I think Fredenstein is dead. That means his replacement, an as-yet unnamed recon that cost the princely sum of £167, arrived in very much the nick of time.

Fred the laptop was just over ten years old – well, closer to 11 – and gained the “stein” appendix when his screen fell to pieces and I needed to put bolts through it to hold him together. [This happened within a couple of years of use. Poorly-designed hinges.] I had still been using him every day, but the wifi adapter was getting increasingly annoying, dropping out and needing resetting with ever greater frequency.

Anyway, I cracked, bought Anonymous, and was just copying files off Fred today when he just switched himself off. The superstitious might suspect that he knew the purpose of my action, and took a final act of revenge on me for sending him on his last great adventure.

If I look up from the screen, I can see a repair job that needs doing: the cooker needs a new grill element. A poor design, the element has been banged into so many times over the years that it is now severely bent, and is only a sneeze away from failing, probably spectacularly. Replacements are available, and I’m sure they aren’t getting cheaper. My friend found me one online in about February, and I still haven’t bought it.

The last electrical thing I remember fixing is the vacuum cleaner, which needed a new switch, and was a trivial repair – the only minor issue being its orientation, so that “on” is now “off” and vice versa.

Why, you wonder, is Jit rambling about broken electricals?

Well, as you do, I was watching Anglia Car Auction’s Classic sale from a week ago, and it occurred to me that modern cars will never be classics. They are impossible to repair. They are, in fact, computers on wheels, and I don’t just mean the electric ones. The cars going through the auction last weekend could readily be divided between pre- and post- screen era. Of course, expensive cars were the first to get screens, a feature that cascaded down the value chain until everything has them now. There was demand for vehicles with screens. But I couldn’t help but think that obsolete screens are going to be incredibly annoying for the new owners. Some will have old maps that can never be updated. Software built to interface with phones that no longer exist, and can never be updated.

It’s a little like the built-in radios. Remember the old ones with push-button memories worked by a piece of string? Long wave and medium wave. Some more modern devices probably even included FM, and there were cassette players and CD players on show when the auction cameraman poked his nose in the passenger side…

Of course, it’s relatively easy to pull out a car radio and replace it with a new one. I presume you can still buy them. But many cars have built-in systems now that… yes, will never be replaced. Can never be replaced. Our own car is not that old, and its car software is glitchy, and yes, can never be updated.

A neighbour with the same, popular, now-discontinued model, had a light bulb fail. He took it to his usual mechanic, who habitually charged a fiver to fit a replacement.
“No good,” says he. “The light comes as part of a unit and you have to replace the whole thing.”
The main dealer, if memory serves, quoted several hundred for the job. (I think £300. For a failed bulb.)
How could they justify the cost?
“Well, they’re LEDs now, and they never fail.”
“Well, this one has failed,” was the pithy reply.
The dealer unmoved, the neighbour got one on Ebay for I think £80, and the mechanic fitted it as normal.

But it’s a salutary warning. Looking at the old cars rolling through in King’s Lynn, it’s obvious that the new owners will be able to make a fist at repairs with spare parts, a socket set and a Haynes Manual.

How will today’s cars fare in twenty or thirty years, rolling under the auctioneer’s stand? Will they be worth anything at all?

Cars now are full of “driver assistance” gizmos. [Take motorised steering wheels. There I was, the other week, cruising down the middle lane of the the M6, when the HGV in the inside lane decided to abruptly move my way. Well, the outside lane was empty, so I mirrored his movement to stay out of the damn way. Except the excitable machine I was in thought I had nodded off or something: because I hadn’t signalled, the steering wheel tried to push me back whence I had come.] They are permanently connected to a master computer somewhere – who really knows where? There are over-the-air updates of the software. The vehicle’s location is always known. They know whether you’ve gone too fast. What when the vehicle reaches a certain age? Does the permanent connection fail, turning it into a brick? We have on-board systems that are limited by subscription. It’s all there on your shiny new vehicle, but you have to pay a monthly fee to make use of it – the utterly pointless heated seats being the most infamous, but satellite navigation an obvious example. [The aforementioned car had heated seats. At one point I dropped something, which turned mine on. Five minutes later, I thought the damn thing was on fire.]

