The drive to relentlessly categorize every aspect of my life or purchases to maximize ‘efficiency’ and fit somebody else’s model is what’s not relevant to my life. I do what I feel like, when I feel like doing it. Which is why I need a car (or several) that can follow along in every regard without a week or even an hour of pre-planning.
I use all my cars for all my use, depending on my mood when I get up in the morning. Yes, I have a daily driver that doesn’t need any maintenance… Or better stated it gets only an oil change and brake pad change every so often that I may or may not do myself. Its never been back to the dealer since new, 90K miles ago. But I drive or ride all my vehicles anytime the mood strikes me.
If your way of doing things works for you then that is ideal, Silvaire. I just don’t think it is applicable or relevant to the vast majority of the population.
The world contains many kinds of people, indeed.
I think its a good idea to get out of ones narrow slice of humanity and geography and meet them versus assuming they’re all just like you, and that it should be mandated thus. What we’re discussing with respect to mandating EVs highlights that fact.
Silvaire wrote:
I think its a good idea to get out of ones narrow slice of humanity and geography and meet them versus assuming they’re all just like you, and that it should be mandated thus. What we’re discussing with respect to mandating EVs highlights that fact.
Absolutely.
Mandating things over the will of the population has always been something I regard as incompatible with democracy. Unfortunately there will always be the “greater good” argument which politicians love to employ when putting their will above others.
The reckognition that we are all different however has to go both ways. Clearly, often we think that our own way of looking at things is the only way, but it’s not. People who spend their time wondering “why everyone else can’t see that I am right and they are wrong” usually end up pretty disgruntled and quite a few of them end up in politics… not my kind of folks.
What I think is important is to experience many different viewpoints. It helps reckognizing that your own may well work for you but doesn’t for others. Thinking myself into someone else’s position in order to help him when requested to do so is a vital part of being able to advise from his perspective rather than mine.
alioth wrote:
No, not really. The only parts of the car that a home mechanic would struggle with are the electronic parts and they tend to outlast the car. The vast majority of the things that need maintenance are the kind of things that can be maintained with ordinary hand tools. It’ll also be a couple of decades before there’s any difficulty getting parts.
Not always. Hondas are for the most part very reliable, but the same cannot be said of every marque. What has ultimately killed most of the cars I’ve had in the end is something electronic that I certainly couldn’t fix myself and where diagnostics plus whatever very expensive part or assembly I would have had to purchase made it uneconomical to keep the thing on the road. Thus I would disagree that the electronics tend to outlast the car, providing you’re talking about something with a well-developed engine, a simple and robust manual gearbox and a galvanised bodyshell. The those three things are, in my mind at least, responsible for taking the natural life of a car from 10yrs / 100,000 miles as it was in the 1980s to 25 years / 250,000 miles as it is today.
Whether you want to work on cars yourself is not really the point, the point is that with older cars you can if you need to and I regard that as valuable future-proofing against those who wish to shape the world with an overall aim of emptying my wallet.. If governments and businesses continue to consumerise car ownership further (‘no user-serviceable parts inside’), those with an older car may be able to avoid being a part of this.
I also disagree that more modern cars present no issues for the home mechanic outside of the electronics. My experience is that the newer the car the more special tools one needs, and the less the car is designed with maintenance in mind. For instance everything is crammed far closer together, with no space to get ones hands or tools into. Simple jobs tend to require complex and lengthy disassembly procedures simply to access whatever it is you’re trying to do. Many things are also totally impractical without a four-post lift.
MedEwok wrote:
Same. I don’t think “I can maintain it myself” is a relevant criterion to choose a car in 2023. We humans became so successful and advanced because we developed division of labour and specialisation. Why would I even want to maintain a car if I can simply pay someone for the work who does this all day instead of myself who would only do such work at best once a year, thus having very little currency and expertise? My time is too valuable for that.
What works for you is what works for you, and not necessarily what is best for everyone or ‘more successful and advanced’. I perhaps have a bit more time available to me (no kids, not a doctor) and perhaps a bit less inclination to pay people to do things (often badly when it comes to cars and other practical matters) when I could do a better job myself and save the money to spend on fun things like avgas.
