Well, Stephen King had a few gaps in his automotive knowledge when he wrote Christine. There are a number of complete howlers about how this or that component works. The biggest is the notion that pushing the car backwards would unwind miles from the odometer (see also: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), but I guess you could chalk that one up to ooky-spooky car-boy love stuff.
The one that always sticks in my mind, and was raised by this thread, is a scene where all the boys are looking under the restored car’s hood and admiring ahem “the gleaming pistons socketed in their valves.”
As deltasigma pointed out above, this leaves you wide open to being scammed by unscrupulous repair persons.
Now, I maintain that a person doesn’t even need to be able to read or write to survive in out society - as long as they are surrounded by friends or relatives who can do it for them. But, that doesn’t make ignorance desirable.
This seems a tad paranoid to me. If you go to an established and respected company that has been competing in the car repair industry successfully without attracting the attention of the BBB, I think you can relax and allow the experts to do their thing without worrying that you know everything they know. They are experts, so even if I DID know very basic things about the car, they could still scam me if they wanted to, because they will always know much more than me, and will concentrate on scamming me in an area that they know I won’t catch on.
I go to the doctor and I am at his mercy. I have no idea how his equipment works. It’s the same for me when I go to have a car fixed.
There’s a big difference between having a basic idea of how something operates and having the knowledge and skills to work with it. The former is always desireable, from the viewpoint of ignorance fought if nothing else.
There’s also a HUGE difference between understanding something as advanced as a computer and something as basic as an internal combustion engine, even if the latter is much more sophisticated today than it was just 40 years ago. The main operating principles haven’t changed.
If you’re ok with that, then fine. I think that’s unacceptable and believe me, I’ve pissed many “professionals” by knowing more than they did in very narrow areas that applied to my personal health and well being. They would give me the consumer cartoon version of something, I would ask question, they wouldn’t have decent answers and couldn’t admit it.
But it’s not a matter of showing off. It’s a matter of having control over what happens to you rather than ceding that control to someone else who, while they may indeed care about you, sure as hell don’t care as much about you as you do.
In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off it actually didn’t work. I always assumed this would work on at least some cars, but have no actual knowledge. Can anyone verify that this never worked?
That’s OK. She scammed him back when she remodeled his kitchen.
Isn’t that why you take the car to get looked over by a qualified mechanic before you make any decisions about it? You know, the people who would actually do the work of fixing the issue and are best qualified to give you an estimate on what it would cost? Or are you just supposed to take the seller’s word that that’s actually what the problem is and that they’re disclosing all problems with the car?
That’s great that you aren’t showing off, but the truth of the matter is, if your doctor wanted to ‘scam’ you in some way, he could, and you would be none the wiser.
You simply don’t know more than he does about removing a tumor. You would be at his mercy, even if you came in there all studied up.
Sure, you can get a second opinion, but then you would be at THAT doctor’s mercy. If he decides to remove a chunk of your liver while you are under, you would have no idea. There is no questions you could come up with that will force the doctor to disclose everything, IF he wanted to be slick about something.
Same with a car. I know it feels great for my husband to smile knowingly at the mechanic and say, “I know a bit about gaskets, myself” and I know it massages his ego when they humor him and say, “Yeah, you got me there! You sure do know a lot about cars sir!” But ultimately, once they get under that hood, they can loosen this or unscrew that and my husband simply doesn’t have the expertise to know how to prevent that scam from happening.
All he can do is get second opinions when his gut tells him to, go with trusted professionals, stay away from greasy slicksters who have probably been reported to the Better Business Bureau and call it a day.
I do believe it is a good thing to be well rounded in one’s knowledge, but I won’t knock someone for not bothering to learn the inner workings of their car.
That’s so not true as I could tell you from personal experience. And btw, I don’t think doctors are trying to “scam” me as you put it, I just think most of them are lazy. Almost none of them keep up with the current literature. Ask them about something that was reported in JAMA or NEJM and you’ll get that deer in the headlights look. You’re fine with that? OK. Like I said, I’m not.
