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[quote=”jkoneman@gmail.com” post=171486]My car has the electric fan that stays on after the car is shut off and also has an electric auxiliary water pump that pumps coolant, at least to the turbocharged. Can you do something like that?[/quote]
I probably could, but I don’t think the added weight and complexity would be worth it. That would be an interesting project though.
I just meant that people don’t like realizing that they don’t know anything here. that does sound sucky though. Canada isn’t as good as the states for that kind of thing but I CAN bike to places able to order any OEM part that I need. Almost. Not seatbelt mount spacers apparently.
I think you’ll find that’s not just limited to Japan, though I would be unsurprised to learn that it is more pronounced there.
Thanks. Why do I feel like there is a story there that you perhaps somewhat bitter about :p
The temperature-induce flow thing makes perfect sense, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before. That being the case, because I am both knowledgeable AND lazy I am going to experiment with wiring it up directly. That should be relatively easy because there are plenty of leads from the battery in the engine bay, the windows not so much.
That’s pretty much what I thought, though the truck liner is an interesting idea. I have basically accepted that I am going to have to wash this car frequently (I’m lucky there is a self-hand-washing place near our apartment) and keep it covered when not in use. If I were to have it undercoated I would get it done professionally. Thanks for the advice.
Interesting, that makes a lot of sense. I had always assumed that it only compared the driven wheels, which now that I think about it would make the system pretty useless (how would it know if both both wheels were spinning?). I now have a better idea of how TC works.
And I don’t have ESP sadly, but ASR is already too invasive for my tastes.
Thanks!
[quote=”Chevyman21″ post=146802]
Back to the electronics, they still make it cost prohibitive to repair at some point due to the cost of them. A PCM, various sensors, BCM, wiring harnesses, drive by wire, etc all cost much much more than their simple older mechanical counterparts and in some cases, cannot be gotten at all. I have a friend who restores vettes who couldn’t get a computer for a 90s vette because it was “obsolete”. Good luck keeping newer vehicles on the road for 50 years with a planned obsolescence logic. Cars lasting longer is more than just 150,000-200,000 miles in my book, they need to be able to stand the test of time like the non computerized cars have.[/quote]I certainly wouldn’t argue with that. Because they are proprietary It will be very difficult for the aftermarket to perfectly replicate tanythign with an IC. Fortunately for cars like mine which have an extensive modding community there are non-OE parts available. That isn’t very useful to somebody with a Sunfire but it does suggest that it is at least possible for replacements to be made if a company can be bothered. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future you could buy one of a few ECUs and install the software for your particular vehicle. It’s really hard to say. They certainly wouldn’t be factory spec though.
Ok, I think I can do you a compromise. For the average owner under normal or abusive conditions, a modern car will last significantly longer than something from the 70s and with much less maintenance. However, the POTENTIAL lifespan of an older more mechanical car is longer if it is fastidiously looked after. Does that sound reasonable?
And yet the average lifespan of the car has been increasing for the past 2 decades. Yes, some plastic components probably shouldn’t be (the coolant flange on my engine) and electronic components can break (I have a slightly burnt wiper relay on my desk), but tell me that rust proofing hasn’t massively improved, or that electronic fuel injection isn’t basically magic. Or tires, they are just silly good now. You can get fuel economy, grip comfort AND absurd longevity out of mid-priced tires.
I think we make the mistake of confusing car electronics with phones. We are used to replacing our phone every couple of years, often because it inexplicably breaks. Phones are designed to be made cheaply and last until the customer is ready to move on anyway. The electronics in a car are more like professional-grade laptops and really old computers. Stuff like the Atari 2600 or ZX80, bulletproof things with no fans and extremely simple designs. I’ve been opening all kinds of electronics lately and I haven’t seen anything like the aforementioned relay. It only has about a dozen components (most of which are resistors and diodes) and one IC, but the PCB lanes are vast and there is a huge amount of isloation between everything. It’s BIGGER than my phone, and it is effectively just a couple of light duty electromagnets.
My point is, cars are extremely over-engineered and that is way more true now than it was in the 70s. If you have to bring in your car for any meaningful repair before 100,000 KM it is considered unreliable. My mom’s 06 Civic Hybrid, which is as complicated as a small cheap car can get, had 150k on it when we sold it and the only problems we ever had with it were as a result of it it sitting in the snow undriven for months at a time. It’s the repair stage where things have gotten worse.
