I will try to tell a story that might have nothing to do with anything. We have a 2006 diesel pusher Class A motorhome with a 400 Cummins engine. The way this particular vehicle was designed and built it has a tendency to overheat on hills. Many of these vehicles do. In the owners manual - once we get around to reading it - all component manufacturers - engine - transmission - chassis - say you must watch the temp gauge on hills and downshift to keep RPMs up around 2,000 and if temp keeps rising you need to slow down more and downshift more to keep RPMs up. So of course we did not know this at first and we had some overheating problems and had to go in to a dealer to try to find out what was going on. They hooked up their diagnostics computer to the connection points under the dash and they could read our history - when we overheated - for how long - what our RPMs were - what our temps were - etc. So how much can one of these diagnostic computers determine? And what does it tell them? If we do not drive the vehicle according to the method the manufacturers put down in writing and we destroy the engine because we did not drive it properly by downshifting and we continually cause it to overheat are we responsible for the damage and does the warranty cover damage we caused due to improper operation of the vehicle? Point here being that our experience was that the computer they used on our engine told them a lot about the history and operation of the engine. Is this true of other engines? How long does this history stay in the computer? What levels of improper operation of the equipment would be cause for voiding the warranty? How much would it cost us to get repairs done on equipment failure not covered by warranty due to improper operation? Questions should be asked and answered to determine true levels of risk before taking on those risks. What is the best source of information for us to determine risk levels and what we can do about them? Who is responsible if we do not know the risks? Who is responsible if we do our risk assessment based on information we get from the wrong sources? Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread.
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