Old cars could actually have their stuff adjusted, though. You’d have to tinker with the carburator if the weather was significantly colder/hotter, etc. to get it to run properly.
Even cars in the 90s started getting too complex - electronic fuel injection, variable valve timing, and more. There’s no need to adjust the valves because the computer does it, and better than you could.
I wouldn’t say the computer adjusts the valves, variable valve timing serves a completely different function than an old fashioned valve adjustment.
It’s true that most lifters are hydraulic nowadays, and self-adjust by filling with oil. So your point still stands, it’s just mechanical, not computer controlled.
My 2017 Honda V6 does require valve adjustments, but I doubt many people actually do it themselves though. And most people probably don’t have it done at all.
(I’m a hobbyist, not a mechanic, so anyone feel free to correct me if I’m wrong)
You’re correct.
Also, cars became pointless after they removed distributors.
Isn’t this more of making sure to cover all bases in case someone gets an idea of doing something dumb so they can sue? Especially in the US because it’s the most litigious country in the world.
Litigation isn’t what you think. A local lawyer had a radio program where he explained our “sue happy” culture.
You only hear about crazy shit, because it’s crazy shit. How many people suicided on New Year’s Eve? Bet you can name at least one! Because blowing yourself up up in a Cybertruck, with fireworks, on New Year’s, in front of Trump Towers, is crazy. Apply this to everything you see and read in the media.
Judges do not have to hear every bullshit case, plenty gets tossed. Most lawsuits have merit and are boring as paste.
Also, lawyers won’t take your stupid case to court. They’re happy to charge for time and advice, but they will not bring legal scat before a judge.
For one, they know these judges, have to work with them for years. Want to piss those judges off with frivolous bullshit? Retain a lawyer and go to court. He’ll tell you how to act before that particular judge.
For two, lawyers want to win, low risk tolerance. Think they’re taking every dumb case to court just for a paycheck? No, they have a reputation to think about. Who’s hiring a lawyer that loses all the time or has a rep for taking losing cases?
tl;dr: Neither judges nor lawyers are stupid and frivolous lawsuits are rare.
The problem isn’t the lawsuits it’s the cost. Litigating anything is prohibitively expensive. Nobody but the rich and businesses can afford that so what you end up with is some huge percentage of cases being settled out of court without anyone (other than the parties involved) knowing about it.
It’s a big reason why settlement figures and jury damage awards are rising… You have to pay for the lawyers!
…which is interesting because lawyer pay is actually dropping and has been for some time now. The biggest firms are collecting all the money and most of that is flowing to the top. So most lawyers are in the same boat as the rest of us where wages aren’t keeping pace with inflation so they’re getting poorer and poorer every year.
That’s happening despite the fact that litigation costs are rising. Something is severely broken in regards to the economics of our criminal and civil justice system.
Only hearing about the crazy shit is the same reason Florida seems so crazy. “Sunshine Laws” in Florida mean arrest records are public information in Florida. A cottage industry has sprung up around scouring arrest records for ludicrous arrests or weird things that happened around them. It’s not that Florida is any more crazy than the rest of the country. We just hang our dirty laundry in the front lawn for everyone to see. Don’t believe that crazy ass shit isn’t happening in your neck of the woods, too.
That said, Florida is kind of crazy, though. At least some of it is imported crazy from other areas, though.
And for what it’s worth those are the people you now have to argue with over whether or not drinking the contents of the battery is a good thing just because the manual told you not to.
Ah yes, when basically the only electronics in a car were the head and tail lights. I can assemble and disassemble a Willy jeep or VW Beatle by just looking at it and going with the flow, I have no fucking clue how to disassemble a modern car’s door panel without breaking anything.
But if we’re comparing us to boomers, let’s see who’s better at building a simple web scraping tool in python which runs on a raspi without any knowledge of python, Linux, AI and how to setup a raspberry pi. It took me a day to figure out.
That’s the thing that hasn’t changed: Some folks have a DIY attitude/initiative and others have a defeatist mentality.
