Safe Speed Forums

Indeed - non-technical people love complex technology in cars. I mean I have a friend at work who can't understand how I can cope without a remote door lock - how on earth do I open the door in the dark. But I hate remote controls for cars. They are bulky, expensive and not very reliable. Worst of all - if you should drop one in the car park the finder can immediately locate your car and drive it off. My key doesn't even have the model name on it.

Look at this http://www.digitalhomedesignline.com/howto/210600542 - that's from the USA but the kit is from Europe

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

I know! I've a French car, and both front electric windows winders are busted. No problem, it's got
a sun roof! Except when I reach the Mersey tunnel, and I can't put my money in! And the car's
only 13 years old, for goodness sake.

PS: good link about the key, which speaks volumes about their tricks. 150 bucks for a car key!
Those guys have some nerve eh?

PPS: when the lock failed on my van, I replaced it with a pad lock. It didn't look too slick,
but it did the trick.

So, let me get this right. YOU are telling ME what I should want to drive so that YOU can have easier / cheaper access to the sorts of cars that YOU want to drive?

The first problem with that is that while I consider myself a reasonably charitable and altruistic bloke, I think that's going a bit far and the second problem is that if we did all demand (and get) more durable cars, we'd keep them longer! (so you'd have to wait until they were even older and skankier to get them anyway)!

I'm puzzled that you run a French car though. They've a generally fairly poor reputation for reliability. I would have thought that if it's reliability you're after, Japanese would be a better bet. Toyota in particular, have a good reputation. You might also like to consider a Kia - I think they are offering 7 year warranties now. Clearly they expect nothing much to go wrong for 7 years! OR a Ssangyong? They used hand-me-down Mercedes technology for the most part. Ncie and "simple" stuff that Mercedes no longer need. Quite a few of the Pacific Rim manufacturers, in fact, use European or Japanese cast-offs. In fact, getting back to your argument about doing things for the common good, surely it is YOU who has a duty to buy new or relatively new offerings from those manufacturers who have the best reliability / build quality. That way, you'll be part of the movement that gives the industry the incentive you talk about to provide better quality cars. If the rest of the industry sees one manufacturer's market share getting bigger, they'll all try to grab a piece of it by offering more of the same. There's no point in you buying a 10 yar old car that's had several owners. There's not really any money in that for the original manufacturer, He's only interested in new slaes and the residuals for the first couple of owners.

As for me, I'm quite happy with Italian. Stylish, plenty of "toys", great fun, and above all, DIRT CHEAP second hand!

Are manufacturers warranties transferable these days?

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Ah, you noticed that eh? That's only a side effect, Mole. I want to limit the amount of cars that are needed overall. I want to make them last. The spoof economics of recent years have made us all forget the basics, but they are coming back now.



Yahoo! That's the main thing. We are really getting somewhere here. It's all about the 80/20 law. We can get 80% of the goodies with only 20% of the effort. That last 20% costs the earth, but that's where the car firms are operating now. Radio-powered keys, for God's sake! What a bunch of chumps they are.

I reckon the reputation is largely unfounded as far as major problems go. My experience of French cars has been that they have a tenancy for bits of trim to fall off and so start to look a bit scruffy but the major bits that you need to keep it driving usually last very well. On the recent French cars I've had even the trim stays on!

so Abercrombe, as cars are currently so cheap, why not take advantage of this and go out and buy a bum basic new car, maintain it well and run it into the ground. That way you won't have to worry about all toys going wrong that the person that bought it new specified, because there won't be any. If you don't like the toys in cars, my tractor would give you heart failure .

Can you actually buy a "bum basic" car? TATA had that one in India for £2k that went half way around the world on a bottle of meths - or something like that, but Europe said we can't buy it as it doesn't meet EU Regulations!

If its good enough for Johnny Foreigner then its good enough for me.

That's the spirit, Lucy. Some people like poncy cars full of little nick-knacks and lights. I
dunno why - they must be bored, or something. But stand-up people like serious vehicles, that
can stay the distance without being full of distractions. That's what I want, anyway. Who would
want anything more?

when you say you want a vehicle "that can stay the distance", what is the distance? Ever use mini cabs? I've been in a Pug 406 in the last few months with 302,000 miles on it, most of that will be around town, is that enough? My 1991 Golf Driver had a dodgy auto choke, arh them were they days. The Honda just starts with it's new fangled ECU and electric fuel injection that requires no maintenance.

