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I think you got it quite wrong. It was never about pure performance. It was always about the rush of the wins during the journey.
Do you know which is the most condescending, obnoxious thing in modern cars - the check engine light. It is the equivalent of the ban on twitter of old and Facebook - with you break our guidelines without telling you what is wrong. Not only it doesn't refuse to tell you the error - with 2 screens in my car there is not a single place, submenu or whatever where I can read the code, let alone the description of the error. You the user are unworthy of even knowing what is wrong with your property.
There is this meme/observation - in the 60s the car manuals included how to adjust the valves, Today the warning is to not drink from the washing fluid.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI - this is ad for Chevrolet from 1937 that gives the best explanation how differential works. This is a culture that creates petrolheads.
In days of old it was basic expectation of masculinity to know how a car works in detail, to be able to repair it (or at least keep it moving until you get to repairman) and maintain it. Nowadays there are guys that brag with their inability to change a flat tire (true story).
We don't live in a culture that can generate interest in cars. Or PCs for that matter. While the PC is still quite open it is too monoculturish (or oligoculturish) to actually generate deep interest in custom builds. The society tries its best to discourage the tinkerer, the inventor. Except in the confines of the big corporations. We don't want people to actually interfere with our plans for planned obsolescence I guess.
My washing machine has 12 programs. And there is absolutely nowhere info to be found about what time they take, the rpm and difference between them. Let alone regulate it or change it. My customer steam oven has all kinds of awesome fancy programs and yet not a simple way to create my custom one.
Nowadays we live in the opposite culture - knowing is discouraged. The car works by magic, the iphone works by magic, the washing machine too.
Huh? Put in an obdii reader and check the code. Tells you exactly what's wrong.
Which is a third-party prosumer item that not everyone has.
That's the point. You shouldn't need a third-party item to understand where the fuck-up is. Even if it's a hidden option in the background, cars come natively with enough computers that you should be able to pull up an error-code read-out without spending additional money.
Instead, we get new cars and trucks with 18 different cameras built in so the software can construct a to-down view when backing up and then wonder why everything is so expensive nowadays.
Grousing about a $100 tool for a car that cost thousands doesn't really make sense. Not everyone has a wrench set either. The obdii scanner pinpoints the issues much better than a few gauges on the dash ever could - it's a huge step up from how things used to be.
Cpi for new cars was flat from the late 90s until covid, so new cars actually got cheaper in real terms. Before that, prices followed general inflation.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SETA01
Also, nobody can force you to buy a new car (it's against the law!).
It makes perfect sense. I'm already paying thousands for said car - why does it not include the necessary software already?
If I wanted to get a new car to replace the one I have(I don't), I couldn't even go with the latest make and model as they literally don't release them in America any more.
Nor am I skeptical that I could purchase one with similar performance and at a similar price. The MRSP for the model I own has gone up, not down. That's not normal.
Hopefully I won't have to find out any time soon.
Cars don't come with wrench sets either. What contempt for the user!
You indeed should not be skeptical, because until covid as I said car prices were getting cheaper in real terms for twenty years.
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I don't think either of us is wrong, a journey needs a destination to have meaning. Performance might be more MacGuffin than goal, but you need a MacGuffin to animate the characters to pursue the actions that create the plot. Without a goal, your journey becomes a walkabout, that of a Flaneur, and few people share that temperament.
The speed might not ultimately have been the fun part, but achieving and pursuing the speed was the motivating force behind the whole culture.
I was viewing mostly your paragraph about how fast modern cars are at factory defaults hurts the hobby. It doesn't in my opinion. Sorry if I wasn't clear. The same way a sharpener takes a cheap knife for fun - he knows it won't beat the Shigefusa or Sakai Yusuke - the high come from the improvement of the original car. It is the relative not the absolute performance of the car that moves the tinkerers.
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Isn’t the engine light strictly more information than you’d have had in an older vehicle?
All your same diagnostics still work. You can go pop the hood and observe, shit, I’m out of blinker fluid. Time to walk to the nearest phone booth and call for a tow.
I bet it’s easier to hack new washer cycles, too. Back in my day you only had one knob and one button.
No. While the ecu has a lot more information it is hidden. In the old soviet lada and moskvich you had a oil pressure gauge. The design was a lot more in your face.
The check engine light is like your wife being angry with you. What is wrong - if you don't know, no need to tell you. But something is wrong. Give me the fucking error code in plain sight. It was the same with windows when they changed the BSOD to smiley. Why ?
I doubt it. Manufacturers go to great deal to obscure the raw parameters - like RPM, duration and so on. Why?
So…which of those raw parameters was available in the good ol’ washer? From where I’m standing, if you desperately wanted to tune your washer, too bad. Today there’s at least a chance that the OEM left an open port somewhere in the machine. It has strictly more features than its predecessor, even if it doesn’t include all the ones you want.
The loss of an oil gauge is a shame. And a surprise—my car still has one! Why do you think they took it out? My guess would be cost-saving, or maybe wanting a cleaner visual presentation. Arguing that it was a corporate plan to discourage amateur maintenance…well, I find that less likely. There are plenty of better ways to make working on your car less appealing; just ask BMW.
