Musings on Cars
Have you ever wondered whom the auto companies actually serve?
I ask this because it increasingly seems that the actual car buyers get precious little opportunity to make their concerns heard.
Before you get going on an angry rebuttal about how different consumers are as a "populous," let me give a bit of background information. My grandmother had two sisters who owned identical cars. They were two-toned Oldsmobiles from the 50s, teal-green with white accents. Both women owned these cars, I believe, until the day they died.
Since one did not often see identical cars owned by sisters -- especially by sisters so generous with enormous chocolate bars every time you saw them -- I asked where they got them. Back in the fifties, they and their husbands (both men died many years before) took a grand trip by train from Port Angeles, Washington, almost as far west as one could travel in the contiguous United States, to Motor City, to Detroit, where they ordered and received their respective identical cars. Then, it was another grand trip home, this time by road.
Since hearing this story (or mishearing it; it's so hard to tell), I too wanted to get my car as they had. That would give me the opportunity Tanta Frieda and Tanta Carrie had, to see your own car built, and to be the very first to road trip it home. Neat concept, huh?
Except you can't exactly do that anymore. At least not in the US.
And the cars show that to be true.
I bought a truck from my brother-in-law a few years back. On the dash was a little irritating red light. I asked my sister about it. She usually takes excellent care of any car in her care, so I thought it unusual that she would let such a literally glaring oversight in maintenance stand untackled.
She got a bit bristly and told the story. One day, after she had gone and had all the regular maintenance done at her local shop, this little "CHECK ENGINE" light made itself known. She took the truck down to the dealer, who recommended the maintenance -- simple belt tightening and valve checking that had already been performed -- be done.
She explained it had been done.
Stonefaced, the mechanic said, "Yes, but we don't know if it was done right."
Meaning, if she wanted to not stare at a damned irritating red light, it would cost her $120 bucks in unnecessary service.
She turned around and walked out, and has vowed never to set foot in that dealer's business again.
The car makers have installed all manner of similar "innovations" concocted by those assigned with the job of appeasing dealers. You see, in order to distribute nationally, to spread an auto brand into every nook and cranny the nation has available, the dealership system was established. This gave dealers exclusive rights on new car sales for the brand they represent. In return, the dealerships must provide maintenance and service, giving the automakers an exclusive distribution network for the lucrative spare parts market where they make far more of a markup than that received on the cars themselves.
So what's the problem?
To keep up their part of the arrangement, the dealerships are forced to keep expensive service personel trained and equipped in a time when the overall quality of the cars they sell is improving. To make matters worse, car buyers, already trained by Walmart and their ilk to seek bargains in all aspects of life, are more and more inclined to avoid $70 oil changes.
So dealers are demanding from the manufacturers built-in reasons the car needs to go see the dealer, like little red lights on the dash timed by calendar chips or tripped by the odometer and that cost hundreds of dollars if you as a driver don't want to be blinded for the rest of your vehicle owning days.
Take also for example the Porsche Boxster. No hood. One of the priviledges of owning a sweet car, everyone knows, is popping the hood and showing off the powerplant. Not so here. All maintenance must be done with Porsche lifts that carefully extract the engine from beneath the car -- even for an oil change.
It gets worse. One mechanic friend told of "maintenance-free" transmissions. That's right, folks, there is no way to maintain these trannies. They lack the basics, like oil fill caps and dipsticks. Meaning that if your tranny goes out, it must be replaced.
People, any place pieces of metal make contact with other pieces of metal while spinning at high speeds is a place where, eventually, maintenance will be required. There is not, nor will there likely be in the immediate future, a practical maintenance-free transmission.
Maintaining these maintenance-free beasts, I was told by my friend, involved removing the speedometer from the speedometer cable, jerry-rigging a crude funnel, holding it tightly at the cable -- tape loses its effectiveness when the oily fluid hits it -- and slowly pouring the transmission fluid. It was very much like administering an IV drip to your car. By hand.
(In fact, I was so struck by the image of the IV drip and laughingly explained how a hospital IV would look on a sick car, my buddy got the "I'm such an idiot" look on his face. Here he was, holding the cable away from the dash with one hand and dripping the fluid from the bottle with the other for an hour -- more if the shop was cold -- when all he had to do was build an IV drip to do exactly that while he attended to other duties. He had a prototype built by the next time I saw him, and was emailing other mechanics excitedly, telling them how to build their own.)
Dealers want more than shop charges built in to the cars they push. Extras draw big bucks. The power windows, the manual transmissions, all are necessary elements to upgrading the sale.
For example, take car alarms.
To be effective, alarms must be very difficult to disable, meaning first of all difficult to find. A car alarm that is truly effective would involve a butt-load of actual mechanic hours to bury deep in the engine bay.
