I've been reading, page by page, the manual for my new Prius and have found some interesting things buried in there. The most interesting thing I've come across is in the section describing fuses. Along with a drawing of the engine compartment fuse box there is a list noting the Fuse, its amperage, and the circuit it serves. I can figure out just about all of them, but No. 15 is the oddest. Fuse name = MAYDAY, Ampere = 10A, Circuit = MAYDAY. Anyone here know what the France MAYDAY is? Sounds a bit ominous to me.
Maybe because the engineers needed a name for it before the marketing team did? I see things like that all the time in my line of work - us engineers give something a name that might be descriptive (if nerdy) or funny or otherwise unintended/unsuitable for public consumption... The marketing folks come by later and give it a snappy-sounding name. (Or, for that matter, they give things names that we never had named in the first place.) When the poor tech writer goes to write the manual, some of the more obtuse things like fuse layouts are probably copied almost directly from engineering documentation, without getting the translation into marketing-speak. At least, that's one theory.
And 'Mayday' is internationally recognisable as an emergency call (be in boats and planes or something on a car), whereas "Safety Connect" is great if you're in an English speaking country and not so great anywhere else.
