I just read the following news:”NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Volkswagen of America is recalling about 71,000 of the German automaker’s new 2011 Jetta sedans for a wiring problem that could cause the car to turn off when the horn is used. Under certain rare circumstances using the horn could cause a short circuit that would, in turn, cause an electronic part called a converter box to disconnect from the car’s power supply, a VW spokeswoman said. The converter box supplies power to various components, including the headlights, wipers and the engine controller. Cutting off power to the engine controller shuts off the car’s engine.”
Reading above news item made me to have the following questions and concerns:
1) Does Volkswagen have a manufacturing plant in Iran? This seems to be a kind of mistake that IRI is good at making like their bridge that resulted in cars being faced with incoming traffic.
2) 2011 Jetta would not be a good car for me. I rely on my horn a bit too much. Once a car has shown a tendency to have the problem of stopping when honk used, I have to take them off of list of cars that I will ever drive.
3) May be maintenance engineers on Iran Air have to get together with design engineers on 2011 VW jetta. The same inadvertent/Accidental technology; a short circuit design in this case, that results in stopping a car when honk is used, can intentionally be used. Iran Air planes can be modified so as a last measure honking a horn will stop the plane from crashing. Don’t say that :”but planes don’t have horns”, somehow for an Iran Air operated plane seems appropriate to have a horn. So just like a pilot hears “Pull up” when Ground Proximity Warning System senses too close distance to ground, mainteannce workers on airport ground, and pilots of nearby planes can be warned with a horn and in between message, of “plane danger, plane danger” or in this case, “khatar, havapayma, khatar havapayma”. But wait a minute, stopping the plane midair, will not prevent crash of two airplanes, the other plane has to stop too. Forget about that one. That would be explaining Traffic Alert and collision avoidance system (TCAS) on airplane and you did not pay enough to be educated in Avionics, just enough to read a supposedly funny blog :). However, I will be nice and provide a simple link to definition of TCAS so I can show Ari that I can educate readers too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_system
4) My final question:”How many engineers did it take for VW to screw up the horn design like this”?
