There was a time when cars were simple, powerful machines. That time has gone. These days, cars are complicated, efficient appliances wrapped around simple, powerful machines, with few so successful as Toyota's highly-computerized hybrid, the Prius.
Sure, these things will be next to useless when the aliens attack and set off EM pulses to shut our toys down, but in the meantime, rooting around in that maze of chips, wiring and gadgets is a sci-fi epic unto itself. Automotivedesignline.com is 3 articles deep into a 7-article Prius teardown, having already dissected the fundamental electronics, the digital dashboard and the skid control module.
Pictured is just one of the Prius' many PCBs, complete with accelerometer chips, a quarter-kilobyte of non-volatile memory, three power controllers and a 32-bit CPU, with its own memory cache, to control the lot. And this is just for the airbag.
Inside the Toyota Prius: Part 1 - The airbag control module [automotivedesignline.com]
