Car repair experiences now vs then

my local mech is always busy. two bays and cars waiting. there are always tons of german cars and land rovers and the like.
i did have to have some front end work done on my '05 dakota. only 27,000 miles, not sure why there was so much wear.

 

Pennsylvania annual inspections are all done through private auto shops.
The state inspection sites are one thing I miss about New Jersey.

 

my guy does inspections. just that and rutine maintenance probably keeps him busy.

 

Around here garages are hurting. Longer oil change cycles, "free" dealer maintenance, and longer warranties reduce the number of visits. Replacing the average 11 year old used car with a new one eliminates all of the work to keep the old car on the road. How often are those who bought EVs going to go to a shop for repairs?

 

In " the olden days," a family, at least where I grew up in a typical suburban lower-middle class to middle class neighborhood.....

was lucky to have one car. Some had two cars, but not that many.

And, a typical weekend pursuit was to have the "man of the house," possibly joined by a neighbor or three, and a few "kids," work on the car in the driveway while drinking beer and listening to whatever sports event you could get on the transistor radio. If it was a teen working on the car, then the radio would be tuned to one of the "boss" AM music stations.

But, the point was that cars were not all that complicated and any somewhat skilled guy could change out a generator, a starter, a radiator, a carburetor, tune-up the vehicle. Replace the plugs, points, condenser. etc. It was a bit of rite of passage for the young boys to get to work on a car.

Of course, this was in the Southern California area, which had a heavy car culture back in the 1950s-early 1970s, anyway, when I migrated northward out of the state.

Nowadays, car are much more complicated. And, while a lot of people work on their cars, there are lots more cars out there. Families that in my day had one car, now, have three or more. One for dad, one for mom, one for the 18-year-old, one for the 16-year-old.

Car shops in my area have never been hurting. Whenever I call one of the three shops I trust, unless I beg, appointments are (and have been for more than 20 years) a week out.

 

Cars are now, from one angle, more complicated, and from another, not—in a pattern that is common to just about everything.

In the olden days of gizmos, there was a lot of unique fiendish cleverness in each one. The music-box-like clockwork mechanism that ran through the cycles in your washing machine. The "moisture-sensitive" gas dryer whose timer pauses whenever the burner is on, which is more of the time when the clothes are wet. The funny way your house thermostat would try to anticipate how much extra heat comes out of the furnace after turning off, by having a tiny settable heater inside to make it shut off early. Let's not even think about all of the fluid-dynamic fiendishness in a carburetor or an auto transmission control valve.

These days, there's pretty much one recipe for building anything. You have some sensors to measure the stuff you need to control. You have some outputs (relays, injectors, motors, ignitors) able to affect the stuff. You hook them all to an embedded computer, and you program it to watch the sensors, control the outputs, and do the stuff you want. If you're thinking ahead, you even program it to tell you what's wrong when something goes wrong.

Even the simplest things, these days, are now done that way. Which is kind of a new world for old-timers. But at the same time it replaces a lot of old, very domain-specific, very fiendish clever complexity, with a converging set of skills that are now very highly transferable. And don't forget that for "kids these days," those skills are not all that obscure and unfamiliar, and through a lot of initiatives like Hour of Code, or Girls Who Code, and the like, easier and easier to bring into one's own skill set.

-Chap

 

I was born in 85, and I've watched the transition myself. Before cars had computers with OBD readers and the internet was established, I felt clueless about how to fix cars (granted - I've always been into computers). Now when something goes wrong I just read the code, look up on the internet what needs fixing, and then follow an online tutorial to replace the part. So much easier than needing a repair manual and a relative who knows cars to help you.

 

Several years ago, a friend took an old Camry into the local Toyota dealership to fix an ongoing problem.

Dealer staff could not isolate what was causing the issue, and one of the staff remarked to my friend that it was a difficult diagnosis, because the car had no computer and they could not read the codes.

I asked him the symptoms and immediately told him it was the fuel pump. He asked if I was sure and I said 95 percent.

Told him to take it to my semi-retired friend Denny who had been running a car shop since the 1970s. Denny replaced the fuel pump. Problem solved.

While the code readers and computers are great. Sometimes it just takes a little human logic.

 

That sounds like reliance on navigation aids, Garmin or the built-in. I can feel myself getting helpless and trusting when I'm using it. It's for the best though...

 

I think technology, car building itself has improved greatly over the past 3-4 decades.
I think most dealerships service departments are making most of their money from planned maintenance. Oil Changes, Tire Rotations, Filter Changes.
If you really look at even the recommended maintenance for most new cars, for the first 60-80,000 miles most of the recommendations are an awful lot of "checking",- what actually get's done is pretty minimal.

Items still can and do break down. But if I buy a brand new vehicle, and I maintain it from nearly mile Zero? I don't really expect any major repair, barring an accident, within the first 100,000 miles.
Not that it can't happen. I just think most well built vehicles are that durable.

 

Reliability is the other big thing. IIRC, cars from 50 years ago were pretty much considered close to the junk heap by 80K.

Flat tires were a common thing. Thermostats, seemed like I replaced them all the time. Water pumps. I could go on....

 

Oh, the need for human logic never goes away. Without discounting Kevin_Denver's good experience, usually just looking your code up on Google is not going to take you straight to a solution. (Sometimes it will, and that's fun.)

With computers and diagnostic codes, one of the easiest newb mistakes to make now is "I got this code, google said it means oxygen sensor, so I changed that, still have problem." You still have to remember the computer is trapped in a box, making judgments based on signals that arrive over wires. When it judges (based on those inputs) that there might be an O2 sensor problem, it can't climb out of its box and check.

So you have to start by thinking, not "where can I get an O2 sensor", but "how many different conditions could possibly make this computer think there's an O2 sensing issue? Sensor? Wiring? Actual mixture problems?" And so you still need a pretty good picture in your head of how the car is built and how it's supposed to work, and the best place to get that is from the repair manuals (and especially the _New Car Features_ manual, in Toyota's case).

But one key takeaway here is that the particular skill of how to start with the errors reported by some software, and reason backwards based on what you know the software can and can't know, to identify what could have made the software report that, is an entirely generic skill that you end up using for all kinds of errors reported by all kinds of software in everything. And so if it's 2017 and you're growing up with a good foundation in using computerized things and thinking about them that way, you're in pretty good shape.

-Chap

 

To really learn new engine technology this day's is to retrofitting old type of engine when there was carburetor then
And in this process you will learn tuning engine with ECU computer
That is how i finished my Master degree in Engine technology
All of this could be learned without school
Using human logic
And understanding how various ECU are working

And
Chap
Have explained with details how to do ECU controlled engine
Where still many certified mechanics only go by scanner readings and don't inspect this first before replacment

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Maybe cars will start incorporating trouble-shoot procedures, work with you. Seems like built-in diagnostic intelligence is still in it's infancy.

 

It is built in already...
Just you have to pay for subscription and be connect to server and live personall....
Some and car's are connect via onboard cell modem 24/7 and feed the company's server non stop on health and problems...
You can call them any way you like...
But this how they see more profitable way and figure from all data's on all Car's ....how well they do out of the laboratory

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

Ability to pull up techinfo on the center stack display would be nice....

-Chap

 

If there was a check engine light, there was a code to be read. Before OBDII, the method to do so was arcane, but didn't require a scanner or other tool to do so.

 

For that car, IIRC, a 1986 Camry, there was no such thing as a check engine light. LOL