In the old days, we would think nothing of replacing the screen or battery of a phone – well, it was at least doable. If you go back to the old flip phones, batteries could simply be clicked in and out. For early smartphones, you could, if dedicated enough, buy cheap third-party batteries, usually with a higher capacity, and swap one in for the fading incumbent. I wouldn’t try it now. The glue holding the screen on is now a major bar to any dismantling, at least if you want to remantle later. [Something wrong with screws, apparently – they have been superseded by gluey tape.] It seems that parts are now coupled together by software, such that even if you could somehow zen your way to replacing the battery, the operating system will constantly complain that it doesn’t match its expectations. [See here. You may need to take advantage of your browser’s translation feature, depending on how good your German is. My browser’s is not very good, but still better than mine.]

There is a “movement” towards the “right to repair.” This seems entirely logical. There may be little that climate sceptics and alarmists agree on, but being able to fix broken tech cheaply is surely one such point of unanimity. I read that various lukewarm regulations on the “right to repair” have come in in the EU and UK. The UK’s Restart project, although couched in the usual “Teh Climate” rubbish, has a worthy aim:

The Restart Project aims to tackle the climate emergency by making electronics work for people, for the planet, and for longer.

We’re a people-powered social enterprise that believes every product should be repairable, and that repair and reuse should be accessible and affordable for everyone.

They host repair parties where you can learn how to fix things, or teach others how to do it if you know more than they do.

The “right to repair” regulations are gradually being adopted in the EU, and we have adopted them over here: see here for a government briefing from the halcyon days of 2021. It rather concentrates on energy use, with the ability to actually fix things something of an afterthought. So far, such regulations do not apply to cars, and the regulations as they are will not make changing your smartphone battery any easier just yet. This page shows the state of things.

Elsewhere I roughed out a calculation that keeping an old car on the road for another 200,000 km would create fewer emissions than buying a new EV.

YMMV, as they say. Either way, it seems quite obvious that importing computers on wheels from our geopolitical rivals (a big hello to our Chinese readers, by the way) is a far less “green” approach than keeping the current fleet on their wheels – ya know, by fixing them. Today’s hi-tech is obsolete tomorrow. It does not make sense to own a modern car – hence the magic of leasing and dumping on a three-year cycle. Your car never gets old. It never gets obsolete.

Most importantly, you never have to fix it.

/rant over

PS. I’ve just shamed myself into buying that grill element. Twenty quid. The cooker cost £465 in 2013. 🙂

P2S. Favourite car over the two days of the auction? It’s a hard choice. Wouldn’t want any of the two seaters. Maybe the green Cortina?

Featured image: the shell of an Escort sold early on Sunday – it went for about eleven grand.

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17 Comments

  1. Where to start?

    It makes sense for our pockets and for the environment, if things can’t be repaired at modest cost without too much difficulty.

    There might be an argument that the economy depends on manufactured obsolescence, but that argument, poor though it is, fails at the first hurdle – most of the stuff we use isn’t made here any more. Much of it comes from abroad, most obviously from China. Having to buy a new laptop, smartphone, cooker, microwave or even a car every few years, is bad news all round.

    I have recently been going down memory lane and browsing diaries from 45 years ago (not much point keeping a diary if you never read it). Nobody in our family (least of all me) could afford anything but old second hand cars back then. I have been amazed at how much time I spent scrabbling round scrapyards searching (usually successfully) for replacement car parts. My car was always failing me in some way, but I kept on fixing it pretty cheaply.

    In fairness , modern cars are much more reliable than their predecessors, but when they go wrong it’s a much bigger problem than it used to be.

    Liked by 2 people

  2. I remember the Anglia Car Auction in King’s Lynn from when we lived there! At the Hardwick as I recall. We went a few times hoping to buy a new car. I’ve always had traditional, non-computerised, straightforward easy to repair cars, from an old Capri (which was beyond economic repair!) to Datsun/Nissan Bluebirds to Subaru Legacy to Volvo V70 (almost modern!) to Skoda Felicia diesel (currently now one of only a handful on the road in GB). I really don’t like new cars. They’re all boxy, wedge-shaped, easy to forget, characterless blobs of metal and plastic, which are a nightmare to repair if they go wrong. I really do miss my Nissan Bluebird. The less said about EVs the better.

    Liked by 2 people

  3. But actually, I have had an EV(V) actually – EVV 671X, a Nissan Bluebird bought from a guy called Iftikhar in West London, which just went on, and on, and on, needing only an oil change and new spark plugs occasionally! Turned out not to be such an ifty car after all!

