On a recent family trip a few miles from our destination, all my vehicle's dash controls went out, then reappeared with a charging system error indicator.

Everything seemed fine - I watched battery gauge and hoped I'd make it. When I got to the destination, I stopped and restarted the engine, and everything looked fine, and the charging system indicator went back to normal.

I noticed afterward that the "Engine Hours", which had been getting close to 10,000, was now in single digits. No other internal counters were reset.

I wondered if it was an overflow condition, but it appears more mundane - many vehicle owners report seemingly random resets. The surprising thing seems to be that it hadn't reset before getting close to 10,000 hours!