Working on the Car at home...

[Dartz]

Oil Change at 173k.

I now realise how vanishingly rare it is to see cars being worked on by their owners in any capacity.  It used to be a lot more common - especially over the summer - you'd have people doing basic shit and not so basic shit.

It just stopped sometime in the last few years without anyone noticing to the point where being outside doing any sort of work you get people looking at you as if you're some sort of wizard.

Do people actually service cars anymore?

I know I had a neighbour who insisted I had to own the most unreliable piece of junk ever since I was always working on it every few months - while his new BMW never got a drop of oil since it left the factory. "Modern cars don't need servicing realy - it's just a scam"

Suffice to say, BMW didn't honour the warranty when the crank escapes and he's going around badmouthing them to anyone who doesn't want to listen but can't escape.

[Jinx999]

I do remember a neighbour being very impressed that I could . . . patch a tyre on my bicycle by myself.

This was a decade ago.

To be honest, I can't do anything on my car myself. Well almost anything, I was shocked to discover that Halfords could fit replacement wiper blades for people who were incapable of doing that.

[Black Aeronaut]

I'm going to be seeing about finding the manufacturer's service manual for my 2013 VW Jetta. I imagine that it won't exactly come cheap, but what's a maintenance technician to do?

UPDATE:
Yeah, that's not too bad. Don't have the money now, but later...
https://www.factory-manuals.com/expand-v...l-354.html

[Dartz]

There does seem to a sort of Alienation of people from how even 'simple' technology works. More and more of it is turning into a black box that either works, or doesn't. Which is strange as there's more and more information available about how to 'do' basic things and how to make them work. Still, more and more of it's just sort of becoming 'fucking magic'.

90% of stuff is the same for all cars. Only the locations change. A reasonable set of functional tools save a lot of money. Pour the right liquid into the right hole and always take the filler out before you take the drain off and 90% of things are simple.  

And there's something satisfying in just 'doing' for a bit.

[hazard]

For me, the reason I don't do the maintenance of my own bike is largely to do with not having the tools or room for it. I'm sure that I could, like Jinx, patch a tire if I was so inclined to do it and had a patching kit like when I was younger, but largely I just can't be arsed. I can just ask someone to do it for me in exchange for a small sum of money after all.


It's also something that's known to be substantially more common in the younger generations than in the older generations, with the major change being the Millenial generation.

[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.

[Rajvik]

I have to agree with Bob on this one, I am actually trained as a mechanic, but quite frankly, when it comes to my own car I just take it to my local chain and have the fluids dealt with, and the dealership for anything else. Its just to damn much electronics.

My next vehicle is going to be a throwback so that I can work on it myself. I'm thinking a wrangler body and an old straight six fathead.

The only thing I actively refuse to touch is a transmission

[LynnInDenver]

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.

My previous car, the 2001 Saturn SL that was the "model" for my Fenspace character's Cerulean Edge, I did a few things myself or with my brother's help, like spark plug swaps and the radiator (there's a bulkhead in it that fails around 11-12 years old), but I never did oil changes, because the damned filter was apparently located dead center of the rear bottom of the engine - basically meaning having to crawl completely under the car to get at it, and I wasn't about to invest in the kit to do so safely, as I lived in an apartment at the time and would have had to find a home for said kit elsewhere (I could probably have gone in with my brother on it, since he also had a 2001-2002 Saturn SL at the time, but I bet he wouldn't have wanted to change that filter either even with the kit).

I am actively disliking the deliberate distension of the DMCA (it was literally only meant to protect IP, but was incredibly poorly written) to try to lock everyone out of the repair market who doesn't want to kiss up to working in a tight tight ecosystem with manufacturers.

[Dartz]

The electronics are a double-edged sword. I know of one catastrophic example - the family Renault (The triangles of doom) doesn't even come with a dipstick for some unfathomable reason. - something like that is plainly silly. It has a display that shows up OIL OK when you start it and that's it. I've heard VAG's can be horrible for it - but you can get an application and cable that'll read the detailed data. I've a colleague in work who's had to recode the injectors on his van - so there're other ways around it that I don't know.

