| Man, my newest car is 25 years old and I do all the maintenance on all of them (25 years, 30 years, and 32 years old) myself, aside from safety inspections and alignments. I recently had one fail safety for two small things and the shop quoted me $1k to fix it--$250 parts, $750 labor. That $250 is going to be more like $50 for me since I know what parts need replacing and I know how to make a bushing for my steering rack rather than replacing the whole rack. If I didn't have that know-how (or a friend or family member who could help me out), I'd be SOL. And this is hardly a one-off thing, and hardly specific to me. Plenty of people are only able to afford cars if they can fix them themselves. Moreover, I hope to keep these cars running 10 or 20 years further down the road. The only reason I can hope to do this is because of aftermarket manufacturers and no technical restrictions on what I can replace, upgrade, or re-make on my cars. A friend of mine has had weird problems on his relatively modern car because of what's probably a cold solder in the fuse box on his car. That fuse box costs $700 to replace PLUS whatever the dealer is going to charge you to reprogram the computer in it. Why does a fuse box need a computer in it? Hell if I know. How do you fix this once the dealer no longer keeps around the cables and software to reprogram that computer? Either replace every single computer in the car with computers from a car with a working fuse box, or reverse-engineer the proprietary protocol the fuse box talks and re-engineer a replacement. Oh, except that latter choice is legally questionable, thanks to the DMCA. I expect a lot more cars from this era to end up as fancy bricks. That's a damn shame; there's no reason to discard a nearly-functional pile of parts just because some auto manufacturer is too stingy to help you fix, or not hinder you from fixing, the thing they built and sold you. I recall a study that showed that keeping an old car functioning was just as efficient pollution-wise than building a whole new car to replace it with. I guess the upside here is that there's going to be a decent amount of demand for folks like me who have both mechanical and electrical chops in the car repair scene in a few years. |