I have a 2001 Golf GTI 1.8 turbo. We recently bought a 2012 for my girlfriend, which has a 2.0 litre turbo. They are effectively the same car just two generations apart. When you open the hood of mine it’s like looking the space capsule. There is precisely enough room for everything, which makes doing work on it a total PITA. Even removing the oil filter from above is an exercise in hand squeezing. The 2012 on the other hand has to have a whole big computer for the E-dif and yet it’s big and airy. It’s the sort of place they build computer chips, all precisely defined spaces and everything isolated from everything else. It is completely wonderful. And why shouldn’t we take advantage of our improved engineering capacities? Big Blue wans’t huge because it was built to a higher standard, it was simply the best we could do at the time. Given that, in road cars not being driven in horrible weather, lighter = better in nearly every way, that should be a priority. Give me space, give me cheap components, lighten up my overburdened Golf.
Oh, and on this topic…If you want an example of where things have gone too far, look at electronics. I have an alarm clock from the 70s which I sure was very expensive. Inside it is all hand soldered components exactly the same as the ones in the box on my desk. If something broke, I could almost certainly fix it. I could even figure out how it worked and modify it if I were so inclined. But to make these things mass manufacturable we shrunk resistors, capacitors and diodes. We shrunk transistors so far that we can have millions of them on a chip. This is amazing and has led to a complete revolution in our lives…BUT…Today I wanted to remove my GPS from its casing and install it into the space between my stereo and cupholders. The screen fits perfectly but the circuit board doesn’t. Ok fine I’ll just use my own ries…OH NO WAIT, I CAN’T. RIBBON CABLES. The manufacturing process is so efficient that we have given up any notion of repairability.
We have this in cars too. There are components now which can only be bought as complete units. The tabs on my mom’s headlight were damaged, so I had to buy a whole unit rather than just a backing plate. Yes, the replacement is cheaper…but if you want to fix it and, more critically, learn about it you are pretty close to hosed. I do wonder at the fact we have people to design consumer electronics at all, because life doesn’t introduce you to it anymore. You have to know you want to do it before actually having any experience.
P.S. I want a lexan sunroof p_p
Funny coincidence this video being posted the day before I had my first such failure (though I suppose it isn’t a coincidence, since now is when the hot weather happens). I have a 2001 VW GTI with the 1.8 Turbo engine which I am currently trying to sell. I recently had the flex pipe behind the engine replaced, so when I got a “secondary air injection airflow” code on Friday I assumed it was a byproduct of the repair. But oh no.
It has been very hot and humid lately here in London Ontario, and this is my first summer living in the area. I popped the hood today, praying that it was a leak and that it was somewhere that I could fix it easily. I looked all around at the bits that I knew were EGR related, and then when I stood back from the engine in frustration I discovered that I was being stared at by a piece of plastic tube with tape around it. Some time before I owned it the hose had ceased to connect at one of the joins (there was another area where I repaired something similar last year, so I expect at some point this engine may have been running lean). It had been repaired with…electrical tape. This had held perfectly fine through the previous summer when I owned the car. It’s possible that the exhaust gas from the leak weakend the join, but I doubt it as that had been going on for a while. I believe that the humidity completely destroyed the tape’s ability to adhere to any surface and so it didn’t take much pressure to make it completely let go.
I bodged it together with some JB Weld and Gorilla Tape, but I’ll be picking up some new pipe in the next couple of days and I’ll do it properlike.
[quote=”Chevyman21″ post=135705]Your welcome, keep us posted on how it goes![/quote]
I shall! The inspection is booked for exactly one month from today.
That’s ok, I would rather be advised by somebody with a platonic acceptance of their own limits than somebody who thinks they know the solutions to everything. It seems based on what you are saying (and I sort of expected this) that I am going to have to sweet talk a mechanic. The one thing I have going for me on that front is that I am near the end of a huge post-winter maintenance and cleaning list, and the effort is extremely obvious. I may resort to saying “look, I’ve done all this effort to make this thing look and drive like new, do you think I’m going to let it rot to pieces?”
That…may not work. We’ll just have to see. I dislike this uncertainty, but such is life.
Thanks!
In the area I’m moving to, it need only pass safety in order to be registered. If I were to register it, wait a month and then sell it to somebody it would then need to be inspected again so that they could register it under their name. Other than that, they have bi-annual emissions inspections (they pretty much just check that your engine isn’t throwing any codes and the CC is showing normal values in OBD) but no further safety inspections. I am actually made quite uncomfortable by this because I want to know that the grandmother in the Kia Magentis behind me has functional brakes, but there it is.