I have no doubt that if you took someone from 50 years ago who could disassemble their car’s engine and put it back together again and raised them up in today’s environment they’d be the ones learning Python and how to fool around with Linux.
Maybe amateur radio folks (from 50 years ago) would be more appropriate for the analogy but you get the idea. Smarts and ignorance are orthogonal concepts.
Yeah, whatever we do differently now is because of new knowledge. Not because we’re smarter. It’s so annoying when conspiracy idiots say “how was this ancient primitive civilization able to build a pyramid, it must have been aliens” while the people back then were just as smart as we are now, but with less knowledge and technological advancements then we have today.
My previous comment is what I usually say to boomers who claim “the new generation is so dumb, they can’t even use a rotary phone anymore” or anything like that. Yeah grandpa, because we have smartphones now. In ancient Rome they built massive aquaducts, I’d like to see you try building one, with a chisel, which still stands over 3000 years later. You’re so dumb, you don’t even know how to do that while ancient Romans built them all across Europe.
It’s just grumpy old farts who are stuck in their midlife and now feel left behind and so much smarter and better than younger people while in reality being so extremity stubborn and ignorant.
50 years ago was 1985.
Feeling old yet?/remindme in ten years
*40 🙃
Fifty years ago was 1940?
Sounds about right, now I feel less old, thanks 😌
*75
/boomerhumor, because every generation that comes after is stupid.
Older vehicles easier to work on, go out of spec more often.
Common sense is limited by the population size that shares the same way of thinking.
What’s common sense to one group, isn’t to the other. Common sense is people specific, not global.
That’s an interesting observation I’d never thought about before. You’re right, “common” just refers to the common culture around you. The common sense approach to something in Germany might be entirely different than common sense solution in Japan.
Like taking off your shoes before entering someone’s home. Why bring street dirt into a living space? Common sense in many asian countries, non-existant sense in the netherlands.
Downvote because OP is just a boomer, not a shitposter.
Or just don’t vote and move along
If I’m not gonna quickly form an opinion on something I just saw for the first time and immediately proclaim it to millions of strangers in a way it can never be deleted, then what’s the point?
Make an alt account and do both
So electric cars don’t have valves. Oh, you didn’t even think that far ahead with your boomer brain? Try to figure out why they put the warning in the manual. With all that leaded gasoline fogging up the brains, it’s fair to assume grandpa drank from a battery on a dare.
Ouch, the edge!!
This implies it was the previous generation that drank the content of the battery
Right, or that back then they just didn’t care if you drank the battery because there wasn’t a hugely well-developed culture of lawsuits like we have now. Those fuckers in 1914-1950 were definitely down for a battery party, no doubt. The ones that made it now think that everyone had common sense because only the ones that did made it through.
Torpedo juice.
They drank anything that would get them intoxicated
It’s there because someone stupid fuck did it, and the car manufacturer don’t want to be legally responsible next time it happens.
It’s actually because valves were shit way back when and they are no longer something that the owner’s manual needs to explain. Many car manufacturers suck but this one is actually because they don’t anymore.
Some one made the KEY comment about lawsuits. Today people sue over anything. Like you are so stupid you spill hot coffee on yourself. (coffee is hot) and then blame the people that you bought the coffee from. In earlier days simple logic was accepted and dumb people wouldn’t be able to find ambulance chasers to file lawsuits for them. Today “instructions” to guide the dumber people are actually to prevent lawsuits.
As someone else pointed out, it was a justified lawsuit. Additionally, they were told the coffee was too hot and should lower the temperature and they refused.
The woman had to sue, and only asked for her medical bills to be paid, around $18k. Again, McDonald’s refused. They then hired people to act like this was an attack, when they knew they were wrong.
It was the jury who decided that $2 million was what the woman was owed. Also, I heard that was 2 days of hamburger sales. The fact McDonald’s is still around makes me think they recovered.
