41–50 of 517 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why in the world did GM make a car with the name Citation? Are there any good connotations of that word?
There’s also the aircraft series: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_Citation_family Those are named after a race horse. Car may also be for the race horse. Or maybe the car’s named after the plane(s).
My wife's car right now is low on windshield wiper fluid. It warns us at a particular spot while we are driving. Not a particular distance from home, a specific geolocation. First thoughts were that it was the amount of time as she went to something and came back. But it does the on screen and audible warning at that location every time, no matter what was driven before that, whether it was 5 minutes, 5 miles, an hou…
Is there anything notable about the terrain at that point? A sharp turn, bumpy road, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm going to armchair and guess that your brother needed a new battery. My (GM) car gets really funky startup behavior when the battery gets old. It will often turn the starter fine, but the electronics can get stuck in weird states until I disconnect the battery (essentially a hard reset).
If it was surrounded by a crowd of engineers, surely someone would have tested the battery?
My wife's car right now is low on windshield wiper fluid. It warns us at a particular spot while we are driving. Not a particular distance from home, a specific geolocation. First thoughts were that it was the amount of time as she went to something and came back. But it does the on screen and audible warning at that location every time, no matter what was driven before that, whether it was 5 minutes, 5 miles, an hou…
This reminds me of a GM minivan that my youngest brother-in-law drove, back in the '80's. He'd gotten it from his father, who was a career GM automotive engineer - and complained that, occasionally & randomly, it would not start. It seemed like the minivan's whole electrical system was dead... Brother-in-law was known to be "not so good" with cars - so his automotive engineer father didn't take the complaints serious…
Heisenbugs are manifestations of whole-system design failings, where projects are not engineered to facilitate troubleshooting, subsystems are strongly coupled, and everything is just barely held together with baling wire and bubblegum. That GM vehicles from this infamous era would suffer from maddening, mysterious electrical glitches makes perfect sense.
> Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pickup. Vanilla is the most popular flavor? That makes me skeptical of the whole story. ;-)
Also, vanilla is good.
My wife's car right now is low on windshield wiper fluid. It warns us at a particular spot while we are driving. Not a particular distance from home, a specific geolocation. First thoughts were that it was the amount of time as she went to something and came back. But it does the on screen and audible warning at that location every time, no matter what was driven before that, whether it was 5 minutes, 5 miles, an hou…
On some days it would work perfectly all day long, but on others it would stop working between those hours.
The biggest clue was it would always work perfectly on overcast days, but on sunny days this strange behaviour would manifest again.
Turns out the problem was related to the mouse being a cheap mouse. The case had very thin plastic.
The mouse was a ball mouse, and it worked by shining an LED into a sensor on each of the X and Y axes. On sunny days the sun would completely overpower the sensor due to the plastic case being very thin and on overcast days it would not. On sunny days the mouse would only work when the sun had moved around the sky to cast a shadow over where the mouse was being used.
Perfectly logical but baffling at first.
This reminds me of a GM minivan that my youngest brother-in-law drove, back in the '80's. He'd gotten it from his father, who was a career GM automotive engineer - and complained that, occasionally & randomly, it would not start. It seemed like the minivan's whole electrical system was dead... Brother-in-law was known to be "not so good" with cars - so his automotive engineer father didn't take the complaints serious…
GM cars are notorious for (sometimes) developing strange problems that would have you think they are possessed with the devil. (Despite post-1990 GM cars being near peers to Japanese cars for reliability overall)