is not a novel science.
Also a fun little exercise, what do car companies sell, besides new cars? That is right, they all sell used cars. For most car companies used cars are a huge part of their businesses model, their ideal customer buys new cars often AND sells their old car to the manufacturer, so they can sell it again.
>Or maybe one day the only vintage cars will be same ones there are now, only the ones made without chips at all might be capable of operating beyond 30 to 50 years ever again.
All cars are made to die, there is no alternative. If the owner wants to avoid that, they will have to do constant maintenance. Vintage cars do not exist because rust didn't exist in the 1990s, but because they were extremely well cared for and had significant replacements.
Car makers need cars to last for a while. That someone can trade in their 3 year old car means and there is value means that someone can afford to spend more on the new car they are buying. However they also need old cars that the poorest drive to die eventually so that there is someone all the way down looking for a different car once in a while.
Many of the parts of the car are bought from a third party who gives a discount to the OEM because they can sell replacement parts later. (put my alternator in your car, and when it wears out in 5-10 years they will buy a new one from me)
It's not like classic cars are flawless immortals. It takes a lot to keep a classic car going and this will be no different.
While true, classic cars are "simple" in that all of their parts can be replaced and remade in people's home garages with commercially available tools like lathes. If a chip breaks down, I doubt even in 100 years someone can make a replacement at home. In theory there will be a manufacturer or market with replacements, but it won't be easy.
It is substantially easier to replace the entire computer system of most gasoline engines if something critical like the ECU is no longer commanding the engine to deliver fuel or spark. In the US this constitutes a "defeat device" and is prohibited by federal law
It is possible to retrofit many old engines that didn't have an ECU with a modern fuel injection system.
My son drives a 1996 Buck Park Avenue which dates from the beginning of the ODB II era. We got it for about $4k but it has been through a few difficult repairs that took my son or auto techs a while to figure out. For instance the immobilizer system failed with the result that we couldn't start the car, it took a tech a lot of investigation to realize this, but once he did it wasn't hard to disable.
What would a defeat device look like for an electric car?
I suppose that hasn't been explored in the legal system currently. Most electric cars would be considered a zero emission vehicle. If you bolted a generator to an electric car that'd change its emissions. One could argue this defeats the original emissions target, but that sounds like a stretch.
Overall if the car has some sort of devices that limits, mitigates, or eliminates emissions then any modification to it can be considered a defeat device
> It is substantially easier to replace the entire computer system of most gasoline engines
Verses a carburetor? Have you worked on engines before?
I read it as agreeing with you by adding an interesting anecdote. Ie “yes, the old systems are easier to keep on the road. It would be possible to keep newer systems on the road with custom built parts (aftermarket ECU) but unfortunately that is illegal “
Carburetors are one of the most complex parts of a classic car and thus a bad example. If there are major carburetors problems it is probably simpler to replace it with fuel injection. (but only if a community of people work together - all the different maps and such in the ECU need to be created before you can make a useful fuel injection - this is long tedious work)
I think that was "versus replacing a chip."
The ECU has fairly standardized interfaces, mostly CAN or just simple switching circuits on or off. You can just get a replacement ECU. These replacement ECUs generally don't do things like using the O2 sensor to adjust the fueling, so they can burn dirtier than the original ECU.
> mostly CAN
CAN is just the physical and framing layer. The data that goes over it is a whole different matter, and it's proprietary to every vendor, incompatible and generally undocumented.
For a lot of cars you can't even swap the exact same ECU between vehicles (due to bullshit like the VIN being written into it for no reason, and often no official way to change that other than "buy a new module" - so you have to hack around with reverse engineering & EEPROM programmers), let alone mix and match completely different parts.
> the VIN being written into it for no reason
There is good reason for this: theft protection. A long known crime model is the "chop shop" where they tow away a car, then cut it up for parts. Because the VIN is in the ECU a chop shop has less incentive to exist since there is less money in it.
It does of course make legitimate repairs harder, and probably there should be a process to write a new VIN in - but it should only be available to someone who can verify the ECU wasn't stolen (which isn't free).
EEPROM programmers and various other ways of rewriting this VIN (turnkey tools using undocumented diagnostic commands giving you unauthenticated read/write access to memory) means it's just one insignificant expense for the chop shop (as it's amortized over all their cars) vs a multi-thousand-dollar investment in money for a legitimate vehicle owner or part-time mechanic.
Only if it is done via EEPROM and not via something more complex. Though your point stands.
Neither case is easy. Making something "simple" like a new control arm or connecting rod is way beyond a typical garage shop. The electronics are not a home shop item either but replacing parts with work-alike modules is already something people do with aftermarket ECUs etc. As long as there is enough demand people will find a way to make the parts (to supply aftermarket), for example I expect the first gen NSX to be repairable for decades.
I very much doubt cars with a lot of electronics and reliant of software and increasingly network connected are going to last that long anyway. The manufacturer stops updating software after 10 years if you are lucky and then its EOL and increasingly unsafe and insecure.
While true, classic cars are "simple" in that all of their parts can be replaced and remade in people's home garages with commercially available tools like lathes.
I've an '81 VW van in my driveway that begs to differ. It's got a bad idle stabilizer. The vehicle won't start unless that electronic idle stabilizer is bypassed. It runs fine in the bypass state, and good thing, because NOS parts ran out a few years ago. There might be efforts to create a clone (haven't checked thesamba.com in a while). I'm sure a clone is doable by someone that paid more attention in electronics class than I did, but no one is going to pop one out on their garage lathe.
And that's just the electronics. It has mechanical fuel injection (fuck you, Bosch), but good luck making injectors in your home workshop. I'll not start on suspension parts whose manufacturing require a far larger hydraulic press than anyone is likely to have in their garage.
Guy with no experience maintaining classic cars. Good luck making carburetor diaphragms on your lathe.
It will require different skills though. One of them may well be reverse engineering, it's not as if the owners manual for a modern car includes schematics and source code.
Because the physics is fairly well know, as I understand it. See for example these[1][2] articles from Microsemi and TI respectively, or this review paper[3] for power electronics.
[1]: https://www.microsemi.com/document-portal/doc_view/124041-ca...
[2]: https://www.ti.com/lit/an/sprabx4b/sprabx4b.pdf
[3]: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/17/18/4589
>Can't read the article but it does make you wonder. How would they know this unless they were already making them barely good enough to last beyond the warranty period in northern climates?
Sorry to be a stick in the ass, but RTFA. The Arrhenius equation is mentioned and is quite interesting.