    Liked by 1 person

  4. A somewhat sad note at the auction was the high number of lots from a firm letting out cars for film and TV. It seems AI can now patch them in, so the production companies don’t need to rent them any more.

    Like

  5. My 2011 Vauxhall’s electronics are stupidly clever. Far too complicated and bossy.

    For about nine months, the car often beeped loudly as soon as I drove off because it thought that the rear passenger doors were unlocked. (They weren’t.) To stop the beeping, I had to stop the engine, get out of the car and turn the rear doors’ child-locks off and on again by prodding about in little slots in the doors’ sides. That would kill the beeps for a few journeys, although a warning light still showed on the speedo.

    More problems arrived after a few months. The key fob either wouldn’t unlock the rear doors when the car was parked or it wouldn’t lock them after parking. To lock them, I had to prod about in yet more slots in the sides of the rear doors and that didn’t always work.

    I eventually solved those lock problems by buying two new lock modules online for £90. It took only about half an hour to fit them. I would have bought some earlier but online forums said that new modules seldom solved the problems. (Also that garages charge >£500 to replace them. Plausible.)

    One lock problem remains. It’s there by design and can’t be disabled. If I leave the keys in the ignition with the engine turned off and get out of the car, after a few minutes the car locks all of its doors. I once had to break into my house to fetch a spare car fob. Since then, if I need to leave the keys in the ignition I always lower the driver’s window before getting out of the car.

    Then there’s the front passenger seat’s weight sensor. If you put a grocery bag on that seat – even one that doesn’t weigh very much – the car sometimes thinks that there’s a passenger who is not wearing a seat belt. Danger! Danger! Danger! To stop the beeping, I have to briefly lift the bag off the seat. I confess that I usually do that while driving – not very safe.

    The electronic parking brake? If you are parked while facing down a steepish slope and need to reverse to get enough space to drive off then there’s every chance that you’ll crash into the car in front. With a manual handbrake you can keep it on until the gears engage and the car starts trying to move backwards. My car’s electronic parking brake, however, switches off before the gears are engaged, meaning that the car rolls forwards. You can probably cope with this if you know that it’s going to happen: rather than slamming on the footbrake, you rev the engine a bit and quickly take your foot off the clutch. But the first time it happened it took me four attempts to move off without bumping into an expensive sports car that was parked closer and closer in front of me. (Actually, that’s the only time it’s happened. I no longer park on steep slopes.)

    Other problems? A rear wheel has been squeaking loudly and sometimes getting very warm ever since the garage did some work on it. But that’s not a problem with stupidly clever electronics. It’s a problem with stupidly… well, never mind.

    On the plus side, the Vauxhall’s rear seats can be folded fully flat, so it can be used as a van or even a camper. I suspect that the fully-flat thing is why the local furniture-making Mennonites owned an identical car for a while.

    Liked by 4 people

  6. I just cannot fathom electronic handbrakes. Why do they even exist? What use are they? What improvement on manual handbrakes do they represent? None, as far as I can tell. Their only purpose is to make driving a car more difficult, less safe and far more stressful. A friend has one on a VW. The car itself is lovely – apart from the electronic locks – but the electronic handbrake is a complete nightmare, especially when doing hill starts. Anyone taking their driving test in a car with an electronic handbrake would probably fail!

    Liked by 2 people

  7. Jaime J; I agree with you about the drawbacks of electronic handbrakes for someone accustomed to the manual versions. However I suspect their introduction came, in part, from the ongoing campaign to have the car control as much as possible, resulting in the modern plague of “driver aids”.

    Hill starts were, indeed, a pain with the earlier variants which were controlled by a switch or button. However, aiui, later versions are automatic and incorporate a “hill hold” function which stops the car moving on a slope until the throttle is pressed. I’ve driven cars that were so equipped and have to admit it works well.

    Sadly the days are gone where a snow-covered car park was an opportunity to channel your inner Colin MaCrae 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  8. Yes, the electronic hand brakes are a lot better now – but there was absolutely nothing wrong with a cable.

    Meanwhile (hat tip Adrian), Harry and Jeremy discuss when peak car was, and settle a tad later than I opine, at about 2015. I really think there was never a reason to add a screen. The peak car section from maybe 24 minutes:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXCfADxDHrc

    Liked by 1 person

  9. Jit, there is also the ‘Mend and Repair Cafe’ movement. I volunteer at a couple of these and it’s quite good fun. A lot of modern stuff is almost impossible to repair as the parts go obsolete too quickly but it’s worth it for the occasional Dansette record player or Bush transistor radio (Mullard OC series transistors!) that comes in.

