Sorry, had a busy day. Here’s an interesting article at the CSM that says that cars are becoming disposable.

…many new cars today cost so much to fix that it’s becoming harder to justify repairs. The BMW that hit McConnell’s shop had dual front, side, and side- curtain air bags. Federal safety rules do not allow air bags to be reused. So each bag would have had to be replaced with a brand new one. The sensors and pyrotechnics that set them off also required replacement. Add the cost of labor, more than $1,000 for each air bag, and even more for the sensors, and the result is a totaled car.

It’s not just airbags–if it were, we could just chalk it up to idiotic federal regulations.

As the article points out, this is an inevitable (and disturbing, at least to me) trend. I first noticed it over a decade ago when my first “Hi Fi” VCR had the stereo die in it. I took it to a VCR repair place and described the problem to the repairman, upon which he said, “yeah, I can fix it, but you can probably buy a new VCR cheaper.”

This came as a shock to me, because when I grew up, when a piece of high fidelity equipment broke, you fixed it. In the early seventies, I was a radio engineer at the local public broadcasting station (in high school). My step-brother had purchased a Sansui stereo receiver when he was stationed in Thailand during the war, while in the Air Force, and one of the channels had died in it. He had paid probably three hundred bucks for it in Asia (a decent amount of money at the time).

The power output transistors had died, which I determined fairly quickly by determining that they were shorted, using a volt ohm-meter. I pulled them off the heat sink and replaced them with new ones from Shand electronics, and he was back in business. My time (at minimum wage–I think a couple bucks an hour) was a couple hours, to diagnose, go to the electronics shop, and solder in the new transistors. It clearly made sense to fix it.

In the face of the VCR problem, I had a piece of equipment that cost a couple hundred bucks, but the repairman’s time was fifty bucks an hour, and there were few discrete components on it–it probably involved replacing an entire board that would have cost fifty bucks or so. It just didn’t make sense to spend the money since, at that time, the price of a new one had dropped, and would provide much better features. I could spend my own time, but I’d have to get some specialized equipment to do the circuit tracing, and still have to get the original factory parts. It just didn’t make sense.

In one sense, it’s great that things are getting so cheap that they’re not worth repairing. That means that they’re becoming extremely affordable.

But I wonder what it means for the new generation. When I was a kid, it was fun to take things apart to figure out how they worked (and useful to do so to figure out why they didn’t). If there was a problem with a part of it, it was affordable to go buy a new one and fix the de-vice by replacing it.

What does a high-school kid with an engineering aptitude do now? What opportunities are there for him or her to indulge in exploration and trouble-shooting (the root bases of science)?

I’ve got a 1986 Honda Accord with a quarter of a million miles on it. It’s got lots of problems–a windshield wiper switch that causes the wipers to come on when you hit a bump, a sunroof that doesn’t open because it needs a slight adjustment to a tensioner that can only be accessed by completely removing the roof from the car and dismantling it, upholstery that’s ripped and dissipated by age and sun, worn carpet, a slightly schizophrenic fuel-injection system that causes the engine to “breathe” when it idles, varying between 900 and 1500 RPM with a frequency of about 0.5 Hz, a hatchback in which the hydraulic lifts have lift their last, the original clutch (which still seems serviceable). It needs a new right axle, which makes little “click-click-click” noises on turns, due to a failed CV joint, and causes an unpleasant vibration in the front end at highway speeds.

On the other hand, the engine still burns no oil. This would have seemed miraculous to a high-school kid of my generation, when cars needed to have rings and valve-guides replaced at least once per hundred thousand miles. The synchronizers in the gearbox are still fine (including the ones in first gear–an unaffordable luxury when I was a teenager–I didn’t have first-gear synchros until I got my first BMW in the early eighties). These would have had to be replaced in any of my MGs with regularity when I was a kid, to to the point that always double clutched on the principle that it was easier to change the disk than rebuild a transmission, and I always did compression braking to save on brake pads (and especially, in the rear, on shoes).

When I was in high school, I would have killed for a car with this performance and handling, even with all the cosmetic problems and things to fix. What’s it worth to a high-school kid today?

I don’t know, but I may find out, because it’s not worth driving or shipping 2500 miles from southern California to southern Florida, where I’ll be living in a few weeks.

But while it’s great to see the costs of sophisticated mechanical equipment or electronics (and the tools to repair things, or construct new things) reduced to the point at which almost anyone can afford them, I think that something has been lost when the cost of manufacturing has become less than the cost of repair–the wonder of taking it apart, and the thrill of putting it back together and having it work, particularly when it didn’t work before you took it apart.

And I wonder where our next generation of engineers will come from.