The story with the hot coffee is a capitalist trope. Serving 88°C coffee to someone who than suffers third degree burns (prognosis: Scarring, contractures, amputation (early excision recommended)) due to a spill is a valid law suit. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants
Thank You! They intentionally served the coffee hotter than their cups were even rated for all to minimize people getting refills and it was well documented by their own employees that people were getting hurt as a result.
The person filing the lawsuit only wanted their medical bills covered. The JURY decided to go punitive and instead gave like 2 days of coffee profits instead (NOTE: The judge then said ‘fuck that’ and reduced the punitive amount down to ~25% of the amount the jury decided on … or 3x what they medical bills came out to because actually _punishing _ a company isn’t allowed).
McDonalds’ smear campaign against this poor woman has been so disgustingly successful.
Yeah if you look any deeper than just reading the title, “coffee hot duh” is a stupid response to that lawsuit
The lawsuits are not about being stupid, theyre about money. Lawyers won that lawsuit, and they didn’t do it by being stupid.
Ok boomer
Taking away the instructions on how to service and repair a car was a result of capitalists wanting to make more money by forcing you to get your car repaired by them.
Adding instructions not to drink battery acid is likely for companies to avoid getting sued because people will always argue that there was no warning about drinking battery acid so the company owes you compensation.
This is a false comparison.
Also helps them get away with hiding shoddy/cheap parts.
~2018-2020 Hondas have defective air condensers. They aren’t rated for the refrigerant. They are basically guaranteed to fail. You also have to go to a dealership to get your AC serviced. There’s a warranty for the AC, but it’s that dealer that checks whether your AC meets the warranty or not (amazing how easy it is to find bits of debris and deny the warranty when no third party can double check.)
You could crack open an original Xbox and do a lot of modifications with it. The Xbox 360 was designed to be as annoying to take apart as possible, possibly to hide the cheap components that lead to the red ring of death…
The Xbox 360 was designed to be as annoying to take apart as possible, possibly to hide the cheap components that lead to the red ring of death…
actually, this was probably to fit it into the very weird and particular form factor that microsoft wanted it to fit in.
The red ring of death issue was actually due to faulty chip manufacturing, rather than bad cooling, it was an inevitable flaw due to manufacturing defects, rather than design failures. The heating and cooling cycles just greatly exaggerated the effect of the problem, that’s why it’s so closely linked.
Also you could’ve mentioned the update fuses in the CPU, IIRC there are fuses that are blown when the system updates, to prevent you from going back, no matter what you do.
I mean I do agree with you. Planned obsolescence and whatnot is very real.
But also, fixing a car from 70’s is very different than trying to fix a car from this millenium.
As technology improves and becomes more detailed, it might also get harder to repair. This isn’t to be taken as a defense of companies which have used planned obsolescence. But even if there was a very user friendly car company, I think it would be more complex to adjust your valves today than it was 30-40 years ago.
I mean I do agree with you. Planned obsolescence and whatnot is very real.
it’s complicated, a good example, actually probably the ideal example, of planned obsolescence is airpods. Designed to not be repaired, thrown away, and then replaced.
It can also apply to things like “lifetime” designed products, you may design something to mechanically wear out, before it needs to be maintained, or perhaps, require no maintenance, until you need to replace it. It’s harder to say whether this is strictly planned obsolescence, or just cost cutting engineering, which in the long run, probably doesn’t change much.
i think the most semantically accurate version of this would be releasing a product that is 100% good, and then a year later releasing a product that is 200% good, surpassing and replacing the previous product entirely, removing the previous product from the product line up, and only supporting the most recent product. I.E. it’s planned to become obsolete, shortly into the future.
Vehicles are also a weird market segment, they’ve gotten considerably more reliable since the early days of the automotive industry, they’ve gotten significantly more comfortable, they’ve gotten significantly more safe. They’ve also gotten several orders of magnitude more complicated since than as well. To deal with the aforementioned advances. Though there have been a lot of issues in recent manufacturing leading to parts that are just, bad.
father i cannot click the book
