Yeah Veektor, that's my new gig.
Sellin' those little planes and their control systems like hotcakes. It's really cool! Commute starts with a postcard view of Mt. Hood, then I get to work with cool people, on cool stuff. Also really neat to be at a smaller company, where my input actually matters. Collins was so big, as a junior engineer I was just a cog in the works. At Insitu, I have a lot more responsibility. Makes for a far less boring workday.
Anyway, figured out why I'm such a curmudgeon about these newfangled electronic-driven vehicles. Simply put: I wouldn't have designed them they way. Doing engineering in the Aero world, I'm used to stuff that goes through a "reliability & maintainability" group. If it's not both reliable and maintainable, then it does not pass go. Newer consumer vehicles (cars & motorcycles) were not designed for maintainability, and they take shortcuts that lead to unreliability. The maintainability is one or two things: A) they're too stupid to design something that can actually be worked on by human beings after it's been assembled, or B) they've deliberately designed things so that you have to go to the dealer. So they're either greedy pigs, or they're incompetent.
And to expand on a comment Bendy made about trying to troubleshoot wiring... it's the PCBs that are a real bizatch, especially when they're embedded in plastic housings that weren't designed to come back apart.
Otherwise, Mudder makes a good point about the state of tune. That does make a difference, and my SS could probably use a good TB sync and fuel mapping. After test riding it with stock pipes and seeing that it purred like OEM (still had the on/off syndrome), my guess is it was never tuned or chipped for the Remus pipes. Need to get it on the dyno at EDR and see what's up.
So anyway, I'm just bizatching about the electronic stuff because it isn't built to aero industry standards, it's not designed the way I'd do it, and much of it is disposable (and bloody expensive to replace). I probably wouldn't mind the electronically controlled motos as much if the user could actually work on them.
