Cruze radio has its own microprocessor, actually a microcontroller that is a single chip with the processor and all of the required peripheral circuits built in. Has its own flash ram and own code that can be refreshed, can't do this at home like any other cheap digital piece of equipment.
But the same crap is used in automotive what you will find in your home equipment. Except your home is normally at 70*F not at -40*C to even 125*C in the automotive environment. So temperature can be a problem.
In the integrated circuit market, we have what is called yield rates hundred of chips are printed at the same time, but the question remains as to how well they are tested before used. Typically at least 10% hit the trashcan, but can get marginal ones as well. Same chip is used in military applications, but undergoes a lot more testing, rejects for military applications fall into the so-called consumer or commercial class. Guess where you are. You can get a marginal component or one that meets full military specifications, call this luck.
MTBF is a common engineering practice that in my mind is a big joke, mean time between failures, based on guessed parameters where the cost of paying extra for good tested parts is opposed to warranty repair costs. Typically the warranty repair costs wins out for more profits. So are you filling lucky? But based now on 36 months, after this you are screwed.
But if it does last 36 months, normally you should be okay.
Another huge joke is self diagnoses in automotive, as opposed to military, worked in both, secondary or tertiary references are used, won't find any of this in consumer grade automotive. So a component can be way out of tolerance and still not generate a code. And if the CEL comes on pointing to a particular component, that component may be just the victim of another component failure.
This is why your dealers are dead lost. We use to provide technical specifications for each component, but the attorneys stepped in to greatly eliminate this or at least restrict this all important information. Claim this increases the companies liability.
For about the first 70 years of automotive manufacture, and ignition system consisted of the ignition switch to the high side of a coil, ballast were added later, to the ignition points to ground. Very simple that anyone could deal with. Today the same thing is done with millions of transistors depending on code stored in rather very temporary flashram. Namely to reach EPA requirements.
