Working on the Car at home...

[Bob Schroeck]

My late father used to work on all our cars -- our garage when I was growing up wasn't just a car shelter, it was a working garage. I remember helping him -- for varying degrees of "help" that improved as I got older -- on just about every vehicle we owned from the 1960s to the early 1980s. He and I even pulled the engine out of a 197x Mustang the summer after my senior year of high school in order to fix, among several other things I no longer recall, a broken timing chain. (Before WWII shrapnel ripped up his insides he wanted to be a mechanic for a living, but after, he was functionally disabled and couldn't handle the strain of being one day-in and day-out; the occasional maintenance task, though, he could do just fine.) Anyway, as the 1980s progressed, he began to run into cars that he just couldn't work on (at least anything more complex than changing fluids or filters), because the increasingly complex electronics managing them were just not user-serviceable, and he would bemoan that.

So that's one reason. Another, at least in the US, is the auto manufacturers are deliberately working toward engine designs that deliberately thwart any desire the consumer has to do any service himself, and they are pairing that up with using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in conjunction with custom chips with the eventual goal of making it illegal to service your own car.