Well, ME for a start!

Naturally, you're welcome to your "sub-poverty" spec Austeritywaggon, but I have to admit to being thoroughly satisfied with my over-complicated oh-so-unreliable Italian exotic! At 18 years old and coming up to the quarter-million mile mark, it's still nice to hop in on a hot day and let the climate control cool my fevered brow - or perhaps as an alternative, press the switch and let the electric sunroof glide back to allow the spring sunshine to pour into the leather-clad cabin. That long motorway trip where a mere touch of a switch will electrically ease the seat into just the right place to get rid of that ache becomes a real pleasure...

...and all for £375.

Hell, it's almost enough to make me want to get out at each motorway service station and flagellate myself for 10 minutes for being so decadent!

I'll admit it has painted plastic bumpers, but I don't find them a problem if I don't drive into anything!

Yup! If that's poncy and over-full of nick-nacks, I just want more of the same! You are, of course at perfect liberty to campaign for the type of car YOU woud like, but as far as I'm concerned, the longer the vast majority of the rest of the motoring public buy over-complex, over-specified luxury cars and then discard them for the latest version with even more toys, the happier I'll be! I get luxurious motoring at 2CV prices.

Hmmn, when was the last time I saw an 8 year old Kia??

In all seriousness, this is the natue of far eastern cars.

They are amazingly reliable and actually can last many years (and a lot more than 8 sometimes) BUT....

If they EVER go wrong (even if just a little bit), they tend to cost SOOooo much to fix that they end up just getting scrapped!

This is what I object to!

It doesnt have to be that way! We can have the technology AND the reliability AND the repairability.

But the manufacturers have missed out on the last one of the three, and it cannot be accidental!

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"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

You can have all three but you can't have them cheaply. Car manufacture is a very price sensitive industry. And a large part of its market, fleet buyers, do not need or expect their vehicles to last more than a few years. They won't pay a premium for a car that can be cheaply repaired three decades later. Nor indeed would the average private buyer= who buys the dream not the engineering reality,

Given the need to cut costs the manufacturer looks to your three headings. He can't remove the technology - that is what sells the cars. Bad reliability is the kiss of death. So he has to compromise on reliability. Use special assembly techniques to save a penny on the manufacturing cost but add £100 to the cost of replacement. Make and patent special parts and make a huge profit on selling spares.

So, I agree, it's not accidental it is free market capitalism - which, as everyone knows, is the perfect way to run an economy.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Yes, I love those exotic Italian cars as well, especially this one:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... at_500.jpg

It has it all - absolutely nothing!

The add-ons may well influence the sale of the car, but most of the technology in the car is there because of legislation.
The engine and control systems technology is driven by emissions and consumption legislation.
Chassis design is, in large part, driven by the need to have a chassis that absorbs impacts and collisions. Also legislation driven.

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

It's bad timing to say that at the point that we are busy rolling back Thatcher's work. Some
industries (e.g. banks and car firms) must be protected from market forces, after all. It's good she's alive
to see the global chaos that resulted from her ideas.

Sorry for that rant.

Move back to the subject: I suppose reliability + repairability = durability. As Dusty says,
only one of those components is being considered, due to planned obsolescence. If
the makers won't do what we ask, we have to make them do what we say. That
is what legislation is for.

It's a fundamental engineering law that when the part that "never goes wrong" fails it will cost a fortune and be impossible to get to. That's the trouble with modern cars. They are basically very reliable but when something fails it will be buried inside the dash or require the engine out etc. to get to. The "black boxes" hardly ever fail, but because they are relatively low volume spares items, they are expensive when they do.

The main problems that have crushed the car firms are these:

1) Lack of cooperation.

2) Lack of standards.

3) Lack of design reuse.

All three are the same thing. There are hundreds of car firms who have each worked in a "free market bubble",
reinventing each other's work over and over and over again, in a futile and wasteful way.

