Now I was reading an article recently from MotorTrend magazine that was all interviews with leaders in the automotive industry about where it is going in terms of drive train. Apart from the usual garbage about integrating hybrid technology with drive trains, for more power and fuel efficiency there was a lot of talk about the idea of making smaller engines that are more powerful through direct injection technology, turbo and supercharging engines. So one day we will see Ford Mustangs on sale and the top engine will be a turboed V6 that get 400hp and 40 mpg. Ford is going it with there notation of eco boost, and most other companies are following suit. Larger sedans are getting smaller power plants to do the same job. In turn vehicles are getting made lighter to make a smaller engine make sense.
This is all fine and dandy, more car for less engine. Okay, sounds reasonable, but what are we trading for this? To me it is a question of complexity and serviceability. This blog will talk about the serviceability aspect of future cars.
Modern engines can do significantly more then the engines of the 1960s and 1970s. They can alter valve timing on the fly, the on board computer can tell you what is wrong with it through a series of sensory checks, they can deactivate cylinders when coasting and turn off entirely when decelerating. And the price of admission for all this, and better milage and power is that they are now built out of layer of complex layer. Take for example and '71 classic Impala. If you were to look under the hood it would all be very organized. Engine here, master cylinder there, distributer cap here. All very easy to sort out. Now if you were to look under the hood of a modern Impala you could point not to the engine but the engine shroud that sits a top the engine, and there is so much more of everything and it is all placed inside as if it went through a trash compactor and what crush in and then wired up.
I won't preach about the reliability of old cars, mostly because they were about as reliable picking up a woman after being sick on yourself whilst playing a triangle. It simply won't happen. So old cars used to break down often. The beauty of it was that if they did break down, they were relatively easy to fix because by contrast to now they were so simple. Now if you need to fix your car, it is a massively complex undertaking that can take many expensive manhours to replace a .99 cent part. Now if you need your engine worked on the amount of accessories and items bolted to or at least in the way of picking it out is staggering. Days could be spent just getting an engine ready to lift out. And if it is fixed, in the process of being fixed something else could go awry and be broken when you pick it up.
The subject of this article is about futurecars and here I am talking about past cars, but for good reason. A modern car is massively more complicated to an old, classic car. Future cars are going to be even more complicated, and the more complicated it is the more it costs to fix. On the flipside of this particular coin there is a shiny beacon of hope. Old cars weren't made to last. There were books published on the subject of making consumer products that intentionally break down and fall apart and need to be fixed or replaced to sell new cars, new parts to make automakers more money. It is a selfish but reasonable concept. If it upsets you though, just take a look at Apple cause they are doing it now as we speak. Could they have made the Ipad 1 as good as the Ipad 2? Absolutely! They didn't because then there would be no need for an Ipad 2 and no huge lines spikes in sales etc. So, old cars were made to break down, which isn't too bad because they were relatively easy to fix. Now newer cars, harder to fix but luckily they are more reliable. When you been building cars for over sixty years, you should know how to do it better each time. For the most part they have, but usually if something is to go it is some minor bit, a sensor or something that can bring a car to a stop and you to your knees cursing a deity of your choosing because you don't want to be the kind of person that takes the bus because they have to not because they choose to.
More and more automakers are trying to block out mechanics by having more specialized tools and computer diagnostic systems to repair cars. Volvo was toying with the idea for a while that only your dealer could unlock and open the hood of your car. When shit like this happens it is hard to not feel like you are getting ripped off.
So I like the idea of making cars more powerful and more efficient but I would never go as far as to say that they are being built better. More reliable sure, but thats not hard cause the bar wasn't set very high back in the day. I just wish there was a way it could be done without a five hundred dollar bill for anytime something small is at fault.
I can remember a friend of mine's dad getting an old 1943 truck. when you lifted the hood the engine looked like the diagram of an internal combustion engine out of a text book.
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of having an old classic car, even it is a heap, just to have a car that I can work on and repair almost entirely myself.
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