I had a Dodge truck with a similar problem but it was never resolved. If I went to an ATM or convenience store on a muggy day when I left my truck transmission stuck in 1st gear. It was obviously the short time stopped and start up again but no clue why. The dealership looked a few times even taking it for a drive with a test tool but nothing happened. It did it until I sold the truck for about 17 years.
Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
151–160 of 517 posts
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#152This 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…
I have a 2009 Mercedes SLK that had the same symptom. It was absolutely fine 99.9% of the time, but one time in a thousand it wouldn't even try to start. No clicks, no indication that it even knew I was in there turning the key. Just dead. And then seven or eight hours later... it would start fine, as if nothing ever happened. Couldn't correlate it to anything. Had it towed to a service center a few times when this h…
wonder if removing and replacing the fuse box (reseating all the fuses, reconnecting all wires, etc) would have done the same thing? sigh.
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#153[deleted]
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Tell me you only use memory managed languages without telling me...
please expand to include more explanation for why you think this is a memory managed lanugage problem. I used C and C++ professionally for years and ran into all sorts of issues like this. Interaction between subsystems doesn't care at all what language you're using inside each component, they care about design patterns and architecture.
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a 2009 Mercedes SLK that had the same symptom. It was absolutely fine 99.9% of the time, but one time in a thousand it wouldn't even try to start. No clicks, no indication that it even knew I was in there turning the key. Just dead. And then seven or eight hours later... it would start fine, as if nothing ever happened. Couldn't correlate it to anything. Had it towed to a service center a few times when this h…
I had a truck do this kind of behavior once. Finally figured it out after months when I moved a wire and it started, then move the wire close to another wire and it would no longer start. These were wires that would typically be close, so my guess is one of the wires was now generating enough noise that it was bleeding over into some other system and causing it to fail. As the car bounced around the proximity of the…
EMF can do some seemingly crazy things. I built a kiln controller and the initial version would sometimes randomly lockup, reboot in the middle of an operation, or do other seemingly "crazy" things. Sometimes even the hardware watchdog would stop functioning.
Turns out contactors pulling in and out a 5000w load generates some strong EMF and sometimes that EMF is enough to cause random glitches to the CPU or other hardware.
Switching to high power solid state relays completely solved the problem while keeping the system compact. The actual silicon transistor was so big you could have drawn the mask by hand and it was attached to a heat sink half the size of an adult fist. I was initially worried about reliability but (knock on wood) 8 years later the system is still working without issue.
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#156We had a similar problem at work in the late 90s. A member of staff reported that their mouse would stop working between certain hours of the day. It had apparently been okay in the morning, stopped working over lunchtime then started again later. 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…
I had a similar problem, but in the opposite direction. My cable internet speeds at home were fairly good (for the US, anyway), but sometimes would absolutely bottom out. Not dead, just glacially slow. After troubleshooting everything under the sun, I came to realize that the problems would happen not when it was raining per se, but when it was heavily foggy or misting. Normal to heavy rain was fine.
Called the cable company, tech came out. Everything inside was fine, but the cable from the main line to the house had a tiny cut in one spot, not enough to really affect the connection, but enough for ambient moisture to work its way in and foul the connection.
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#157> Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pickup. This feels very contrived; who organises a supermarket like that? "Where's the ice-cream?" "Which flavour? We keep them separately, to make an anecdote work." (Like, the moral of the story still works, but the specifics feel very dubious...)
Hell, I'm skeptical vanilla is the most popular flavor, although that may change by year.
At the very least, chocolate is neck and neck and on the only sales chart I could find (which I think was for the UK?) chocolate sold more than vanilla.
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a 2009 Mercedes SLK that had the same symptom. It was absolutely fine 99.9% of the time, but one time in a thousand it wouldn't even try to start. No clicks, no indication that it even knew I was in there turning the key. Just dead. And then seven or eight hours later... it would start fine, as if nothing ever happened. Couldn't correlate it to anything. Had it towed to a service center a few times when this h…
wonder if removing and replacing the fuse box (reseating all the fuses, reconnecting all wires, etc) would have done the same thing? sigh.
It would have required removing and replacing the box itself... the fuse box has a connector going into the back side, and then a separate harness inside the box that splits out the individual fuse sockets; that connector seems to have been the problem. At various points I swapped/reseated every fuse in there trying to fix things, never occurred to me to remove the box itself.
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a 2009 Mercedes SLK that had the same symptom. It was absolutely fine 99.9% of the time, but one time in a thousand it wouldn't even try to start. No clicks, no indication that it even knew I was in there turning the key. Just dead. And then seven or eight hours later... it would start fine, as if nothing ever happened. Couldn't correlate it to anything. Had it towed to a service center a few times when this h…
What happened with the human-powered airplane?? Is that a thing normies can do?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DaSH_PA
I don't know if Alec Proudfoot counts as a normy, but DaSH PA flew a bunch of times, with many different pilots. That particular event, which was an attempt to try some records, was a bust; there had been rain recently and the dry lake beds weren't. Landing gear was a recurring problem (light weight and robust don't go together), and even some last-minute attempts to build a runway out of 4x8 plywood sheets was unsuccessful.
I have some very, very fond memories of flight days at Moffett, though. I had gotten to work on the Moffett runway for work previously (so cool out at the bay end of the runway at night, totally silent), and getting back there to help run ground ops (including assembling DaSH PA before sunrise so first flights would hit the calmest possible air) was just lovely.
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why in the world did GM make a car with the name Citation? Are there any good connotations of that word?
I think it's funny how GM came out with the "Cavalier" to compete with Honda's "Civic". Or that matter, there was a Chevy Cobalt (e.g. a "Kobold" is a demon that causes mine accidents) or an AMC Gremlin.
There's always the business-school legend about the failure of the Nova with the Spanish market.