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Comment by douche | Hacker News Reader

I would really like a 100% mechanical automobile, with no computers involved, designed such that when something breaks and you're fifty miles away from anything, you can actually crawl underneath and fix it. Analog radio, crank windows, keyhole locks on every door, real guages. I'll concede the electric starter and the windshield wipers, since I'm not that nostalgic for the days of the Model T.

Completely off-topic, but if I saw a new truck with the old-style floor-mounted stomp pedal for the dimmer switch, it'd almost be a shut-up-and-take-my-money situation. I cannot comprehend why automakers keep piling more stuff into the steering wheel. Some of the little sedans have handles and buttons coming off them every which way.

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I've found computer-controlled electronic fuel injection much more reliable than carburetors. And OBDII is very handy for diagnosing mechanical problems, even with the manufacturer idiosyncrasies.

I sense some rose colored glasses.

Cars are so much more reliable than they were even 25 years ago. Reliable and longer lasting. My first car broke down if you looked at it wrong. My current car does not have that problem even though it is just as old/has just as many miles on it than my first car did at the time. Breaking down on the side of the road used to be a common part of my life, now it hasn't happened to me in the last 8 years.

The reason for that increased reliability is probably because of pump pressure, not controls.

Direct injection has several hundred bar working pressure and a separate filter can be used because of such pressure. Traditional float controlled carburetor probably doesn't work because there is some foreign object stuck in the duct. You cant use heavy filtering because the pressures are almost atmospheric.

The fact that automobiles are on the road for longer than ever and their life expectancy keeps growing makes me think they're getting better at reliability and maintainability rather than worse.

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I also find AAA much better than crawling under my car in the middle of the night 50 miles away from anything...in general. But I know that's a personal preference.

My uncle was showing off his new car to me - it had all the fancy bells and whistles of "modern" cars, including a sensor for everything. The same day, one of the sensors told him a tire was low on air. He filled it up at a gas station and ended with a blowout on the highway (up until then the sensor still said it was "low"). The damage to the car was minimal, but it wiped out the "blind spot" sensor on that side of the car. Needless to say, these sensors are ridiculously expensive to replace.

I hate that cars are bloated with superfluous components that always break before the car itself does. That said, there are some gadgets that I would miss on a fully mechanical car. I'd be happy to find a manufacturer that could balance that correctly.

>I hate that cars are bloated with superfluous components

Low tire pressure sensors are required in all new cars after 2011 for safety as driving on under inflated tires is very dangerous. It's a much needed safety feature. Your car is going to get more "bloated" every year as new safety features are required each year because they work at reducing crashes.

I am not sure who just blindly fills up their tires without checking the psi as they go.

Sure blame the victim. But the point of these sensors is to make it foolproof. Then they fool you. That's the issue - its not safer to have faulty sensors that we come to depend upon.

Why would you want that? How often does your car actually break? What computer-controlled components break in it?

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.

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.

That's why I still drive my 2000 Integra. It's not without a computer, but it's mostly mechanical. I can fix nearly everything myself, and I do. It still gets decent mileage, it's incredibly reliable, and parts are relatively cheap and plentiful.

>when something breaks and you're fifty miles away from anything, you can actually crawl underneath and fix it.

Where are you going to get the parts if you are 50 miles away from anything?

I once fixed the alternator pulley on my 1984 VW Rabbit in the parking lot of a gas station in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming using nothing but JB Weld, zip ties, and a piece of scrap metal I found and shaped into a replacement Woodruff key.

There's definitely something to be said for the maintainability of a vehicle where a small tool box worth of tools is enough to fix 90% of all possible problems.

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