Yet as much as car dealers want to keep the wrenches in the shop turning, they want even more to avoid truly wrenching non-billable activities.
It's more cost-effective for all around to install the inexpensive guts of the alarms -- the sirens, for example -- at the factory, and then activate them by having the assembly line crews install only the expensive controls, like the key fob receiver, as the pricey option.
I learned of this practice from an old girlfriend. She had a Camaro, a car she had purchased used and had for at least three years. One night, she and a friend heard a siren, and so pulled over to wait for the lights on the emergency vehicle to come whipping around the corner.
But the siren was coming from her engine.
Which was weird, since her car didn't have an alarm.
She managed to wake up the neighborhood at three in the morning. A neighbor finally ripped the battery cable off so everyone could get back to sleep. When they finally reconnected it the cable the next morning, all was again quiet. The siren was never found and never heard from again.
So, dealers want scalability and upgradability worked into cars designed to require specialized service. What else could they demand?
How about profitability?
Years ago, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) passed a series of future requirements that, as they were enacted, would have forced automakers to sell a growing percentage of zero emission vehicles in the state or face fines for failing to comply. At the time, the only way to achieve that requirement would be to build battery electric cars -- and sell them.
The automakers did indeed build these cars; but no one can accuse their subsequent salesmanship efforts as being in any way inspired. The cars were made available in a dealership with great media fanfare, to be sure. Later, though, when actual customers inquired about getting such a car, they were told nobody wants them, so the dealership doesn't carry them. Try another city.
And those that did get these cars didn't get to keep them. All the electric models were available as a lease-only, and that lease did not have extension or purchase options. There were some exceptions, but not to individual buyers.
So here we have a weird disconnect. Potential buyers were being turned away, just as the automakers, every last one of them, were testifying to the CARB that there simply wasn't enough demand for the cars they did manage to build.
Was that true? I honestly don't know if the demand was that slack, because remember folks, very few of the cars were ever available for sale.
One thing is certain, though. Dealers didn't want them.
Every car sold must be supported with service. Let me tell you, working on a 12 volt electrical system is a different endeavor from working on a 300-400+ volt electrical system. (As an example, there is a warning label on the hybrid battery pack of the Honda Insight that warns the voltage within "Will Kill You.") Very few mechanics even want to learn how to tinker with something that deadly.
An electric vehicle enthusiast I know told me years ago about his attempt to buy a Ford EV Ranger, the electric version of Ford's pickup. He was told that as soon as two mechanics in the Puget Sound area were adequately trained, he could place an order. Jim abandoned his quest for the electric truck after one of the trainees died. Jim owns one of the first Priuses in the area instead.
Apart from the service impacts new technology tends to have, one has also to consider the cost. Dealers and manufacturers alike want low cost, high markup -- and new technology is never cheap.
Exactly how uncheap the tech might be, though, is completely unknown. Thanks to the internet, we can cite examples of cars with artificially inflated parts. One such citation involves a battery maintenance module equipped on the EV Rangers. People who build EVs themselves like everything about these units -- except the cost. Well, a former employee of the company that makes these units told the story.
Ford had approached the company with specs and asked for a quote. Given the volume, the part could be mass produced cheaply. The company quoted Ford $40 per unit. Each Ranger required, I think, 16 to 18 of them.
Ford called back and placed the order provided the price be raised to $120/unit.
This was the same Ford Motor Corporation that testified to the CARB, under oath, how prohibitively expensive electric vehicle components turned out to be.
Only those privy to the closed strategy meetings at Ford know exactly what the EV Ranger should have cost, had the development been fair and truly market-based. Likewise, only the dealer representatives know for sure what kind of pressure, if any, was put on the various automakers to avoid the burden of carrying non-gas vehicles, and to carry almost exclusively Big Ass trucks with loads of leather and doors that open with a click of the fob -- mileage be damned.
And now that gas is climbing and likely to keep climbing in the future, these beasts that clog our roads carrying only a fraction of their capacity every day may turn out to become our national albatross. It's difficult to reduce dependance on foreign oil when the car for which millions of drivers paid dearly now sucks too many greenbacks out of the wallet and has no resale value whatsoever.
All is not lost. Not every automaker cleaves stringently to the maxim of middleman. Our neighbors will be flying to Sweden in a few months to see their new car roll off the assembly line. They will drive it about in Europe for a few days, sightsee and do the tourist thing, then fly back home. A few months and an ocean voyage later their car will join them.
They will be living the trip my great-aunts enjoyed half a century ago.
I take heart in the fact that this excursion was arranged by their local car dealer, and that the dealer seems to fill the role of conduit between factory and customer, not unavoidable obstacle making far-reaching, profit-inducing design decisions and later claiming these choices to be ones of which you would approve.
And of that, I'm sure Tantas Carrie and Frieda, frugal and practical as they were, would approve.
