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Too Cheap To Fix

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.

Posted by Rand Simberg at April 19, 2004 08:42 PM

Comments

The little bastards are finding plenty to do, trust me. I have a nephew that rebuilt and sold an old Buick...when he was twelve. Now he's into R/C cars and has no trouble ripping them up and building new Franken-cars. He uses all kinds of frequency analyzers and other electrical gadgets I can't even identify for trouble-shooting, and they were all cheap. Remember what an oscilliscope used to cost?
I know how you feel, though...I learned a lot of drumming by putting the record player on half-speed and working my way through the riffs at a speed I could grasp. How do kids do that now, in an age of CDs? I dunno, but they do. No shortage of excellent drummers out there.
Myself, I still like my watchmaking. Nothing like picking up a deal Elgin 1920s pocketwatch at a flea market and getting it running again. But then, I'm an old fart of forty-four.

Posted by Toren at April 19, 2004 11:16 PM

The short answer is that engineers are becomming programmers. The tools are on the computer.

This is an ongoing process. We don't have general purpose home replicators or anything like complete automation yet, but there is something of a world wide machine/human ecosystem that continues to require fewer humans for many of the important functions. We call that "higher productivity."

My father put together some great heathkit projects. They were much cheaper than purchasing the product whole. I loved reading the manuals. But there was a lot of manual labor. I put together a heathkit shortly before they folded. There were a few chips and one PC board. Heathkit folded because it was costlier to create kits than snap the devices together in the factory. You don't repair TVs, because there's almost nothing IN a TV.

I do a bit of embedded programming as a hobby. These days, you throw in a general purpose microcontroller for most functions you would have worked up discrete logic a few years ago. It is cheaper, quicker, and can be easily changed. The tools aren't very expensive, and you can program in Basic if you want.

For small electronic projects, you can create PC board layouts on the computer and either photoetch or send them off to a company to do the boards for you. I purchased low-end electronic layout and simulation software for this. Folks that are into this stuff more than I use GALs, ASICs, and other such where they can do real digital logic when a microcontroller won't do. There's even some programmable analog chips.

You can do similar things with CAD tools and hardware. The process is changing, yes, but it isn't going away. I look at this as the early stages of the ongoing virtualization of all manufacturing. If true nanotech does become possible, there will be no direct engineering. We're developing the kind of tools that will be needed for that.

Posted by VR at April 19, 2004 11:32 PM

I'm glad nobody went for the snarky one-line answer: "Sri Lanka."

Posted by McGehee at April 20, 2004 05:24 AM

Personal pet peeve: CRT computer monitors. What is it about them that makes them go black, emit a faint electric odor, and die? TV's don't do that.

Posted by billg at April 20, 2004 06:26 AM

Actually, a lot of them are building "battlebots."

Posted by Jim Gerrish at April 20, 2004 07:43 AM

"The short answer is that engineers are becomming programmers." It's not just engineers, it's everybody. This is both good and bad.

It's good because it decentralizes power, but it's bad because people that have never made the investment to learn to be good designers or programmers are assuming roles they are unqualified for. Including management roles they are unqualified for.

Years ago I remember a company I worked for sticking a group of machinists in a room with an equipment rep. to learn how to program their latest and greatest CNC machine. It wasn't very sophisticated coding, but even feeding parameters to a few black box routines was too much for them to grasp. This isn't to disparage machinist... I know I have no ability at all to true a lathe or turning center.

Even scientist have stopped thinking about problems and instead will create some iterative process on the computer and assume they've learn something significant.

I think at some point there will be some sort of shakeout, but can't at this point predict what that might be. Perhaps the U.S. will decline and some other country take it's place... but I can't guess who.

Posted by ken anthony at April 20, 2004 08:49 AM

On the other hand, Alvin Toffler predicted the disposable society long ago in Future Shock

Posted by ken anthony at April 20, 2004 08:55 AM

Get that axle fixed. If the CV joint lets go at highway speeds, you could find yourself operating on three wheels, which takes some creative thought.

You're too valuable to lose.

Posted by Doug Pratt at April 20, 2004 10:04 AM

FWIW - Heathkit

Posted by D Anghelone at April 20, 2004 10:32 AM

Ah, ok, now I remember the "educational" Heathkit company coming out of the restructuring of the original. They were a shadow of the former company and I didn't pay much attention to them. I didn't think they would last long. There used to be a Heathkit store in my city and huge catalogs that were fun to read. They had their own (limited) robot in the '80s, and quite a few do-it-yourselfers bought heathkit computer projects.

Posted by VR at April 20, 2004 02:38 PM

Yes I'm hopelessly addicted to maintaining my Ford Mustang GT. Its a 1995 and the last year of the 5.0 liter engine so has a somewhat nostalgic value to it. One of the best tools I bought was a air compressor and pneumatic tool set. Being a Ford I obviously can't boast of the same dependability of an import such as Honda. I'm not necessarily fixing or repairing daily but at least every three months I have to turn a wrench on one thing or another. However, I will say that since I have horsepower to play with that I definently drive a little harder than most people. Also I tend to be rather picky when it comes to a strange noise or a part that starts to not perform as well as it should. Then I start replacing stuff and my car stays in pretty good shape despite my heavy foot. As my father says either you make a car payment on a new car, or pay for car repair on a used car.

Posted by Hefty at April 20, 2004 02:42 PM

For those who are concerned, I should have said "failing" rather than "failed" CV joint. I inspect it regularly--it's still got a lot of life in it. I can't justify replacing it in a car I rarely drive and am about to get rid of.

Posted by Rand Simberg at April 20, 2004 06:14 PM

I agree with Toren: The fact that you can buy new stuff for less than fixing the old doesn't stop the tinkerers at all. They do it because they like to find out how things work. I'm an IBM mainframe applications programmer, and I like to tinker with scripts to automate some of my tasks. Heck, at home I have Microsoft Works which doesn't have macros, and I just found a way to produce histograms with less manual intervention than I originally thought. Of course Excel would do it completely automatically, but it was a small challenge to do it in Works and I learned something in the process.

Toren also wrote:

I learned a lot of drumming by putting the record player on half-speed and working my way through the riffs at a speed I could grasp. How do kids do that now, in an age of CDs?

There are free and cheap programs that'll do this even better - they can alter tempo without altering the pitch. There are even free plugins for Winamp that'll do this.

Posted by Jim C. at April 21, 2004 05:02 PM

The reason electronics are not worth repairing anymore is:

1) The switch to surface mount components which are difficult to repair by an individual.

2) The low cost of modern electronics, in part due to manufacturing techniques like surface mount which are conducive to rapid, cheap assembly.

Posted by Mike Puckett at April 22, 2004 10:45 AM

My main proplem with cars that can't be repaired easily is when the damn thing stops in the middle of nowhere. I felt more at ease when there was the possibility you might get it running again with the tools you had (okay, I usually have a pretty full set in the back) and some thought.

Posted by Marja Lappi at April 30, 2004 10:24 AM


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