Transistor failure can happen, it just kinda doesn't anymore. It's mostly a thing people worry about with classic cars, because even bad old transistors have about a 20-30 year lifespan.

After CAN bus was introduced and standardized in the early 90s, usually the actual problem associated with "electrical gremlins" were either model-specific poor CAN implementations and then the capacitor plague which affected mostly cars from MY 1999-2008. Overall, cars made after about 2009 typically have fairly reliable solid state electronics.

I'm confident Wmill did mean the transmission because 17,000 mi or km seems very low but possible for an abused or poorly manufactured transmission to fail, even though that's typically a fluke rather than universal to any model of vehicle. A truck or car transmission should ideally last about 20x that long, and they usually have a 60,000-100,000 mile warranty.

I'm sure he meant transmission, but there are some odd control module board failures starting to happen in early 2000s Buicks. AC Delco discontinued the parts, and apparently the only way to fix the issue is to either hope that a junkyard pull isn't affected by the same component failures (which, again, mostly going to be aging electrolytic capacitors and not transistors or ICs) or flat-out refurbish the board to bring it back to factory spec. Which is a damn shame, because the 2000-2004 Le Sabre is the most reliable thing that GM ever built, and is otherwise incredibly cheap to maintain once you address a couple of design flaws inherent to the *Series III 3800 V6 in those cars (mainly shitty plastic coolant line elbows that tend to crack and leak, and if it's time to do intake gaskets, IT IS TIME TO DO INTAKE GASKETS, NOW).

Of course, GM can't abide anything that isn't a disposable shitbox that falls apart ten seconds after its powertrain warranty expires, so they had to kill these models (and engines) off around '06ish. I think there were two years around there of the Lucerne that were nearly the same build but with updated electronics.

It's that plane meme with the bullet holes in it, biases getting in the way