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Originally Posted by mpolli
My observation is the Germans have really good connectors but really poor quality circuit boards.
Mike
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I agree with this. The connectors on my 560SL are really beefy, and they are repairable. The only problem I've had with them has been underhood connectors getting brittle, not unreasonable for a 20 year old car. But the PCB's - bad. And it's not just that they are low-quality, but they aren't supported well. ANY circuit board vibrating and not supported well to break up harmonics will eventually fail. About 15 years ago, I worked at an electronics mfr where our new hotshot mechanical engineer had actually constructed a computer animation of PCB's vibrating at certain frequencies in our products. The frequencies happened to coincide with a truck packaging test's frequencies of a simulated trip in a semitrailer. This explained why our products were winding up DOA even after taking what looked like a "safe" trip in excellent, expensive packaging. He fixed a lot of these problems with a single $0.02 screw in the PCB and a $0.05 spacer.
Now that virtually everything is surface mount, you would think that vibration resistance would get better (?). I don't know...