PCBs are cheap to manufacture and are usually coated, to ensure longevity, requiring significant effort to replace any parts.

Do you want your ABS controller to be seated like that? Seems like a genuinely terrible idea.

Just sell me the whole ABS controller then.

That is actually the hard part, odds are the chips inside are not longer made. When making ABS controllers the OEM guesses how many replacements will be needed and buys that many extra to put in a environment controlled warehouse - when they guess wrong they run out and if the parts inside are no longer made the rest of us are out of luck. If the chips inside are still made the OEM will generally order more (if they run out before the expected date that implies there is a lot of demand so it is worth ordering more).

The expected date above is for normal care lifespan. If you are a collector good luck.

What do you expect manufacturers to do exactly? They all sell replacement parts, it is good business.

You obviously can't expect them to support models forever. Even right now their suppliers keep open ancient manufacturing lines for the ancient chips used in these controllers.

>If you are a collector good luck.

Good thing that is a small minority of, usually well off, people.

Chip manufactures have very different business from car part manufactures. The car parts manufacturers would love to sell me a new ABS controller, but the chips that go into it are not made anymore and they don't have the ability to get them made in many cases. Most often because they just bought some common part like a 16 bit CPU - when they have their own custom chips they can maybe find someone else to make them (though sometimes this isn't possible)

No, I probably don’t, you’re right. I took a look at some of the pin outs for chips in my old car and even those are pretty massive in some cases. I’m not sure how you’d ensure they were seated and secure with such little movement. I suspect these are normally soldered and even epoxied in place.

The surface area of each pin of a plug-in automotive fuse is somewhere around 100-150 mm^2. Vibration, thermal expansion/contraction, etc is easily handled with that much area for maintaining contact.

How big do you want your automotive-grade chips to be?

I have a feeling they could be larger, but I’m very naive in this field. Great point though, I see that the pin outs are fairly expansive on some of the chips in my old car, and they’re likely worse in my newer car. It would be difficult to achieve any kind of secure connection without solder and epoxy.