I don’t think so. I don’t know of any reasonably modern (postwar) odometer that works in reverse, and I know of a number of examples of prewar cars that had an anti-reverse clutch on theirs.
The Ferrari in Ferris Bueller definitely did, making the whole final sequence nonsense.
I always try to do my own research whenever I consult with an “expert” in any field. As an example, when I was trying to uncover the root of my chest pains, my GP had me take a “Calcium Score,” which is a type of CAT scan that detects calcified plaque in the coronary arteries. The score came back zero, so he assumed that it couldn’t possibly be heart-related, and started looking other places (e.g. - GI). However, I wasn’t so sure - I had done my own research (on the web), and found out that this diagnostic technique often results in a lot of false negatives for young patients (under 50), where the plaque hasn’t had time to calcify. I went to a Cardiologist, and she ordered additional tests that resulted in my double bypass.
In another case, I had a friend who has “his” Mustang repossessed because of lack of knowledge about how it worked. He was avoiding the repo guy, and at one point ran off the road and into a ditch. When he tried to start the car after the accident, it wouldn’t start, and he had to leave it there. The repo guy came and towed it away. When he told me this story, I said “Did you reset the impact switch?” He looked at me blankly and I told him to RTHFM. Most cars (and this one specifically) have a safety switch that shuts off the fuel pump in the event of an accident. In this case, it’s in the trunk, and the location is noted in the owner’s manual.
The same thing applies to computers - I hear about people getting scammed (or at least, mis-lead) all the time because of their lack of knowledge. See: Malware. If people were more interested in how things actually worked, they would be less susceptible to scammers (but, I suppose, this would cut into my business).
I am old as dirt and although I have certainly heard of a “cylinder” in cars, I haven’t a clue what they look like or what they are for.
While some guys in high school loved puttering around and fixing cars, I had not an iota of interest and thought I was a genius when I was able to change a spark plug on my old car back then. I still needed help in figuring out which spark plugs to buy…
I remember driving that old car for 6 months without a radio, and saving up to buy one. Just had the money together and went to buy gas and the gas station attendant was near the car (yep, you could still find the occasional gas station back then with attendants) and I told him I was going to finally buy a car radio that worked!
He looked in the car and pointed below the steering wheel and said, “It looks like your fuse is loose.” He reached down and put his finger on the loose fuse and suddenly the car radio worked! I felt like an idiot - driving that car for 6 months in dead silence - and that was the first I had ever heard about a “fuse” being in a car!
Does that give you some idea as to my knowledge of cars and car parts?
Sure, absolutely. And no, you shouldn’t take the seller’s word for anything, even if the seller is your brother.
But a little knowledge is helpful. Like, for example, if the seller tells you, honestly and upfront, that, say, the clutch is shot, you’ll have an idea of what that means and what’s involved in fixing it. You might not know how to fix it yourself, and you probably wouldn’t have the tools anyway (I don’t), but you could decide if that just ruled the car out, or if you were willing to deal with it. And if you ruled out that car, you’d save yourself the cost of having a mechanic look it over.
Then I remebered that my son (currently a HS sophomore) hasn’t learned that, or how to write in cursive, can’t spell worth a damn and doesn’t care, doesn’t know the US state capitols or all the presidents in order. He’s taking calculus this year, and has had a computer class every year since 6th grade, and can write a little code and make a PowerPoint presentation. He’s taking an engineering class this year that wasn’t
Nope, nor is Home Ec. No overly baking powdery chocolate chip cookies for me.
Our shop inclined students get transferred to a separate VoTech school.
And even if you never intend to look under the hood of a car i feel like you ought to know why people use the expression “firing all cylinders.”
My son will turn old enough to get his license this year, and he does have a basic understanding of engines, and can also change a tire,and the air filter, and has helped change the oil. But that is not from school. That’s because his dad, grandfather and uncles all work on cars and he likes to also.
While your PC has more memory and a faster processor it is not nearly as complex as a modern car.
My car is an entire computer network with over 20 nodes on a high speed data network that control everything from the emissions to the click from the turn signal system.
In addition to that you have the entire mechanical systems, hydraulic systems, cooling systems, HVAC, fiber optic infotainment system.