    I just have to close my ears to the background climate panic conversations that go on.

    There is a surprising amount of money in grants available for these efforts if you can fill in the forms correctly.

    Liked by 1 person

  10. I guess it’s all part of the ongoing drive to make the humans redundant. Tesla now make cars which drive themselves. Are we being unreasonable to object to this automation of what was once a valuable human skill, the acquiring of which was a rite of passage into full adulthood, which granted one the freedom of the road, to go anywhere, anytime, in command of a mean machine? Now it seems the machine is going to be in charge. Automated washing machines are one thing – a good thing. I’m not sure that you can say the same about fully automated driverless cars or cars that have so many ‘helpful’ gadgets they basically remove any requirement for human skill and judgement. Stop the world please; I’d like to get off here.

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  12. Pingback: News Round-Up – The Daily Sceptic

  13. Thoroughly agree with this article, far too much modern tech isn’t under your control, but that of corporate busybodies. I’m going to link below to some further watching/reading on this topic, because it’s well worth exploring further.

    This guy makes videos https://www.youtube.com/@rossmanngroup/videos about big tech planned obsolescence, and leads an effort to defeat it.

    There’s this article about the problems of smart technology being a tool for state interference in our lives as well as a means for corporations to **** us over: https://dailysceptic.org/2023/09/27/the-coming-tyranny-of-smart-technology-is-worse-than-you-think-but-there-is-hope/

    And this article gives some good thoughts too: https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/why-you-should-destroy-your-smartphone-now/

    A lot more people need to learn how to reverse engineer and otherwise tinker with their property, defying things like Digital Rights Management (a kind of corporate built malware used to prevent you fully using your own property).

    I trust that Fredenstein, and his replacement, are both running a Linux distro of one form or another (Mint is easy for refugees fleeing from the totalitarian hellhole of Windows-land, Ubuntu is similar underneath but with a somewhat less Windows-like user-interface). This is the only way you can have a computer that actually works for you rather than for Microsoft or Apple. If you’re in Windows-land presently, make sure to back up all your files to an external drive before wiping and installing Linux. And there’s a good chance that the files still on Fredenstein might be recoverable if you buy a USB-to-SATA or USB-to-NVME adapter, take the hard-drive (might be SATA or NVME) out of fredenstein and then read from it like a USB drive)..

    Liked by 2 people

  14. John, I will salvage Fred’s hard drive at some point and put it in an enclosure – it’s more than likely OK.

    As to Linux, I have been trapped in Windows for a long time. Everyone uses Word, and until the emulators are 100% perfect, so must I. [I could have Linux on a stick to boot from when I don’t need Word. Maybe. I would be pleased to do so.]

    Like

  15. Mike, their prices make my £167 recon look like a freebie! I guess the real issue is that all laptops should have been built that way. I had a nice Asus laptop years ago whose screen failed – the repair shop sold me a new Dell. Imagine if the screen could have been swapped out easily… if the motherboard too, so that I could eventually leave Windows 95 behind… the CD player upgraded to DVD…

    One thing about that old laptop was that it was built like a brick, and there were plates on the bottom that you could unscrew and change the drive or add memory. Plus, the battery was one of those that clicked in and out.

    Ha! I just asked the internet when the Asus A6000 was made. The AI said 2018 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  16. Jit: Linux on a USB stick does work, it is how you do a Linux installation, but sticks used like this for a long time can wear out quite quickly. Persistent USB sticks can let you take Linux for a fairly long test-drive, but persistent USB sticks are slow to run from, and due to the low write cycles that USB stick flash mmeory is rated for, might only be good for a few tens of days work with. Dual boot of Linux with Windows can work too, but it is tricky, updates to either OS can cause the other to be wiped (though it is usualy Windows with worse etiquette in that regard). Windows inside a virtual machine (VM) (Oracle’s Virtual Box is free, somewhat open-source I think, and simple to use) can work, with Linux as the host OS running on the actual hardware. There’s also WINE, a not-quite-an-emulator which lets some Windows software run on Linux, some versions of MS Word might be WINE compatible. A Windows VM running on a Linux machine is probably the best choice though. Most Linux distros use LibreOffice which is compatible enough with other folk using word IF you are only concerned about text and images, converting back and forth doesn’t preserve formatting very well. Glad to have helped.

    Liked by 2 people

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