The mitsubishi and honda cars I used to buy all the time had one major issue. When the check engine light came on you pulled over immediately and waited for a tow truck.
My current little mercedes threw up a check engine light a few months ago; fortunately a few blocks from where I normally have my cars serviced. Drove it to the workshop. The mechanic said no problems (if it is not making a noise, hmm) and booked in 3 days in the future… said it would be fine to keep driving.
Well heck… it has predictive failure, it will advise when any important part is likely to fail soon. When it was booked in they found the part in warning state, reset the error flag on the computer to maintenance pending and ordered the part.
The bad thing about the car is it is continental, the part took six weeks to arrive from Europe so thankfully it wasn’t an important part. It was just a thermostat that if I was driving in a country burried under snow controlled the heating of fuel before it went into the engine… in nice warm NZ no issues.
But, it is nice to know that, most of the time anyway, warning lights are predictive in this car rather than a problem has occured.
I do know when a real problem occurs the entire console display turns red instead of grey and sounds a really load alarm. Such as driving with the door open or moving the car without the handbrake fully disengaged; oops my bad.
It also has a status message display that I will probably eventually find annoying. It threw up a alert saying front right parking light needed attention… I have never used the parking lights and probably never will, but to clear the message it needed servicing.
The only thing it cannot predict is potholes and nails, I have had to replace two tires since I have had the car. It is rated for a steady 240Kpm (although the max the cruise control can be set to is 185Kpm) on a decent autobahn; however on the crappy pothole filled NZ roads even 100Kpm is unwise because as soon as it hits a bump the hydraulics try to raise the suspension for rough terrain, having the car adjust suspension hit up/down for every blasted pothole makes you realise how bad NZ roads really are.
Interesting how NZ manage roads, there is a passing lane heading south from carterton where the road surface was so bad they just put road cones out on it to stop anyone using the lane that was worst torn up… cones have been there for over a month, I guess that is the permanent fix.
On other roads in really bad condition I drive a lot there are ‘temporary speed restrictions’ that have been there for years; why fix a problem when you can just slow down and bottleneck traffic instead; it is cheaper to throw up a temporary speed restriction sign and leave it there forever than fix the road. And when the raod is so bad drivers have to slow down anyway so I guess it works.
