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I'm not OP, but with my car? The battery dies every winter, then nothing works. (diesel with hand crank for the win!) The break in alarm sometimes starts to bl

by vlehto 10y ago

I'm not OP, but with my car? The battery dies every winter, then nothing works. (diesel with hand crank for the win!) The break in alarm sometimes starts to blink the lights on its own. You have to do some "open the doors, lock the doors, open them again" sequence to fix it. It took me year to figure out what's wrong and how to do the right moves. The radio doesn't work anymore, as there is some kind of superuser code that's required every time the battery dies. The headlights have some computer control. They point to wrong altitude. Mechanical problems happen too. But they often happen by wear. You get significant warning before it's completely kaput. And you can often guess what's wrong from the symptoms quite easily, because the erratic behavior is more consistent.

douche 10y ago
This ^. I had to replace a dead battery in my truck a few weeks ago, and it's been all frigged up ever since - apparently all the engine tuning resets if power is disconnected. I've tried to get the dealership to disable the door auto-locking (get above 5 mph, doors lock) "feature" half a dozen times, and I've given up, since they disable it in the software and it's turned back on before I leave the parking lot. ABS brakes are awful, and down-right dangerous if you are not expecting their flaky behavior, and rather want them to perform in a predictable and consistent way. It's terrifying driving an ABS vehicle on icy roads. Who hasn't had a largely irrelevant, but very expensive, sensor burn out and trip a buggy corner case in the engine firmware? I realize I sound like a Luddite, but my favorite vehicle so far is still my first, which was a bare-bones, rusty 1985 F-150 with a four-speed manual and a straight six. It's still on the road, with over 300,000 miles on it, although it has become something of a truck of Theseus, aside from the frame and tranny. You can tear the whole thing down and put it back together with a pretty basic set of mechanics tools. It wasn't perfect - starters and solenoids tended to go bad, and mileage was a tad worse than the current models - but it's simple, so that when things go sideways, you patch up the one component that's broken, and trundle onward.

by vlehto 10y ago

douche 10y ago

This ^. I had to replace a dead battery in my truck a few weeks ago, and it's been all frigged up ever since - apparently all the engine tuning resets if power is disconnected. I've tried to get the dealership to disable the door auto-locking (get above 5 mph, doors lock) "feature" half a dozen times, and I've given up, since they disable it in the software and it's turned back on before I leave the parking lot. ABS brakes are awful, and down-right dangerous if you are not expecting their flaky behavior, and rather want them to perform in a predictable and consistent way. It's terrifying driving an ABS vehicle on icy roads. Who hasn't had a largely irrelevant, but very expensive, sensor burn out and trip a buggy corner case in the engine firmware? I realize I sound like a Luddite, but my favorite vehicle so far is still my first, which was a bare-bones, rusty 1985 F-150 with a four-speed manual and a straight six. It's still on the road, with over 300,000 miles on it, although it has become something of a truck of Theseus, aside from the frame and tranny. You can tear the whole thing down and put it back together with a pretty basic set of mechanics tools. It wasn't perfect - starters and solenoids tended to go bad, and mileage was a tad worse than the current models - but it's simple, so that when things go sideways, you patch up the one component that's broken, and trundle onward.