and the thing, as I learned after the T sensor on my Chevy drifted, is that the engine computer makes a bunch of decisions based on what it thinks the temp is so you pretty much need it to be right. Back in the day if you had a bad sensor but you knew nothing was wrong, no real biggie. No such luck today. Seem to be a lot of things in today's engineering world where there is race on between increasing reliability of individual components vs decreasing fault tolerance of an increasingly complex system. We went through a long period with cars where net reliability kept getting better (solid state ignition, better instrumentation, cleaner fuels, better machining tolerances, more corrosion resistant materials, higher performance lubes) but we seem to be in danger of them going over the cliff with so many added bells and whistles that those gains could be lost.