I ask this because it increasingly seems that the actual car buyers get precious little opportunity to make their concerns heard.
Before you get going on an angry rebuttal about how different consumers are as a "populous," let me give a bit of background information. My grandmother had two sisters who owned identical cars. They were two-toned Oldsmobiles from the 50s, teal-green with white accents. Both women owned these cars, I believe, until the day they died.
Since one did not often see identical cars owned by sisters -- especially by sisters so generous with enormous chocolate bars every time you saw them -- I asked where they got them. Back in the fifties, they and their husbands (both men died many years before) took a grand trip by train from Port Angeles, Washington, almost as far west as one could travel in the contiguous United States, to Motor City, to Detroit, where they ordered and received their respective identical cars. Then, it was another grand trip home, this time by road.
Since hearing this story (or mishearing it; it's so hard to tell), I too wanted to get my car as they had. That would give me the opportunity Tanta Frieda and Tanta Carrie had, to see your own car built, and to be the very first to road trip it home. Neat concept, huh?
Except you can't exactly do that anymore. At least not in the US.
And the cars show that to be true.
I bought a truck from my brother-in-law a few years back. On the dash was a little irritating red light. I asked my sister about it. She usually takes excellent care of any car in her care, so I thought it unusual that she would let such a literally glaring oversight in maintenance stand untackled.
She got a bit bristly and told the story. One day, after she had gone and had all the regular maintenance done at her local shop, this little "CHECK ENGINE" light made itself known. She took the truck down to the dealer, who recommended the maintenance -- simple belt tightening and valve checking that had already been performed -- be done.
She explained it had been done.
Stonefaced, the mechanic said, "Yes, but we don't know if it was done right."
Meaning, if she wanted to not stare at a damned irritating red light, it would cost her $120 bucks in unnecessary service.
She turned around and walked out, and has vowed never to set foot in that dealer's business again.
The car makers have installed all manner of similar "innovations" concocted by those assigned with the job of appeasing dealers. You see, in order to distribute nationally, to spread an auto brand into every nook and cranny the nation has available, the dealership system was established. This gave dealers exclusive rights on new car sales for the brand they represent. In return, the dealerships must provide maintenance and service, giving the automakers an exclusive distribution network for the lucrative spare parts market where they make far more of a markup than that received on the cars themselves.
So what's the problem?
To keep up their part of the arrangement, the dealerships are forced to keep expensive service personel trained and equipped in a time when the overall quality of the cars they sell is improving. To make matters worse, car buyers, already trained by Walmart and their ilk to seek bargains in all aspects of life, are more and more inclined to avoid $70 oil changes.
So dealers are demanding from the manufacturers built-in reasons the car needs to go see the dealer, like little red lights on the dash timed by calendar chips or tripped by the odometer and that cost hundreds of dollars if you as a driver don't want to be blinded for the rest of your vehicle owning days.
Take also for example the Porsche Boxster. No hood. One of the priviledges of owning a sweet car, everyone knows, is popping the hood and showing off the powerplant. Not so here. All maintenance must be done with Porsche lifts that carefully extract the engine from beneath the car -- even for an oil change.
It gets worse. One mechanic friend told of "maintenance-free" transmissions. That's right, folks, there is no way to maintain these trannies. They lack the basics, like oil fill caps and dipsticks. Meaning that if your tranny goes out, it must be replaced.
People, any place pieces of metal make contact with other pieces of metal while spinning at high speeds is a place where, eventually, maintenance will be required. There is not, nor will there likely be in the immediate future, a practical maintenance-free transmission.
Maintaining these maintenance-free beasts, I was told by my friend, involved removing the speedometer from the speedometer cable, jerry-rigging a crude funnel, holding it tightly at the cable -- tape loses its effectiveness when the oily fluid hits it -- and slowly pouring the transmission fluid. It was very much like administering an IV drip to your car. By hand.
(In fact, I was so struck by the image of the IV drip and laughingly explained how a hospital IV would look on a sick car, my buddy got the "I'm such an idiot" look on his face. Here he was, holding the cable away from the dash with one hand and dripping the fluid from the bottle with the other for an hour -- more if the shop was cold -- when all he had to do was build an IV drip to do exactly that while he attended to other duties. He had a prototype built by the next time I saw him, and was emailing other mechanics excitedly, telling them how to build their own.)
Dealers want more than shop charges built in to the cars they push. Extras draw big bucks. The power windows, the manual transmissions, all are necessary elements to upgrading the sale.
For example, take car alarms.
To be effective, alarms must be very difficult to disable, meaning first of all difficult to find. A car alarm that is truly effective would involve a butt-load of actual mechanic hours to bury deep in the engine bay.
Yet as much as car dealers want to keep the wrenches in the shop turning, they want even more to avoid truly wrenching non-billable activities.
