Silvaire wrote:
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
For sure that’s true. The last place I’d take any vehicle if I needed real expertise would be the franchised dealer. Highest prices, lowest quality work. No diagnostic skills, just iterative part-swapping at your expense.
One thing we lack over here is ‘quicky oil change shops’, so that’s why I usually change my own oil. Most garages don’t really want to do just an oil change, they want to sell you a packaged ‘service’ from whatever ‘menu’ they publish. So they will do just an oil change if you insist, but they won’t do it in 15 minutes (“leave it with us, we’ll call you”) and you’ll pay for an hour’s labour as the minimum charge, plus oil at some outrageous (100% at least) mark-up. It’s all part of kidding their customers that a ‘service’ still involves more than changing the oil and looking at stuff, like when it used to involve valve clearances, greasing trunnions, balancing carbs, etc.
MedEwok wrote:
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.
Absolutely crazy. You need a socket/spanner for the sump plug, a filter wrench and a bowl to catch the oil. You generally don’t need to lift the car up, but if you need more space underneath then driving the front wheels onto a couple of bricks will suffice. As consumables you need some oil, the new filter (1/10th the price of an aviation one) and a new crush washer for the sump plug. All this can be ordered online and will turn up the next day for well under half the price the garage is going to charge you in addition to labour.
Maybe such a ghastly reaction to the regulations about oil is the German way? I am sure there are some rules here about not letting oil drain away into the ground, but I don’t know (or care much) what they are – I’m sure they’re not six figure fines for a single drop. In any case I’m doing this on my own property, behind my closed driveway gates, and no-one is watching me or taking any interest in my private business. I can’t claim never to have spilled a drop over the years, but it’s a fairly clean business. The waste oil goes into an old oil bottle and is kept until I next happen to be going to the local waste disposal site, where it can be poured away FoC. I can legally place the sealed bottle of waste oil in the trash if I wish to, but I choose not to.
Circumstances vary but I estimate than by doing my own oil changes I save about 30 mins of my time and maybe £75 in cash compared to taking it to a garage. I also avoid the usual problems with using a garage, which are an over-tightened sump plug and over-filled oil. It really is not a big deal and not anything that needs any serious expertise, but given you had to look up what it involves I am not surprised at your reaction to the prospect.
The biannual inspection seems onerous and the winter/summer tyre change also. I don’t have to do these so there aren’t regular trips to a garage to tag this work onto and none of my cars get ‘serviced’ in the way the manufacturers and other vested interests would like me to. It seems like the automotive business and regulatory environment in Germany is well set-up for maximum wallet-extraction potential!
It’s all part of kidding their customers that a ‘service’ still involves more than changing the oil and looking at stuff, like when it used to involve valve clearances, greasing trunnions, balancing carbs, etc.
Having watched all this grow over the years I’m aware that a lot of it was created by BMW. They were by my observation the first to give periodic services names (e.g. Service A or Service B) with the intent of any avoiding discussion or negotiation on what will be done and paid for by the customer. We really laughed 30 or 40 years ago at that approach, we were accustomed to saying “it needs a valve adjustment and carb synch, I’ve already changed the oil” or similar but time proved some people, particularly snobs, will take the bait when the discussion is brought to their level. As you point out the actual content of the services has withered to very little. BMW also grabbed the concept of designing-in the need for special repair tools (I could provide early examples implemented long before computerized tools were a thing) and the other European manufacturers learned from them, although I’m not so sure about the French as their stuff hasn’t been available locally since the 80s. Happily US manufacturers are wary of aggressive lawsuits and legal trouble in our consumer-driven society so they haven’t gone quite as far. The Japanese have an undying respect for their customers and don’t want any bad PR at all. So there are choices unless of course you’ve ridden European motorcycles your whole life and would like to continue doing so. I also had Alfas as my daily drivers for years but have now resigned myself to avoiding European cars like the plague and having just one late model European motorcycle at a time, the rest being older and maintained in new condition by me. That’ll keep me going with motorcycles for 20 years or so which is my time horizon. With cars who knows, but it won’t be electric because as discussed they are a massive package of coercion and limitations for my purposes.
Silvaire wrote:
Happily US manufacturers are wary of aggressive lawsuits and legal trouble in our consumer-driven society so they haven’t gone quite as far.
Apart from John Deere.
Somebody has to push over the line, or there is no line 
I imagine a John Deere thought that because they were selling quasi industrial equipment they could more readily get away with coercive business practice, despite being a domestic manufacturer/target and despite clear US legal issues in doing so. Apparently their customers thought otherwise.
Slightly off topic – If you are going to change your oil, you might consider a vacuum pump oil extractor. These work great and avoid having to get under the car. And if you are really lucky, like I am, you’ll have two cars that use the exact same oil filter, like my ford kuga, and my wife’s mini cooper! A relaxing 30 minutes of work for each car, and even my daughters have done it to their cars.
BTW, not sure if this is available everywhere in CH, but my tiny village has 3 or 4 very convenient places where we can dump old motor oil/paint/solvents and cooking oil – they are separate.
@eurogaguest1980 I’m not a great fan of sucking the oil out through the dipstick hole. Garages do it to save time, and obviously they care little about doing a good job (it will leave plenty of really sludgy stuff still in the system) and their customers are mostly clueless so they don’t know its happening.
Ideally the oil should be drained out through the sump plug while fairly hot.
MedEwok wrote:
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.
I wonder why – our local tip (waste disposal site) takes used engine oil, they have a big tank you dump it into. It’s where the plane’s used engine oil goes, too.
Here in the UK, electric cars continue to sell but the public charging facilities are lagging further behind.
From Dec 2021 to Dec 2022 the car to charger ratio has worsened from 31 to 36.
London is the best with 11 currently.
In the NW it has worsened from 49 Dec 2021 to 85 in Dec 2022.
This probably reflects the obvious fact that the best user scenario is someone charging it at home, and doing fairly short trips. But it supports the concern that EVs are going to hit a brick wall. Well, they obviously will (because maybe half the population can never charge one – better data must be available but has not AFAIK been published) but the Q is how soon. Probably there are several more years of growth left.
AFAIK all chargers here are private enterprises, so if there was money in it, a lot of them would be going in.
But another factor is the gradually improving range.
But then this may save the day..
I wanna see how they do this (the other methods are clearly unviable for cars)
without frying the occupants
This issue has been looked at by many people over at least the last 40 years. Basic physics dictates that if the air gap is say 20cm (typical for a car) then you will have a poor coupling factor. Then there are the health hazards for the occupants.
