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Automakers Want to Outlaw Gearheads From Working on Their Own Cars
SeraphimLabs:
^^ One of the biggest downers to me as I became competent fixing cars was the "Classic Movement" or whatever one wants to call it. The main advantage of being willing to crawl around under cars in nearly freezing weather, enduring icy water dripping down your neck when doing front end alignments, and putting up with too hot engines(lean burn) when doing tune ups, was the fact you could pick up a car with some years and miles on it and make it run well on the cheap.
-MilesAhead (April 28, 2015, 08:01 AM)
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That's still quite possible, and experiences I know all too well. Clunked the barrier on ice in January a few years back and spent several days under a tarp in a blizzard with the front end of the car apart stitching the ~300 wire PCM harness back into a sane configuration so that the engine will fire up again. Or one of my more recent ones, on my way to a christmas dinner with the wife's family and I burst a transmission cooler hose. Ended up getting her and her brother helping me push it more than a mile to the parking lot where I work, all my tools were there to piece it back together.
Its just harder to do. As cars become increasingly automated, they become less tolerant of components wearing out and systems not quite performing as they used to. It makes the PCM liable to just freak out and shut the car down, then throw tantrums at you when you try to troubleshoot and get it going again. Even then though, I have no problems picking up a car that is one step away from the scrap heap for $1000, putting new CV joints and brakes on it, and driving it for 3-5 more years and 50k miles further before it finally passes beyond my ability to keep it clunking and goes to the scrap anyway.
In that regard the cash for clunkers program really screwed me over. Thousands of perfectly good candidates that were the right age and while quite travelled still had plenty of useful life were collected and intentionally destroyed in the name of government subsidy. Since then the price of old cars has gone way up because an entire decade's worth of easily repaired used cars was lost.
Renegade:
In that regard the cash for clunkers program really screwed me over. Thousands of perfectly good candidates that were the right age and while quite travelled still had plenty of useful life were collected and intentionally destroyed in the name of government subsidy. Since then the price of old cars has gone way up because an entire decade's worth of easily repaired used cars was lost. -SeraphimLabs (April 28, 2015, 01:08 PM)
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That was a colossal waste of money. Here's one rant about it:
http://ericpetersautos.com/2011/01/16/cash-for-everyone/
mwb1100:
In that regard the cash for clunkers program really screwed me over. Thousands of perfectly good candidates that were the right age and while quite travelled still had plenty of useful life were collected and intentionally destroyed in the name of government subsidy. Since then the price of old cars has gone way up because an entire decade's worth of easily repaired used cars was lost.
-SeraphimLabs (April 28, 2015, 01:08 PM)
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I had never thought of that aspect of the cash for clunkers program.
CWuestefeld:
I hate to get political here, but yes: Cash for Clunkers was an epic failure.
It didn't help the economy. Studies show that almost half of the money went to people who were going to buy new cars anyway.
And it was bad for the environment. By destroying a pile of moderately used cars that got traded in, the price of other used cars rose significantly (as was noted above). The result is that poor folks can no longer afford to replace the really old rustbucket they're driving, so the worst polluters are staying on the road instead of being retired.
The law of unintended consequences can't be avoided, even by - especially by - governments.
Renegade:
The law of unintended consequences can't be avoided, even by - especially by - governments.
-CWuestefeld (April 29, 2015, 01:43 PM)
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I have a very difficult time believing that the consequences weren't unintended. When you have decision power over that kind of money, you're generally pretty smart and have lots of other smart people around you. While the maxim "never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence" often holds, I just can't see that in the Cash for Clunkers program.
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