The travails with my wife’s steaming pile of human refuse daily driver are well documents on the forum portion of the website. It’s the worst car we’ve ever owned, and probably ever will own.
As if on cue, after a couple weeks of trouble free (not worry free) driving, my wife called to let me know that she thought the car was about to explode on the highway. I spent about ten minutes trying to ask simple questions in a vain attempt to narrow down the problem and got, as you’d expect, nowhere. After all, this is the woman who once called me in high school to tell me her van was making a “space ship noise.” It was low on power steering fluid.
She managed to limp the car home and it was waiting for me in the driveway that afternoon. I had a couple ideas that ranged from the mundane (bad gas) to the extreme (no oil/internal damage) but that’s all they were, ideas. Luckily my father in law remembered a trick that this heap is equipped with: By flipping the key on and off in a proper sequence, the car displays all the trouble codes from the computer right there on the dash. A quick visit to Google with digits and I knew that the MAP sensor was bad. A hundred bucks and ten minutes of work later, the car was running and driving just as poorly as it did when we first got it, which is far less poorly than it was when my wife was fighting it home the other day.
In this case, the modern technology that many of us gearheads lament saved me big time and money. If not for the car being able to tell me the problem, it’d have been lost as hell and probably just sent it to a shop where a professional mechanic could have done the work, and charged me every inch of the way (rightfully so, I will add).
So where is the fine line? The line where we have the stuff we want, but not the intrusion or added complexity that we loathe. I’ll admit that I have no idea but I would argue that this is an area of the hobby that divides the old school and new school gearheads and hot rodders.
Fact is, when guys modify modern stuff, one of the first places they go is the computer, that little box that’s hated by every guy who loves changing jets in his Holley. The “brain” that’s taking the thinking out of the modern hot rod, they’d argue. The counter point is that there are people out there skilled enough, and products friendly enough, that one can load different “tunes” in and out of the computer even more easily than making those jet changes.
For me personally the line is not so much related to the performance tuning of the car, but rather anything that controls the car’s physical ability to act upon my inputs. Traction control that cannot be turned off, “stability control” (that is soon to be mandated equipment on all cars sold in this country) forbidding me from ripping off a nice power slide, or even in some performance driving situations, ABS that does not allow me to threshold brake. Those are the places that I don’t think the computer should be going because frankly, before long everyone will be in a car programmed to go 65 mph and get there in 30 seconds.
The shining light is that there are guys and girls out there working in darkened rooms, in front of multiple monitors, developing the programs, flashes, and updates to shut all the nanny systems down.
Of course the easy answer to all this is not to buy anything late model and just own old stuff. That’d be fine for me, but my wife has not warmed up to the idea of driving something built in the 1960s with a massive blower coming through the hood.
Maybe someone can work on a tune for that.
