Cats and Audi's frightening electrical design

[Traurig, Scott R]

Wow, this is really weird. Are Audi owners more likely to own cats, or vice
versa? Not an anti-cat comment in the bunch, either. Just try that on other
lists! I've got two cats myself (who also like to trash dark clothing :-)

Meanwhile, I just got my hardcopy electrical manual for my A4 yesterday.
What a beast! It took me 2 hours to put it together (the cats had fun with
the discarded packing material :-). Man is it hard to read! I say this from
the perspective of an electrical engineer, not from that of a copywriter or
someone unfamiliar, as to those types I'm sure it looks terribly well
organized and though out, with all kinds of helpful references and stuff. I
just wish they would have organized it as one function per page, as opposed
to random circuit fragments per page. I had to look at 5 different pages to
fully understand the fog light circuit! The presentation of the fragment is
excellent, however :-/

Even more interesting is that there is a lot of unfused switching in the
car. This is kind of frightening to me because it leaves A LOT of
unprotected wiring and switching components. For example, the entire
headlight switch assembly is fed directly from the main power bus. The
outputs of the switch then go through a number of fuses on the way to the
lighting circuits. The total power fed to and through this switch is not
insubstantial, especially with all of us upgrading our headlights. If there
is a fault to ground in the wiring between the bus and the switch, or in the
switch itself, say hello to an electrical fire!

Regards,

Scott
98.5 A4 1.8TQ