To drive prices down, quality up, and (yes) even give you features, the answer is one word - REUSE.
That requires cooperation to create standards. For example, there is really no reason to have more
than one car control/telemetry bus in the world.

Waste is the flaw of the free market system, and waste costs US money. That is why we need to
enforce cooperation, unless they can sort it out themselves.

And, of course, the manufacturers want to carry on manufacturing cars! (the clue is in the name)

Which is why, with all the improvements in materials, design and build quality, cars still, on average, only last as long (give or take a few years) as they did 35 years ago when they only botherd to paint the bits you could see and they (quite literally) fell to bits after 12 years or so. The fact of the matter is that it would NOT actually cost that much more to make cars more durable and repairable.

To take the Rover P6 example that I keep harking back to, it would have taken, quite literally, only ONE design change and we would still be seeing many of these late 60's , early 70's cars in daily use! All it would have taken would have been to have dip galvenised the base unit, the rest could have been left as it was. (If you wanted to be really posh, the base unit could have been made out of stainless steel. This would have been a bit more expensive but really not by that much. (I actually know somebody who built a replacement chassis for a series landrover out of stainless steel. Funnily enough he ran into some unexpected minor problems because it didnt rust! He also has photos of somebody who stripped doyn the body shell of an old range rover and dip galvenised ALL the steel sections!. An expensive project, but if it had been done at the time of construction it would not have added much to the overall construction cost) and would have ensured that they would really have lasted indefinitly)




Which really does have to change. The planet simply does not have the resources to continue with an economic model that relies on digging stuff out of the ground and turning it into tat (even well built tat) that is designed to be thrown away after a couple of years only to be replaced with an esentially identical product!

It is one of the reasons why we are in the mess we are in (economically speaking)

(but, of course you know all that )

How to change the model??

Well, an idea I had recently is a "showroom Tax". But not one that is simply swallowed by the treasury.

Heres how it works. Each new car has a surcharge on it. Quite a swinging one actually. The figure of £5,000 or 20% of the sale price (which ever is greater) came to mind but no doubt one could come up with a diferent formula that would achive the same ends.

This charge would not simply go to the treasury. It would go into Bonds that would be tied to the vehicle (ie transferable on resale) the bonds would attract interest and would pay out in two tranches, one (say) after 15 years, the other after (say) 30 years provided the vehicle is still roadworthy! . If the vehicle is written off or scrapped within these times, the bonds revert to the treasury.

The aim of this is to eliminate depreciation. While the first buyer pays a higher price, when he sells the car the value of the bonds will ensure that he will likly get as much as he paid for it.

But only if the new buyers are confident that the car will last the course. This ,in turn, will force the manufacturers to think in terms of 30 year plus design lives. and behave accordingly.

(this would also have the effect of increacing the "Savings Ratio" which while unrelated to motoring matters would aslo be a good thing)

On another note, what would be interesting to see is a list of manufacturers ordererd by the pecentage of vehicles that they have ever made that are still in use (there would have to be allowence made for verry old manufacturers and very young ones ISWIM)

I understand that the top of the list will be Land Rover with a figure of around 80%, further down will be Rolls Royce and Porche whith figures somewhere in the 60's. I am not sure about the others though!

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"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

It's not bad timing, it's simply bad.

How long are people like you going to continue blaming New Labour's bungling mismanagement on Margaret Thatcher? It's nearly 20 years since she was in power for pity's sake!

It is worth noting that during Thatcher's reign, and for about ten years afterwards we had a pretty near bulletproof economy. Low inflation, low borrowing, high GDP and low unemployment. Then we have ten years of Labour and gradually the wheels fall off and we slip back to 1973. No control over inflation or lending rates, falling output, public borrowing on scale unimaginable 20 years ago.

The problem is in trying to wrap socialism up and present it as capitalism.

Of course this was never a problem in the past was it?

It's also worth noting that the cars that originate in more socialist parts of the world tend to be the worst of the lot for maintenance, and the very ones that most espouse all the reliability issues you are complaining about!

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CSCP Latin for beginners...
Ticketo ergo sum : I scam therefore I am!