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posted by
martyb
on Wednesday December 19 2018, @04:34AM
from the now-they're-buying...trucks? dept.
from the now-they're-buying...trucks? dept.
General Motors has announced it's shuttering five production facilities and killing six vehicle platforms by the end of 2019 as it reallocates resources towards self-driving technologies and electric vehicles.
[...] North American car production hit 17.5 million vehicles in 2016, and dropped marginally to 17.2 million in 2017. Interesting, but perhaps not significant.
More telling are changes in driver behaviour. In North America, for example, fewer teens are getting driver's licences. In 1983, 92 per cent of teens were licensed, while by 2014, that number had dropped to 77 per cent. In Germany, the number of new licences issued to drivers aged 17 to 25 has dropped by 300,000 over the last 10 years.
Are we over our love affair with cars?
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TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @05:25AM (5 children)
It can still be fun, you need to learn some new skills though.
New cars self-diagnose, which takes some of the art of being a good mechanic away. These days, the mechanic ( or "tech" if you prefer ) tends to just address
what the car's OBD-II system indicates is the fault, most often by simply replacing a defective part with a new part.
Mechanics who can diagnose a car's problems without using a computer are going to be increasingly rare, and the older cars which lack an OBD-II system will require a mechanic to actually understand the systems in the car. Such mechanics are literally "old school" and are retiring or dying off at a high rate. Good luck finding someone to repair an older car in the years to come, because people who have such knowledge will be increasingly scarce. Having said the preceding, there is a real joy in being able to understand the systems and use logic to diagnose problems. Unfortunately most of the people who would be best at such tasks won't end up working in a car repair shop - they will be working as engineers.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @05:45AM (3 children)
Cars without an OBD-II system are probably more than 20 years old now (it's been mandatory in the United States since 1996). Models worth repairing will be at least as hard to find as professional mechanics capable of servicing them. This is just normal market forces at work. Most cars don't last longer than a normal person's career anyway, so by the time all the old professionals die off nobody will be using any cars that require their services anyway. So there's no real problem here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @03:54PM (2 children)
"by the time all the old professionals die off nobody will be using any cars that require their services anyway. So there's no real problem here."
WRONG.
Obviously you don't have a clue about the market for older cars.
Take a look at the Bring A Trailer website.
And next time, when you don't know what you're talking about, shut the fuck up. bitch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @08:22PM
such a passion for antique vehicles!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday December 19 2018, @11:40PM
I just bought a 20year old diesel van. Craigslist. Because it had such an elegant design. So damm simple. The whole engine is pistons, gears, cams, pushrods. The only thing in it actually using electricity is its E4OD transmission, which will fall back to mechanical mode. Just last week, I finally got the powertain control module back online so I get more appropriate shifts. (I had a bad solder connection in the Programmable Speedometer/Odometer Module). This thing just gives me a lot of confidence that I can depend on it, which is a lot more than I can say I have for most of my later tech stuff that needs other permissions before it does what I wanted it to do.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Thursday December 20 2018, @12:51AM
I think he meant the fun to drive, not to maintain it.