boats and cars becoming too complicated

[pvb]

My wife's car has failed the MOT because the SRS Airbag light stays on, the car is a Mercedes and it will cost £1,300 to fix; it can not be done diy because you have to have the "right tools" to reconfigure everything. It is unnecessary complicated which allows garage dealers to charge what they feel like. Hope boats don't go this way too, and definitely don't need airbags in the cockpit.

Take it to a Merc "specialist" rather than a franchised dealer - it's likely to be much cheaper.

I've just traded my wife's SLK because it was 8 years old and the seat heater stopped working and one of the self-levelling Xenon headlights decided to search the sky for invaders. I knew it was going to be another £1000+ expense.

 

[pvb]

No idea though whether they are robust enough to last 15 years or more.

Increasingly, it isn't a case of how well a car is built which determines how long it lasts, it's the cost of replacing electronic modules later in the car's life - when the car's worth a few hundred quid but the repair cost is £1000+. That's when most people decide to cut their losses and scrap the car.

 

[elton]

Sadly, the days of simplicity are over, because environmental legislation requires motor vehicles to emit pollution at levels that are impossible to meet without resort to sophisticated engine management systems. I'm a big fan of the old Bosch K-Jetronic electro-mechanical fuel injection system, but sadly it is no more.

 

[Avocet]

You are quite right. A DS is basically made up of a very large number of fairly simple parts, so there tends to be a lot of dismantling required to solve a problem. That's unlike modern cars which generally use a small number of very complicated parts which are simply swapped as required. I don't attempt to repair hydraulic bits on my DS, but otherwise everything is perfectly doable, if time-consuming. And the ride when it's all working is just Out. Of. This. World.

Yes, the ride was pretty amazing. Is yours an old "red fluid" one? (Apparently, they were even better)! I can remember amazing my friends taking speed bumps without lifting off and watching the looks on their faces as we passed over them and the realised they still had all their teeth! Of course, the clever hydro-pneumatic suspension got all the credit for that, but I always felt that was unfair. A very low unsprung mass (inboard brakes) helped a lot in that regard. The only downside, I thought, was that while ride over big bumps and holes was unparalleled, I always felt that small corrugations (like rumble strips, cobbles and cats' eyes) were very poorly absorbed (I think because of Citroen's reluctance to use rubber suspension bushes). Fantastic cars though.... best £75 I ever spent! Eeee them were t' days...!

 

[JumbleDuck]

Yes, the ride was pretty amazing. Is yours an old "red fluid" one?

No, mine's a green fluid one. In fact, it may well be the most modern DS in existence having been - as far as I can tell - put together from a knock-down kit in the South African factory at Port Elizabeth after production had officially ended.

 

[ffiill]

Annoying warning lights-firstly I have yet to undrstand why body and engine management computers do not have a reset to default button as do all other such devices and why you have to get a garage to clear "false"faults.
If however you have a fault light on that is irrelevant just remove your dash display unit;remove the clipped on back dus cover and seperate the solid state circuit board from the display screen.On most modern cars the individual lights are leds intergrated into the circuit bours shing through symbols etched on a plastic screen.Just tipex out the offending symbol

 

[Avocet]

EU legislation obliges them to store fault codes relating to emissions performance until the ECU can next be interrogated by a dealer. Obviously, as generic fault code readers become more common, anyone can delete the faults, but the idea (at least the way the legislators think!) is that the dealership can then know that even if the car was running fine and there is not warning light on currently, the emissions performance has been compromised at some point since the last service. With the others (usually airbag or ABS / ESC faults) I don't think there's an equivalent requirement. They're probably there for backside-covering purposes if someone has a nasty accident in a car that was showing a fault light and the customer ignored it but was trying to sue them.

 

[Matata]

Captain fantastiv, i just fixed the sons ABS. The ABS warning light was on permanently on the dash. Removed the module ,sent it to ECUtesting derby way. Great company.they opened the original box, fixed it ,back to me in three days ,140 quid fixed. They do lots of ECU . Check out their website. Nik

 

[Sailfree]

Almost came unstuck tonight. Rear top box on motorcycle and could not release it with the central button on key. I had a heavy inner bag and no way of attaching it. After inserting key, starting engine and switching off central locking started to work. Even using key in top box lock could not over-ride the central locking.

