"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

[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....