OTOH, given how all consumer electronics contain complex microcontrollers running some RTOS and usually a buffered RTC, would it be inconceivable to have some periodic check running there, and after 2 years of time, changing some voltage on some path to ever so slightly higher, spinning some fan just a little bit slower, doing other weird pwm stuff, and have it cooked? Who would ever know with obfuscated firmware, deeply embedded and encrypted?

I'd say it would be less complicated to implement than the stuff which caused Diesel-Gate.