Dealing with Outdated Automotive Software?

Jan Hendrik Montag asks: "My car mechanics had problems to fix a problem in electronic motor management with my 14 yr old Audi. That was not too surprising. But as my mechanic consulted a Volkswagen/Audi-company, they received the answer, that my car is too old and they don't have the appropriate devices and software to read my cars' mind. I just wonder, what will happen in 20 or 30 years to then-vintage-cars from today? Shouldn't there be a necessity to declare old car-software and diagnostic devices open-source just to make sure a collector then can repair his/her car just as it is possible to repair an old car from the 60's? Or will those cars be doomed in case of failure? What would be a solution?"

Comments

It would be nice, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice, but just because people depend on it doesn't mean that people are going to support or open source software. I'm not sure why car companies would care about their consumers enough to be any different.

Heh

[smoondog]

Find a better mechanic. I/my wife owns an 89 BMW 325i Conv. It is way cool, pretty fast, a lot of fun and cost less than $5k in very good condition (less than 100k california miles). We found that headaches are minimized if you find someone who is *truely* an expert in your car. At first we went to a mechanic to do some really minor work and everytime we took it back, something new was broken! Bad. (Mechanics will never admit fault for something like this, even if they fix it they act like they are doing you a favor) Anyway, find a good (very good) german mechanic. I'm willing to be a good vw mechanic may suffice, given the similarity of the makes, but not sure.

14 years is not that old. These cars should still be very fixable. You don't need a new car, you need a new mechanic. Ask around.

-Sean

New cars are not designed to be maintained...

[GeekWithGuns]

I just had a problem with my 1996 Cavalear. Long story short I knew it was an ignition problem so I replaced the spark plugs, then the spark plug wires. Neither of these fixed the problem and the next thing to replace was the coil pack and then the ignition module.

Since I had just replace the wires I had found the coil packs and ignition modules we mounted in the dumbest palace...on the back of the engine, above the transmission! Now I know modern cars are packing the engine into a smaller and smaller area to give more room for the people rideing in the car, but since there was a ton of space in front of the engine, where a part that will fail several times in the lifetime of the car could have been mounted, it really pissed me off.

I gave up and took it in to my mechanic and the bill was around $140 to replace the coil pack that I suspected. If I would have replaced the part it would have cost me $20!

Whenever money is involved, these companies are always inventing ways to extract as much money as they can. And they wonder why we end up trying to "cheap out" and bargan shop the hell out of them.