‘Your time is too valuable to do this’ is a well-worn sales theme for anyone selling you a service that you don’t really need, and it’s ego-stoking so many people really believe it. Unless you charge by the hour for your work (not true for most salaried professionals) and could literally make $X more by choosing to work a given hour instead of doing something else, your time has no quantifiable value and it’s simply a question of the choices you make about how you wish to spend that time. If you choose to load your life up with commitments such that you have very little time to pursue your interests and hobbies, then that is a valid choice but I’d suggest that paying people to take various things off your hands is a high-cost and low-yield way to gain that time back. More effective would be to make different fundamental choices in the first place.
As an example, take performing an oil change on a car. It will literally take me less time to do it myself than it would take me to deliver the car to a garage and fetch it again. Doing it myself saves something like the cost of 1hr flying and although it’s a simple job that a trained chimp could do, I will know I have taken proper care and the same cannot be said for a ‘professional’ unless I hang around and watch them do it.
My time (and money) are indeed too valuable to let the garage do it ;-)
As an example, take performing an oil change on a car. It will literally take me less time to do it myself than it would take me to deliver the car to a garage and fetch it again.
That is certainly true for a great many maintenance tasks on any of my 13 vehicles including the plane, but oddly enough it’s not true for oil changes. I’ve been going to the same quicky oil change place for at least 20 years and I stop there on my way to the hangar, in fact I will do it today. They’ve never yet screwed up so unlike virtually every ‘professional’ workshop I’ve dealt with I trust them to do a good job. About 15 minutes added to the trip to insert an oil change, no appointment needed 
Great post BTW. My biggest current frustration with my newest 2020 model year vehicle is that after I do the periodic service, turning off the service reminder light not only takes a special tool, it takes a special dealer only tool that has to be connected to the manufacturer’s website by a current dealer to work. That way, by design, there is no way anybody except a current dealer can do it. Given that the dealers who have bought that tool with their own money seem to quit in frustration with the manufacturer after a year or so, I guess that was a form of self-defense for the manufacturer. It should in any case be illegal, and might even be illegal locally.
On that vehicle it takes me longer to get the service light turned off than to do the service. But if you’d seen the damage that the monkeys at the local dealer caused doing the first service for the then-owner (I bought it when it was a year old) you’d never want anything you own near the place, like me, and I’ve been friends with the owner since about 1993. The same is true of most OEM dealers where the modern money-machine setup is happy smiley CSR salespeople serving as front men in representing generally low quality and abusive work sold to naive people who think their time is too valuable and that they should ‘let the trained experts take care of it‘. If only they’d seen the brutal reality the whole charade would fall apart, but ignorance is bliss at least for a while
Happily the Japanese manufacturers don’t stoop to this level of ‘service light’ coercion, and their products don’t break anyway so my daily drivers don’t need to go to the dealer and aren’t affected.
Graham wrote:
As an example, take performing an oil change on a car. It will literally take me less time to do it myself than it would take me to deliver the car to a garage and fetch it again. Doing it myself saves something like the cost of 1hr flying and although it’s a simple job that a trained chimp could do, I will know I have taken proper care and the same cannot be said for a ‘professional’ unless I hang around and watch them do it.
I just read up on what one needs for an oil change and I don’t think it’s a clever way to save money or time. First you need equipment to lift the car up, second you need an absolutely foolproof way to catch all the old oil because spilling even one drop is a felony over here and can easily incur six-figure fines.
And even once you managed that you need to go to a special site to deposit the old oil or at minimum take it to a dealer. Overall that’s just way too much hassle for a minor job that’s usually done when my car is at the shop anyways for the mandatory biannual inspection or tire changes to winter/summer tires.
MedEwok wrote:
second you need an absolutely foolproof way to catch all the old oil because spilling even one drop is a felony over here
you need to go to a special site to deposit the old oil
I’m sure you’ll now be told that these requirements are unreasonable government interference in your freedom.
(Although I would agree that making the spillage of a single drop of oil a felony is a bit excessive.)
We take used oil to any auto parts store, of which there are three within a mile of my hangar. They sell it to recyclers and are happy to take it.
