Technology Makes New Cars Too Expensive to Fix

securitas writes "The CSM's Eric Evarts reports on how technology makes new cars too expensive to repair, which may lead to disposable cars. The increased use of expensive electronics, air bags and advanced, lightweight body materials are causing costs to rise. Add to it the cost of specialized training and equipment (for an aluminum-body repair shop: $200,000) or even the cost of new parts alone (xenon high-intensity-discharge headlights: $3,000 each), not to mention the knowledge base required (over 1 million pages, available only electronically vs. 100 pages 20 years ago) and a labor shortage. From the article: 'Specialist technicians need advanced reading, problem-solving, and basic electronics skills.... The best people to find are those who have worked in the IT [information technology] industry.'"

Comments

Not only obsolescence, but safety.....

[tiger99]

The sad thing is that some of these problem areas, notably the structural use of aluminium, have had major safety implications, which no-one in authority seems to have noticed. Alloy wheels should not be allowed either, the problem is that the poor fatigue properties of all aluminium alloys make it unsafe in an uncontrolled environment, and only marginally safe in a tightly controlled environment with regular inspection and replacement, such as the aircraft industry. Clobber an obstacle once with your alloy wheel, and it, or the alloy suspension components, or their attachments to the alloy vehicle body, may have had almost all of their fatigue life used up...... You can't know, but the final failure is quite likely to happen at high speed, without warning.

Also, we know that ABS brakes, electronic throttle control, and other fancy features, heve been killing people. Some advances are OK, in fact the use of electronic ignition came at least 20 years after it had been proved to be reliable and beneficial, because the generally incompetent car manufacturers though it would be unreliable or cost more than the primitive system it replaced. They were eventually forced to adopt it to meet emission regulations, then realising that it was wonderful, they went mad and put electronics, often with inadequate software and/or EMC precautions, in all the wrong places also, so we get numerous accidents, mostly ascribed to "driver error", when a bit of trash code sees an unexpected input value for some reason, and locks out all of the brakes. Yes, it does happen, and with monotonous regularity.

I will not own a car which has ABS, traction control, or alloy wheels. None of them are necessary, and they all kill people. And I don't want lots of messy electronics controlling wing mirrors, sunroof, seat position, etc, because when it fails (it will!), a replacement, if available, will be hideously expensive, maybe 100 times or more than its original cost to the manufacturer.

It is interesting to note that in the UK at least, automotive hardware and software designers are paid what the rest of industry, and in particular safety-critical industry, regard as derisory salaries. I am sure you know the saying "pay peanuts, get monkeys...". Yet they pay their marketing men and stylists (neither of whom are necessary to make a good product) very well indeed.

As to aluminium bodies, the main influence there seems to be a certain grossly incompetent German manufacturer, whose dangerously unstable vehicles, using a long-obsolete layout which is guaranteed to produce dangerous instability in certain real-life situations, which have killed many people. I believe that in the US, the number of their most offensive product is the one you need to use to call the emergency services when it crashes. The same irresponsible company is responsible for stupid techniques such as rear-wheel steering (to try to overcome the gross effects of basic design incompetence) which in themselves cause more problems.

It is a pity that Ralph Nader did not finish the job he started many years ago, a lot of things ought to be outlawed for the benefit of public safety. The "green" movement ought to get a lot more outlawed, of course Dubya does not listen to them, but most of Europe at least does.

If you want to know why aluminium is a disastrously bad material for anything subject to random, varying stress, such as car bodies and suspension components, try to get a copy of a book called, IIRC, "The Science of Strong Materials" by Prof. J. E. Gordon, published by Pelican, and see what he says about its use in aircraft. The book was written long before anyone, apart from a few oddball experiments, thought about mass-producing cars from the material. The aluminium lobby is very powerful, they seem to get their material into lots of places where it does not belong, particularly now that they are being seueezed out of the aircraft industry by much safer composites.

Aluminium is a very good material, in the right place I have nothing against it. Lo