Electronics quality can vary certainly as we all know of very reliable cars and those to stay away from.
My career was as a product development engineer for a major computer company and reliability engineering was a major part of any product design. That same company was a prime contractor to NASA and it's computers on the ground and in space played a major role during the Apollo missions. It was a two way street with much being learned from NASA about designing complex high reliability systems.
The least significant parts in any product design went through a qualification cycle to assure reliability for at least a 100,000 hour power on life cycle. More critical parts went far beyond this benchmark. Automotive application requirements based on temperature, humidity, altitude, vibration, power, contaminants etc required the electronics to pretty much meet what used to be referred to military spec comonents. As parts designed for military spec has dwindled to such a small percentage of production (i.e. consumer, automotive, industrial electronics parts has grown in orders of magnitude) the highest reliability parts now are generically referred to as automotive grade parts.
From automotive life cycle and related fields, a rule of thumb of correlating 100,000 miles in a vehicle to around 5000 hours engine run time has been used for many years.
A well designed vehicle to go at least 200,000 miles again be considered rule of thumb to be on average around 10,000 hours run time. If the lowest level of qualified electronic parts are being selected e.g. 100,000 hour qualified parts, then the life cycle expectation of electronics portion would be around 10 times the life cycle of the mechanical parts.
To be able to manufacture in the production volumes done with vehicles incorporating the use of electronics parts , the same concept of built-in diagnostic and self test capability that had to be built into large scale computer systems at the chip or module level in the '60s and matured into extensive use in the '70s are now in just about all significant scale electronics systems had to be similarly used in vehicles. My washer, dryer and electric stove have built in diagnostics. :<)
Out of economic necessity in the early days, I started doing my own mechanic work on my cars since the late '60s and continue to do so today, except for a couple of really major jobs I didn't want to deal with. Through that experience I have seen the amount of maintenance work needed to keep a car in good condition dwindle to a fraction of the amount of work in the '60s. And I've seen the life cycle of the relative few cars we've owned grow to a minimum expectation of at least 200,000 relatively trouble free miles to 300,000 miles. My current vehicles.. an 11 year old Toyota Prius and a 17 year old Toyota 4Runner 4x4. Electronic problems to date: zero Mechanical problems: a few but relatively minor. I think I can say it here in a Kubota forum, the Japanese manufacturers have a well earned reputation for building some pretty good stuff. The Prius is ridiculously simple to maintain, the drive train is mechanicly simpler than a standard vehicle, two electric motors and one planetary gear set does the work of a standard automotive transmission, not to mention generating and using stored power for better economy. btw battery life is averaging longer the typical automatic transmission life and is cheaper and easier to replace than most of today's typical automatic transmission removal & overhaul cost.
The skills and tools to be my own mechanic has changed as more and more electronics and sensors have found their way into vehicles.
As part of being able to work on my own vehicles, it has been a standard practice to buy the factory service manuals for those vehicles and equip myself with the relatively inexpensive diagnostic code readers (now my cell phone with an application and a bluetooth OBDII interface adapter). Same for the Kubota tractor, bought all the factory service manuals for the tractor and accessories.
I find the tractor manufacturers trying to prevent owners from maintaining their own equipment to be abhorrent practice. That was attempted with cars many years ago and laws were passed that forced the standardization most diagnostic code information and parts and documentation to be available not only to owners, but independent garages, rather than access being limited to authorized dealers. As cars have got to be more complex the "good" manufacturers have supported the education and dissemination of information and provide wholesaler parts distribution channels for maintaining their vehicles.
Examples for Toyota:
http://www.autoshop101.com/
https://techinfo.toyota.com/techInf...echinfo.toyota.com%2Fpublic%2Fmain%2Fmdc.html
and certainly Kubota repairs and parts information is widely available on the internet
Anybody other manufacturer who doesn't do likewise. I boycott with my purchasing dollars.
There are really two different issues here, learning to deal with electronics in today's vehicles and the original topic in this thread, the restriction of parts, information, etc aimed toward preventing owner or independent garage maintenance and repair of equipment.