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I’ve often thought that the lack of such maker cultures both in STEM and in the arts hurts the ability of the next generation of people to get excited about making things themselves. Everything is left to the professional, to the pro STEM guy to make an app for that, or for the artist to create the kind of content people want. I think some of the trouble comes from the laws. If someone does something stupid with their device settings and either breaks the device or injures themselves, the company might be liable for that. In the case of the arts, most mainstream characters and concepts are copyrighted to long past the lifetime of anyone who grew up when the concept was new.
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An increasing number of new cars don't even come with a spare tire, without which the skill is not necessarily useful. On the other hand, modern tires are far more reliable than our grandparents', and run-flat tires aren't that bad, from what I hear.
And it's not like most folks can change the tire on the rim at home anyway: that's a specialized skill these days involving some specific large power tools and esoteric knowledge of installing TPMS sensors correctly. And used tires have specific proper disposal requirements too.
I'm not sure I disagree with your take completely, but it's also interesting to see the grind of reliability engineering and the division of specialized labor make observable progress within my own lifetime.
Maybe not a full size spare, but compact spares are standard on 2023/2024 Camrys, Corollas, Accords (the one big exception of the four being hybrid models only have flat repair kits) and Civics (the 4 most popular not-SUV, not-truck cars of 2023).
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It's not that it is skill, it is the equipment for the rimjob (pun intended), but lifting a car, unscrewing 4-5 bolts, changing, putting bolts again, running till you get to the closest shop is useful. And it requires less than 60 seconds of learning.
From my experience modern cars are reliable until they aren't and they make sure that in that situation you are completely helpless.
I do my own oil changes and brake work, but I refuse to change flats on the road. Not because I don't know how to do it, but because the scissor jacks cars come with are absolute garbage and rather than dick around with one of these in the rain on the side of a busy road I'd rather just call someone to do it for me for free. At home I have a floor jack so it's not an issue, but if I didn't have a garage and instead, say, had to work on my car while it was parked on the street, I'd probably take it somewhere.
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Unsure if you are talking about the manufacturers of PCs or the enthusiast.
All the same, I do miss the days when the various manufacturers had more interoperability. Now you pick and AMD or Intel processor, and they must use a small range of AMD or Intel motherboard chipsets. It's all very homogenized.
I think the peak of enthusiast computer building was probably Socket 7. You had chipsets from Intel, ALi, SiS or VIA. You could use CPUs from Intel, AMD, Cyrix and a few other also rans. You could do all sorts of goofy stuff with clock multipliers and the front side bus. I'm still running a Pentium 233 MMX at 2.5 x 100 instead of 3.5 x 66.
You still had a plethora of motherboard chipset manufacturers for a while even after that. Nvidia got in the game for a hot minute. I'm not sure who hung on longest? Maybe VIA? I see they kept plugging along with Intel until the P4 era, and then AMD until AM2.
None the less it's all pretty boring now. You pick AMD or Intel, then throw the whole damned thing away in 3 or 4 years for a new socket. And often not because new hardware has really gotten all that better, but because Windows has gotten so shit it's slowed your PC to a crawl.
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Not to excuse the atrocious incapacity of your screens, but your car should also have an OBD2 port, right? For $20 you can plug in a handheld reader (or bluetooth dongle to use your phone as the reader) and see what internal code triggered the light.
And this is what I do. But once again - it shows the attitude towards the driver and the owner.
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I'm actually curious, what exactly is the brag here they were making? I've encountered people who can't change their own flat tires, but I've yet to encounter one who was anything less than sheepishly ashamed of this, much less proud enough to brag about this lack of ability on their part. Is it just that they enjoy such a luxurious life that they can just throw money at people to do this for them, even in unplanned emergencies?
I'm reminded of anecdotes I've heard from teachers mentioning that their students today don't understand computer filesystems. Everything is just done via app, and the idea of using a browser to download a file to a folder on their hard drive, then navigating to that folder in an explorer program, copying the file to another folder where it needs to be, and opening it with another application or whatever is completely foreign to them. It sort of makes sense given the environment in which they grew up and learned computers, and it seems similar to my own attitude towards cars, which is that they really are just
a black boxmagic, and if something goes wrong, I go to my localmechanicmagician to get it fixed. Because learning the magic myself just seems like more trouble than it's worth. When I was learning computers, I had to learn the filesystem to actually accomplish anything. Now, kids don't have to, so they don't.I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing or either.
Imagine you grow up in an conservative area where boys & man are all interested in cars, and being able to change tires is seen as the bare minimum of manliness. You're an awkward nerd that doesn't like cars but is good with computers.
20 years later, all the kids that made fun of you in school for not caring about cars are at best suburb normies and at worst still live with their parents. You went to google and now make literally 5x as much as the majority of them, while still not being able to change a tire.
It's not about the thing itself, it's about what kind of person you are. And young people pick this up as well, they see that being able to change tires is basically meaningless and anyone being proud of it is probably a loser at everything that matters, so they countersignal how bad they're at it.
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It went something like this - I had flat tire (due to stupidity on my part), the girl I was in the car with posted some kind of story on the social media. Some fuckboy wrote something among the lines her - hey hun, do you know how to change a tire. Her answer was - no, you? . His answer was - no I have guys for that.
For the other part - it was the damned iphone. Because android was open for learning and still is. But apple are actively hostile towards viewing their device as something different than magic.
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