Moderns...what fittings will you avoid when they are shiters.

[gordonbennet]

It appears i'm not alone in detesting most moderns.

 

Trouble is these moderns will be in shite territory in 10 years time, well if they make 10 years before the electronic failures render the heaps to the weigher.

 

There's several things, well dozens actually, that i will not never as long as i draw breath be buying into, certain things moderns are increasingly gaining.

 

Here's 3 or 4 not on your nelly's to kick things off.

I ain't having, ever

 

1. Automated manual or dual clutch DSG type gearbox, as designed by satan, presumably when he had a very sore arse.

 

2. Electric Parking Brake, what the actual fuck, has anyone ever thought of a good reason for one?, its an answer to a problem that never existed, and apparently destined for lorries, oh goody.

 

3. Stop Start, NO NO NO.

 

4. Keyless Go, Renos are bad enough when the credit card starts to break up, i can see keyless go as a mehusive kerching when the bugger spits its dummy out.

 

 

Right, thats 4 to be going on with, i expect you lot have more.

 

Indeed, does anyone like the above fittings, and would they spend their own money on them?

[chaseracer]

Doesn't every new car have stop/start now, with the necessary 400 quid battery?  This could be a timebomb, shitewise... 

[Cavcraft]

Ford badges

 

VW badges

 

Threads about modern cars being crap.

[gordonbennet]

Hah, apparently some new cars have to reprogrammed if you put a new battery on or it won't charge correctly.

 

Good wheeze that   now bend well over and take it like a man  dry   KERRRCHIINNNG.

[Lacquer Peel]

BRING BACK THE HORSEY HORSELESS.

[mat_the_cat]

To some extent though, as cars move out of main dealer territory, there will be affordable fixes and work-arounds coming onto the market. Plus the DIYers like ua will become more electronics savvy.

 

I remember the same sort of complaints about automatic chokes, and after that fuel injection!

[Lacquer Peel]

I remember my Peugeot 405, a car designed in the 1980s, having bayonet fittings for the radiator, necessitating removal of the front bumper to undo them. Non A/C cars have conventional hoses with jubilee clips. WHAT IS POINT.

[Sloth in a bowl]

At least stop/start can be turned off on most moderns.

 

DSG boxes, electric handbrakes and diesel motors are to be avoided in my mind.

[Junkman]

Trouble is these moderns will be in shite territory in 10 years time,

 

No they won't.

[Ratdat]

I think our current 156 is probably the latest model car I'll own. I plan to never buy anything much later than 1990 ever again if I can help it, so none of this will ever be an issue

.

[Bren]

The electric window switches on my vectra were acting up - they needed more pressure than you would think to operate the windows.

 

Unbeliveably, you can strip them and clean them, which is what I did - normal service was resumed.

 

You wouldn't think this was possible on a modern but it is.

 

Modern vauxhalls are ace.

[Shep Shepherd]

Anything post-2005 is anathema to me.

[Asimo]

As above plus

 

exploding cushions, sunroofs, air conditioning (I live in England FFS), leather, anything that needs an acronym ie ESP, EDL, turbothingys, Blue toof, compression ignition, four cylinders, head gaskets, folding seats, rear wiper, multipox wiring, more than one camshaft..........

 

Fuck. Another Ami it is then.

[Albert Ross]

Well, I just bought a 5 year old Volvo on the never-never. Bluetooth, Built in SatNav, Keyless, 16V Twin Cam Turbo Diesel, "Auto" box (Twin wet clutch 6 speed manual with oil bath DMF and electronic actuation)  French engine, German (Getrag) transmission designed for a Jap car, Heated electric leather, in-dash CD changer. Etc etc etc. Come 5 years time, it will want all the airbags doing......

[cort1977]

A recent hire car Chrysler 300 jobby had the option of heated and cooled cup holders.   Pretty sure i will be able to continue to live without those.

[Justin Case]

Any badge that includes the words Eco, Green or Blue

[Hendry]

I like toys, I've always liked well specced cars and always wanted the range top model with all the options but one thing I fucking detest are tyre pressure monitoring systems, unreliable, expensive to fix, need replacing/reprogramming each time new tyres are fitted, stupid annoying warning messages and clearly designed for lazy people who don't know a thing about cars, I'm sure most folk would know there's an issue long before a message pings up, unfortunately I'm sure I read somewhere all new models of car brought out after a certain date (possibly 2015) will require these as standard.

 

Parking sensors, probably a great idea but so annoying, the beeping doesnt aid me it annoys me.

[derek9213]

all of the above and i have another related question

 

why do we need automatic headlamps and wipers,    ive never had any problem with the old manual ones

 

if it gets dark switch on the headlamps

if  it rains switch on the wipers

 

im sure i can manage to do that myself 

[mercrocker]

Any number plate which starts with anything higher than a K will, I suspect, be the very first fitment on a car  that puts me off buying it.  

[Micrashed]

Come 5 years time, it will want all the airbags doing......

Stuff that.

The MicraShed is 15 years old now with one solitary airbag and no fault light, the C8 is 8 years old with shitloads of air bags and they aint getting replaced in 2 years.

The only two things on the C8 that are problematic or will be if they go FUBAR are the rear automatic sliding doors and the EGR valve.

[garygazgazza]

Anything with Prius written on it.

[Taff]

It appears i'm not alone in detesting most moderns.

 

Trouble is these moderns will be in shite territory in 10 years time, well if they make 10 years before the electronic failures render the heaps to the weigher.

 

There's several things, well dozens actually, that i will not never as long as i draw breath be buying into, certain things moderns are increasingly gaining.

