Ford's answers to the NHTSA 6.7 Investigation

BenK wrote:
NewsW

Totally agree that automotive is one of the toughest nuts and then factor in
the idiot and gorilla (both user and advisers) out there who WILL use
it wrong and/or break it to then blame the OEM

BGA's are okay with just solder, but it is not in a high vibration
environment...the carrier takes that away, but for open contacts of
a switch, even with a designed in wipe, hard gold is the only way for me

They used BGAs in mission critical and safety critical systems??????

We had plenty of problems with BGAs in much less sensitive CE applications like Playstations and xBoxes, which as you know, both blew up on them because of excess heat, tin whiskering, and solder coming apart.

The whole move to de-lead was to me, not so smart and the transition poorly managed ---- with a drop dead deadline rather than a gradual phase in.

When I looked at the laboratory and prototype scale solutions put forward, I kept asking, "does this scale" and "what do we know long term" and I kept getting stonewalled.

That is, until the $$$ bills came in from the bright ideas.

If you recall, certain issues with that infamous accelerator pedal also was related to lead free solder, and the problem was never formally fixed per se.

What was fixed was a high level interrupt override that basically, overrode many other lower level commands.

I have my own theory as to what happened, as to how the failure cascaded, but it didn't earn me a place on the official investigation team.