I've also solved problems on my car thanks to having an OBD hookup and a smartphone - little things like the knock sensor sending spurious signals thanks to crosstalk in a cable, or a vacuum leak caused by a crack in a hose. I could tell I had a bad fill of fuel because I could see it re-tuning itself and retarding to compensate. I think I've the beginnings a weak fuel pump because it's slowly trimming rich, but it's not critical yet.

In a way I'm sort of lucky in that the engine of my car is still basically an evolution of 1970's design so the electronics were just sort of bolted to it to make it run - but most of the sensors and the like are easy to swap and easy to get at and clean. And there's a lot fewer of them. Crank position, intake air, both exhaust sensors and a knock sensor - I think. That's on a mid-2000's car. That may be close to the sweet-spot. It's smart enough to be useful and simple enough to be fixable. Most electronic problems I have are sensors getting dirty and the occasional random total instrument failure.

Right to repair is going to become a much bigger issue in the near future - especially for cars that've fallen out of the factory's graces and are into the extended support phase. Not everyone can afford a new car and people need to drive. I think Repair has been spoecifically added as an exemption to the DMCA - but I may be mistaken.

[hazard]

The DMCA isn't going to help car manufacturers in Europe though, but Europe's own intellectual property laws may offer them similar protections. The major question is going to be if you can hand off a car to any garage or if you specifically need an associated mechanic that's licensed to work on a given brand's cars. If it's the latter I can see a trust busting suit being successful, after no small amount of legal wrangling, if there's still an unaffiliated garage industry to speak of.

[Black Aeronaut]

Either way, if they have their way with it? They're gonna drive themselves out of business because no one's going to want to drive their cars.

Except maybe the people well off enough to buy a new car like changing a pair of socks.

[hazard]

Only if there's a good alternative. The EU at least has a decent to high quality public transport system, and at least a few nations besides the Netherlands have clued in that with good bike infrastructure you can crater car travel across short distances and provide a boost to inner city stores, so there's another alternative.

The USA? They're not able to wrap their heads around alternatives to a car without a massive rethink. Although at least electrical bikes and especially enclosed electrical bikes offer an option.

[classicdrogn]

Cars, guns, and talking a good game about sex while actually being prudes, that's what the good ol' Yoo Ess of Ay is all about! Though at this point needing your own car is a self-sustaining thing everywhere but those cities with at least semi-functional mass transit, with to the way things have been spread out and grouped into residential and business areas due to the expectation of people having a car to travel and transport things.

[Black Aeronaut]

Even so, people will look at alternatives. The one car company that twigs to the idea that people want cars that can be repaired without costing so much that you might as well get a new car will wind up dominating the market.

[Dartz]

And then, randomly, the battery dies. Dead cell - after 12 years in the car that's not too bad. On the plus side I made an unusual lightbulb for a few seconds when I tried to measure the voltage across it with the multimeter in current mode. Forgot to switch after doing a dark current check.

Now I need a new multimeter and a new battery.

It was kind of helpful of the Leaf owner to gloat about how I should've bought an electric car - I mean, he said you'd never have to worry about problems like that in an electric car.

[classicdrogn]

It's better justification for driving a volts-vee than concern for the environment, at any rate.

[Dartz]

It's better justification for driving a volts-vee than concern for the environment, at any rate.

Yeah... getting stranded because of a flat battery never happens in an electric car.

[classicdrogn]

You have hella lots of batteries in parallel in an electric car, so you lose some top end performance with a dead cell, but as a rule, no, you won't be stranded unless the battery catches fire or something. Now, just plain running out of charge is another question...

[Black Aeronaut]

Spontaneous combustion of electric cars is apparently a thing, too.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2019...on-vpx.cnn

[Rajvik]

You have hella lots of batteries in parallel in an electric car, so you lose some top end performance with a dead cell, but as a rule, no, you won't be stranded unless the battery catches fire or something. Now, just plain running out of charge is another question...

you also lose a lot of charge time, i work with electric forklifts, when a cell goes in the battery pack, you lose operational time, which in an electric car means loss of range.

[Black Aeronaut]

Yeah, been looking into this. Some folks have converted Pontiac Fierros into EVs using Lithium Ion batteries. To make damn sure they last, they group the cells in packs of six with charging managers on each group. Additionally, they only use 20% of the battery's charge to maximize battery life. They still manage to get some pretty good range. A few have gone a step further and added solar panels to provide a trickle-charge while they're at work.