"Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?"

[elfs]

"Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?" is the popular refrain many Linux users like to toss at people who run one of the proprietary operating systems, like Windows or MacOS.

Well, Volvo is betting that, if you're a woman, you would. Their concept car for women has the following blurb: "The no-open hood, which actually can be opened by a mechanic if necessary, is in response to the fact that drivers of new cars today, and conceptually in 10 years, don't need to look under the hood since most of the parts reliably run off electronics."

I have to admit that the ponytail crease in the headrest is an interesting point. "It's not about woman's lib: in an accident, the ponytail holder becomes a single point of contact where all the energy of an impact will be concentrated."

Comments

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

The icing for me is that the car wasn't designed by a bunch of sexist male engineers - it was a design team of women.

[dwarfrage.livejournal.com]

Hell *I*'d take a pony tail crease, I've had middle of my back hair for 4 years now, and I hate it getting caught between me and seat.

The hood, I'm not so sold on. :)

*shudder*

[kyriani.livejournal.com]

I enjoy looking under the hood and being able to repair small things and knowing about my car. The day they stop allowing me to do things like that is the day I will actually get off my butt and figure out how to dismantle a car like that. ;p
Hell if I could make the money I am making now as a mechanic I would switch careers in a heartbeat. ^_^ But thats also the programmer in me, I want to know how everything *works*.

[juuro.livejournal.com]

So, being a programmer who wants to know how everything works, In a large system you are familiar with the functions and implementation of every module, including the operating system and the drivers that talk to the silicon? That is a good thing. And I really should like to have people like you in the development teams whose output I'm purchasing.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

What bugs me most is that folks would be *happy* not having the option. I mean, I don't work on my Saturn. Frankly, the under-hood human factors are that which fertilize the soil... and I'm not happy with GM for doing that. But at least I have the option.

The whole nanny state thing.... grrr, arrrrgh...

[juuro.livejournal.com]

My father is a mechanical engineer. He's done a lifetime of work in maintenance of all sorts of stationary and rolling machinery.

When he looks underneath the hood of a modern automobile he is forced to say "I don't understand it."

You have the option? Not really. You have an illusion of an option, and the permission to check the dipstick.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Actually, the trick is getting the little diagnostic doodad that plugs into the car's computer. If you can get hold of one of those (or an interface for your laptop that does likewise), troubleshooting becomes fairly easy. The engine tells you what's wrong, you look up the code in the book (if the software doesn't already map it), and replace the appropriate part. Of course, having convenient lifts is also handy; sometimes you have to do something crazy like drop a wheel to get at an otherwise simple part....

(Of course, nothing beats the Volkswagen for that. Want to change the spark plugs? Drop the engine. If you have the appropriate lift, it only takes ten minutes. Four bolts, throttle cable, fuel line, maybe something else I've forgotten. Cachunk. Engine on the ground. OTOH, you damn well better line everything back up just right when you put it back, or she'll never stay in second gear...)

The difference in a Saturn and Microsoft Windows is that no one made me click thru a thingy saying I wouldn't reverse engineer it. If I can get under the hood, I *can* hack it. I might not *want to*....

And by the time the Saturn runs out of warranty next year, there will probably be quite a few of those little diagnostic gadgets running about. And I'll grab one. But for now, we'll let the dealer handle it.

[juuro.livejournal.com]

The little diagnostic doodad... engine tells you what's wrong...

Now we switch from my dad to my self. I did my previous career in the maintenance of large electronic installations with extensive built-in diagnostics. One of the crucial things I needed to learn in each of them was how to interpret the messages from the built-in fault-finders. "Well, it is saying that module A is out of spec, and the manual says that in this case I need to replace A and B, and perform the five-page adjustment procedure. But given that it is also saying that module G is drifting but not out of spect, and that yesterday we restarted the gyros, and the moon is waning gibbous, I can ignore the fault for now."

Of course you can claim that this is the result of the original manufacturer of the system not doing a satisfactory job of their diagnostic heuristics, and you'd be right. My experience is, however, that in any major system there always is something that slips through of is misdiagnosed. The self-diagnosis may very well find 99.97% of all possible problems. The problem is, that of the interesting and probable problems quite a few seemed to fall into that 0.03%.

(Drop the engine to change the spark plugs? That is, in my opinion, a huge step _backwards_. No matter how simple the engine-drop procedure is. I've owned and operated several automobiles where access to spark plugs never needed anything more complicated than opening the hood.)

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

This is the OLD Volkswagens. So it's not that it's necessarily more complex now than it was then....

[creepingcrud.livejournal.com]

Looking at the article, the idea seems to be that full extension is about a foot less for the gullwing than a standard door (they say 2' vs. 3'). The downside is that you can exit a car via a standard door even if there isn't room for it to open fully, which is probably less true with a gullwing.

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

Bentley and/or Rolls Royce had a "sealed bonnet" thing many years ago, IIRC. It was a symbol of quality to them.

But there does seem to be a trend lately about "maintenance free" things that are exceedingly difficult for end users to service themselves (the automatic transmission in the V-8 Toyota 4Runner has no dipstick, for example, the fluid lasts 100k miles, and you basically have to take it to a shop or get special pumps to do any maintenance yourself).

In my case, it might be a good thing if my vehicles came with their hoods welded shut, well probably most of my stuff would be better off sealed, because I tend to take everything apart.