Cars (all fuels and electric)

Peter wrote:

but the really old ones are money and time consumers on an epic scale.

Depends how old and what sort.

Both my daily driver (2009) and my hobby car (1972) cost peanuts to run. Neither takes up any significant time unless I want it to, for e.g. some project / upgrade on the hobby car.

Peter wrote:

But my VW Scirocco (2012) was not type approved (in Germany or EU) for a towbar or a roofrack so if I attached one, it will fail the MOT.

Really? I don’t think the MOT involves checking any paperwork for whether some accessory is allowed. Maybe it will if you get your MOT at a VW main dealer, who perhaps knows it is not supposed to be there. But if you take it to any ordinary place doing MOTs they will shrug and say “oh a towbar” and test it like any other towbar, which is basically that it is must be safe and secure. I genuinely do not think the MOT has any element of checking against manufacturer’s paperwork – the tester tests the car in front of them and is not presumed to have any access to type certs, manufacturer’s information, specs, or anything like that.

Happily cars do get an MOT in my area, regardless of age, only a periodic emissions test after they reach some age I’ve forgotten (5 or 10 years old?), unless they are 1975 or older in which case there are no tests at all, of any kind. But the car market as a whole is not so blessed.

There is doubtless a benefit in any such test in having a vehicle model that the mechanic has never seen before. The same applies BTW to annual inspections of unusual certified aircraft with marginal documentation. Not so much to a new C172

Be glad you’re not in New Zealand where it is every six months for cars and motorcycles, possibly the craziest situation I’ve ever heard of. Bureaucrats allowed to run wild.

Yeah, Silvaire – so obvious, bashing "government " all the time. Even the same you elected . . . NZ MOT is half as bad as this looks: Basically they care about working brakes and non-leaking engines and gearboxes. Also maybe reasonable carb settings, meaning the thing does not waiste most of the fuel . So it does make some sense and seeing the MOT is not a big thing, they were open till 8 pm as far as I remember. So you did that after work easily. And yes, I do believe the Kiwis got a lot quite right – very unlike USA . . . . Vic

I do believe the Kiwis got a lot quite right

If you’re talking about twice yearly government inspections of privately owned and operated cars, I think you and they are both nuts

The Kiwis care a bit about their environment and it does not matter if vehicles are run privately or public when polluting landscape is the topic. NZ had lots of very old cars traditionally as imports were 200 percent of what they cost initially. So that is why they looked at vehicles more often for “keeping the country tidy” . So extremely unlike to USA where corporations profits are all that matters, see derailments just recently and reasons for these recurrent dramas. And stop complaining about governments, mostly politics are not to blame. In fact , most obvious in USA, politics are just puppets of corporations buying their parlament staff. This is true for both main parties as no alternatives exist, no differences at all. So you better aim your protests at big corporations like Lockheed, Raytheon and all that run your “democracy” – laughable from first day they did the consitution . . . Vic

@vic if you hadn’t noticed the subject of the thread is cars. I do understand that NZ traditionally runs on very old used cars, and also that the situation has been maintained by the Japanese taxing cars more as they age, not less, another rather strange policy that in forcing unnecessary domestic consumption as a benefit to industry also promotes used car exports to NZ, where they are happy to benefit. Regardless, I think anybody with a brain would agree that delegating your responsibility to monitor the condition of your car to government via a mandated inspection every six months is really quite bizarre.

Otherwise, you do seem to have some unrelated and rather unfocused issues that I’m not going to address.

Have a nice day, as we say in the US in such situations.

It is time to have a bit of a laugh

Ref post 507 above, thanks again @172driver, looks as if Spain likely is an important source of natural H2. Aragon, just South of the Pyrenees. I sincerely hope something comes out of this.

https://www.elconfidencial.com/tecnologia/ciencia/2023-03-01/primer-pozo-hidrogeno-europeo-aragon_3581493/

Graham wrote:

The 2007 Civic will certainly do more miles between problems than the 1979 Marina, but when it does have a problem you’ll probably need to pay someone (who’s skills and equipment may not be around for ever) to fix it and you’ll probably depend on a supply of parts (which you can’t fabricate yourself) that may not be produced for much longer.

No, not really. The only parts of the car that a home mechanic would struggle with are the electronic parts and they tend to outlast the car. The vast majority of the things that need maintenance are the kind of things that can be maintained with ordinary hand tools. It’ll also be a couple of decades before there’s any difficulty getting parts.

I pay someone to do this stuff because I’m not minded to work on cars.

alioth wrote:

I pay someone to do this stuff because I’m not minded to work on cars.

Same. I don’t think “I can maintain it myself” is a relevant criterion to choose a car in 2023. We humans became so successful and advanced because we developed division of labour and specialisation. Why would I even want to maintain a car if I can simply pay someone for the work who does this all day instead of myself who would only do such work at best once a year, thus having very little currency and expertise? My time is too valuable for that.

Of course if you do it as a hobby because you like tinkering it’s a completely different case, but then we are talking about a car for a hobby and not one for daily use anyways.