Unecessarily overcomplicated.

 

[Neil_Y]

Yes in answer to OP, Volvo V70, needed garages help and very small hand to change rear sidelight, an original Volvo drive shaft set £1000 (scrap part £25), Volvo 245 which will be driving to Stockholm this week towing 1800kg, water pump change 15mins, it just works, minimal servicing takes mins and I think it will be 300k this year, a bit of body rust but has new arms, shocks, brakes all changed quite cheaply.

All we need for the old car is to drop a more efficient engine in, that's what someone should work on. 240's also have more comfortable seats than the sculpted shaped seats.

Same goes for my BMW k1100, now I know the abs warning reset process It will pass its not!

 

[maby]

Nothing wrong with a bit of bling provided it is not fundamental to the operation of the vehicle in question. I do worry that some of the modern systems in both cars and boats do not "fail safe", leaving you with a functional vehicle that will still get you home.

As an example, we have a Prius - has been pretty reliable and a pleasure to drive, but it is beginning to show its age and, when components of the overall system go down, a roadside patrol will be totally incapable of doing anything about it. I have been giving some thought to replacing it with the Honda equivalent - very similar vehicle, but it is designed so that any failure of the "rocket science" bits will result in it just falling back to a rather slow conventional car. The Prius has no starter motor and, if the hybrid systems fail, it would be impossible to start the petrol engine even though that bit may well still be functional - the Honda has a starter motor that is not normally used, but could get the petrol engine running if the hybrid dies.

 

[KellysEye]

I agree about modern car engines being DIY unserviceable but modern boat engines can be DIY serviced. All the kit on yachts except the electronic kit can also be DIY serviced. Over six and a half years I spent one or two days servicing things or more often repairing things, the longest period when nothing broke was one month then three things broke on one day. The problem is boat kit is designed for weekend and holiday sailors not for 24x365x6.5 use.

 

[CreakyDecks]

The lambda sensors on my Volvo haven't worked for three years, yet it flies through MOT tests with almost zero emissions and the petrol consumption is still the same horrendous figure it has always been. A lot of this stuff is useless rubbish put on for the American market.

 

[Monique]

My wife's car has failed the MOT because the SRS Airbag light stays on, the car is a Mercedes and it will cost £1,300 to fix; it can not be done diy because you have to have the "right tools" to reconfigure everything. It is unnecessary complicated which allows garage dealers to charge what they feel like. Hope boats don't go this way too, and definitely don't need airbags in the cockpit.

I had the same problem on a CLK 350 Cab. Went to an indie with STAR, he reset the system. No more SRS airbag light.

Give it a whirl before paying M B Thieves...

 

[C08]

When I bought a new outboard main engine a couple of years ago I considered the 20HP Tohatsu with a conventional carburettor and fuel system and none of the plethora of sensors that go with "new" technology or the 25HP Tohatsu with fuel injection and an engine manmagement ECU and all the gubbins. I opted for the old technology engine that would give me a fighting chance of fixing a problem at sea.

 

[DownWest]

What is tending to happen, is that they are forcing us luddites out. Cars of a 'certain age' will no longer be allowed into inner cities, liable to happen in Paris soon, bit like the aged van ban in London.
We run two old cars, small petrol Renault for her and a diesel Espace for me. The Twingo has simple single point injection. I keep a spare module in the boot and have all the other bits in the shed. The Espace has no electronics for the engine, so completely fixable with spanners. A more recent one would be more powerful and economic, but at what cost?

 

[Avocet]

The lambda sensors on my Volvo haven't worked for three years, yet it flies through MOT tests with almost zero emissions and the petrol consumption is still the same horrendous figure it has always been. A lot of this stuff is useless rubbish put on for the American market.

The only reason your gets through the MOT without them is because it will be of an age where it was not legally obliged to have them (just that Volvo fitted them). If it were a more recent car, it wouldn't pass it's MOT because they're tested to tighter limits.