July 14th 2006.

Dodo bird.

We had a SAAB in the shop this week with a severe misfire on one cylinder. That was cured, after analysis, with a new coil pack
($437!) but that's not the point of this weeks rant.

The car came in with a reading of zero on the gas gauge (one of the more annoying things you can do to your garage technician).
So yours truly was sent off to put at least ten bucks worth of fuel in the tank, to eliminate lack of fuel as the reason for the misfire.

Arriving at the self serve pumps, I pushed the gas flap release button in the door and nothing happened. I couldn't gas up the car.
A phone call to the office and then a call to the owner whilst I quaffed a Tim Hortons cafe au lait, elicited the information that there
was a manual gas gap release inside the trunk - not all cars have such a thoughtful device.

Fortunately, the trunk lid release button worked and sure enough, there, inside was a bit of string with a little plastic tag attached to it.
A quick tug and the gas flap opened. Thank heavens for back up systems.

My Porsche has pop up headlights, long since replaced on newer models by $1500 wrap around plastic lens systems.

If a headlight fails to open, or close, there's a little round knob under the hood that allows one to activate the headlight by hand.
It's not so easy, but in an emergency at least, it works.

As has always been the case,  popular items fitted as standard features to expensive cars eventually filter down to even the lowest
of the low on the food chain. Even $15000 new cars now come, in many cases, with air conditioning, ABS brakes, windshield washers,
rear wipers etc, etc as standard.

An announcement was made this week that very soon manual window winders and door locks may not be fitted on cars  any more.

I probably don't have to tell many of you that the failure of an electric window in the down position is at very best, awkward and in
the worst case, as in a forty below snow storm or a torrential summer storm, immobilising.

The car has to be parked somewhere warm and dry until the weather will allow it to be moved for repair.

At this point. I'd like to enter a plea to the car companies to include in their designs a small access port in at least the drivers door,
if not all the doors, so that the windows can be wound down, or up, manually when necessary with a crank handle included in the tool kit,
or preferably clipped into the back of the glove box.

Now we get to a more disturbing trend which is the substitution of mechanical manual door locks with all electric systems.

I will agree that more and more of my clients hand us the keys and say "the key doesn't work, use the remote".

What they mean is, that they have never ever opened the doors with the key and now the door locks have seized solid.

This is about intelligent as never using your handbrake on an automatic transmission - until the day you HAVE to use it,
such as at a roadside safety check and you are left with a completely seized brake system that won't unlock as the cops drive away.

These "driver identification" systems, whereby a driver steps up to his vehicle and it recognises him/her and unlocks the doors
are fraught with possible failures.

I really don't know what to suggest if manual door locks go the way of the Dodo bird, but if you have no manual locks and no
window winders, pray you don't end up under water, having slid off the road into a river, or, like me with my rally car, end up upside
down in a ditch. I don't know for certain but I'm reasonably sure that these latest ideas to hand over ordinary manual operations to fully
automated electric actuators is going to increase my profitability in the long run by quite a nice margin.

Because the solenoids, electric motors, remote controllers and their attendant batteries all fail more frequently than you can imagine.

The tow truck drivers are also going to love this latest trend.

I'm not enough of a Luddite to do a King Canute and try to hold back this technology.

My only plea is for manual emergency back up systems wherever possible, just like the slot that releases the shifter if the interlock
between the shifter and the brake pedal fails. And they do, often.

Or maybe after the warranty expires, nobody in the manufacturing industry gives a toss anymore?