 

Here's 3 or 4 not on your nelly's to kick things off.

I ain't having, ever

 

1. Automated manual or dual clutch DSG type gearbox, as designed by satan, presumably when he had a very sore arse.

 

2. Electric Parking Brake, what the actual fuck, has anyone ever thought of a good reason for one?, its an answer to a problem that never existed, and apparently destined for lorries, oh goody.

 

3. Stop Start, NO NO NO.

 

4. Keyless Go, Renos are bad enough when the credit card starts to break up, i can see keyless go as a mehusive kerching when the bugger spits its dummy out.

 

 

Right, thats 4 to be going on with, i expect you lot have more.

 

Indeed, does anyone like the above fittings, and would they spend their own money on them?

 

My compnay car is a 63 plate BMW, and as I had a good year in the run up to spec'ing it, I got as much as I could. Keyless ignition is FTW, as is stop/start. What is funny is my automatic assumption now that ALL cars are keyless and having to fumble through my pockets looking for keys when not in the Bimmer!!

 

Both features come with built in by-pass, the fob had a convential key concealed inside it and the stop/start has an override.

 

To flip your question on it's head, I think that automated, adjustable-speed, intermittent wash/wipe on a stalk is the all-time best ever safety feature and I wish I was clever enough to retro fit it.. Fumbling around on the dash of my Galaxie amongst 6 identical (albiet gorgeous) art deco switches, in the dark, while it's drizzling, is fucking terrifing. Anything that makes life safer is groovy, I think.

 

The future is great, just depends how you approach it.

[mercrocker]

Good thing about  old stuff is you can move everything around....My Oxford has  almost  every switch in a different place to where BMC had them, some have  longer stalks and the fog lights are only on a one-touch flicker so I can flash with them (they are useless as lighting).   Took about ten minutes to get things where I want them and intuition kicks in after that, even in the dark....

[Asimo]

I followed a BMW 6 series yesterday, ( just the sort of car I would buy at ten years old if they weren't full of stuff I don't want). Anyway, I was amazed to see the wipers are still as for LHD on RHD cars, making rain driving as bad as BX!

I thought that particular bit of vorsprung dork meanness had stopped in the 80s. Amazing to see such obvious cheapskateyness on such an expensive car.

[Asimo]

"My compnay car is a 63 plate BMW"

 

Good luck with that, hope you don't keep getting the blue-screen of death and have to keep re-booting until the PAS agrees to work.

[Waderider]

I've yet to meet an electrical fault I couldn't resolve. Mind you I am quite qualified and experienced as a electrical and civil engineer. It's just fear of the unknown, in twenty years time the average joe home mechanic will be much better at diagnosing and repairing this. I don't buy into carbs were better.

 

Having typed that, there is no way you'll ever get me buying a current Frenchie, and I'll still avoid the cars with the worst reputations. And I'll probably just keep buying Volvos.

 

Which reminds me, can anyone recommend from experience an OBD code reader and clearer for a 2003 Volvo V40? Maybe I should start another thread where advice for fixing EMS and electrical issues could reside?

[tooSavvy]

...the future, now the past...

 

I recall reading about the first write-offs of Rover 214/6 thinggies - cos the ECU was behind the front panel & kops it in a medium frontal.

Price of a new one was so much the car gets fragged.

 

Everyone has ECU now and I don't hear this as the OMGECURIP issue?

 

When my dear old Savv gets fragged, I'll be looking for a Dacia....

 

TS

[Asimo]

I have worked as a test, service and development engineer (non-vehicle electronics) for most of the last 40 years. I think there are three big barriers to fault finding electronic problems in modern cars.

 

Firstly, the absence of accurate and detailed enough information with which to readily diagnose and locate a fault.

Secondly, the ludicrous price asked for vehicle, and even worse, model specific electronic spare parts.

Thirdly, access to loom, connectors and modules: these bits seem to be fitted into the bare shell, in nooks and crannies that were handy on the production line but nearly impossible thereafter.

 

1) OK, you have a fault code, but exactly what parameters were read by exactly what algorithm? I am not going to know and this ignorance makes fault codes far less usefull than they could be.

 

2) Electronics are really cheap to produce in quantity, one of the reasons cars are full of electronics, so it is hard to see high prices as anything but profiteering.

 

3) Makers are never going to care about repairability. Repair costs outside of the warranty period are of no concern to them. My own experiance of obscure electronic problems (on my Golf mk4) is that inside the warranty period dealers just clear the fault parameters and shrug.

[Formula Autos]

Given my experiences running a Mondiesel as a daily driver, I'll avoid anything turbodiesel when they get into shite territory. Replacing injectors and DMFs wouldn't be economic at shite car value levels. Lobbing in injectors from the scrappy wouldn't even be an option either, without the means to code them to the ECU and what-not.

 

All of which will probably consign the dizzlers to an early death, leaving us to fight over the petrol engined equivalents that have survived*. As dizzlers now account for a big chunk of the new car market, there should be plenty of panels and trim from them available from the scrapyards.

 

The future might not actually be that bad.

 

* Which will be virtually valueless, as the lentil eating lefties will be running around in battery powered horrors, and Joe Public will be so shit-scared of fuel costs that they'll still continue to shell out thousands every year buying dizzlers on the never-never. Petrol will be a dirty word by then. Which is where we come in.

[Morgan84]

DMF - No thanks

 

DPF - No thanks

 

Stop/start - No thanks

 

Keyless - No thanks

 

Hybrid - No thanks

 

Electric park brake - No thanks