It's more cost-effective for all around to install the inexpensive guts of the alarms -- the sirens, for example -- at the factory, and then activate them by having the assembly line crews install only the expensive controls, like the key fob receiver, as the pricey option.
I learned of this practice from an old girlfriend. She had a Camaro, a car she had purchased used and had for at least three years. One night, she and a friend heard a siren, and so pulled over to wait for the lights on the emergency vehicle to come whipping around the corner.
But the siren was coming from her engine.
Which was weird, since her car didn't have an alarm.
She managed to wake up the neighborhood at three in the morning. A neighbor finally ripped the battery cable off so everyone could get back to sleep. When they finally reconnected it the cable the next morning, all was again quiet. The siren was never found and never heard from again.
So, dealers want scalability and upgradability worked into cars designed to require specialized service. What else could they demand?
How about profitability?
Years ago, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) passed a series of future requirements that, as they were enacted, would have forced automakers to sell a growing percentage of zero emission vehicles in the state or face fines for failing to comply. At the time, the only way to achieve that requirement would be to build battery electric cars -- and sell them.
The automakers did indeed build these cars; but no one can accuse their subsequent salesmanship efforts as being in any way inspired. The cars were made available in a dealership with great media fanfare, to be sure. Later, though, when actual customers inquired about getting such a car, they were told nobody wants them, so the dealership doesn't carry them. Try another city.
And those that did get these cars didn't get to keep them. All the electric models were available as a lease-only, and that lease did not have extension or purchase options. There were some exceptions, but not to individual buyers.
So here we have a weird disconnect. Potential buyers were being turned away, just as the automakers, every last one of them, were testifying to the CARB that there simply wasn't enough demand for the cars they did manage to build.
Was that true? I honestly don't know if the demand was that slack, because remember folks, very few of the cars were ever available for sale.
One thing is certain, though. Dealers didn't want them.
Every car sold must be supported with service. Let me tell you, working on a 12 volt electrical system is a different endeavor from working on a 300-400+ volt electrical system. (As an example, there is a warning label on the hybrid battery pack of the Honda Insight that warns the voltage within "Will Kill You.") Very few mechanics even want to learn how to tinker with something that deadly.
An electric vehicle enthusiast I know told me years ago about his attempt to buy a Ford EV Ranger, the electric version of Ford's pickup. He was told that as soon as two mechanics in the Puget Sound area were adequately trained, he could place an order. Jim abandoned his quest for the electric truck after one of the trainees died. Jim owns one of the first Priuses in the area instead.
Apart from the service impacts new technology tends to have, one has also to consider the cost. Dealers and manufacturers alike want low cost, high markup -- and new technology is never cheap.
Exactly how uncheap the tech might be, though, is completely unknown. Thanks to the internet, we can cite examples of cars with artificially inflated parts. One such citation involves a battery maintenance module equipped on the EV Rangers. People who build EVs themselves like everything about these units -- except the cost. Well, a former employee of the company that makes these units told the story.
Ford had approached the company with specs and asked for a quote. Given the volume, the part could be mass produced cheaply. The company quoted Ford $40 per unit. Each Ranger required, I think, 16 to 18 of them.
Ford called back and placed the order provided the price be raised to $120/unit.
This was the same Ford Motor Corporation that testified to the CARB, under oath, how prohibitively expensive electric vehicle components turned out to be.
Only those privy to the closed strategy meetings at Ford know exactly what the EV Ranger should have cost, had the development been fair and truly market-based. Likewise, only the dealer representatives know for sure what kind of pressure, if any, was put on the various automakers to avoid the burden of carrying non-gas vehicles, and to carry almost exclusively Big Ass trucks with loads of leather and doors that open with a click of the fob -- mileage be damned.
And now that gas is climbing and likely to keep climbing in the future, these beasts that clog our roads carrying only a fraction of their capacity every day may turn out to become our national albatross. It's difficult to reduce dependance on foreign oil when the car for which millions of drivers paid dearly now sucks too many greenbacks out of the wallet and has no resale value whatsoever.
All is not lost. Not every automaker cleaves stringently to the maxim of middleman. Our neighbors will be flying to Sweden in a few months to see their new car roll off the assembly line. They will drive it about in Europe for a few days, sightsee and do the tourist thing, then fly back home. A few months and an ocean voyage later their car will join them.
They will be living the trip my great-aunts enjoyed half a century ago.
I take heart in the fact that this excursion was arranged by their local car dealer, and that the dealer seems to fill the role of conduit between factory and customer, not unavoidable obstacle making far-reaching, profit-inducing design decisions and later claiming these choices to be ones of which you would approve.
And of that, I'm sure Tantas Carrie and Frieda, frugal and practical as they were, would approve.