@Mustangman @George_San_Jose1 This is a great topic for us to cover. Thank you for this idea. With all the different technologies being used throughout the industry, it does seem more and more difficult for people who like to work on their own vehicles.
It is also more difficult for the manufacturer trying to protect their connected car networks from being hacked by malicious entities or modified by “tuners” looking for more performance but spoiling their emissions compliance… I’m thinking “rolling coal”…
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My experience, I was with the same State Farm agent for 40 years and saved about a third when I got a quote from Geico because 2 of my granddaughters started working there. On a saturday I got my insurance policy for my brand new 2004 PT Cruiser and saw that it contained no collision or comprehensive.
When I called State Farm, they told me that it could only be changed by my agent when he opened on Monday.
With Geico, I could have changed it with a phone call.
It is true that you might get a different person every time you call, but they all have instant access to your claim and I have never had a problem with a claim and their rates continue to be very low,
I later found out that State Farm agents had instructions not to bother their “legacy” customers with rate quotes unless they requested them.
I have auto insurance through a large on line auto insurer, and I don’t think they ever had agents, even in the 1950s/60s when my parents had policies with them. Any time I needed them, they were always a call or chat away. It’s easy to check status of claims on line, and I can contact them any time. I have an agent for my home insurance, and it is a bit less convenient to contact him. I needed to do that about a year ago, and his office suggested I contact the main office, and they sent me back to him. What’s that about an agent being there for me again?
I am with Geico, They do have local independent agents you can buy your policy from in some places. I have a granddaughter in Florida that works for one. I don’t use a local agent even though there is one near me.
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Here ya go:
My favorite @CapriRacer quote out of all that:
“I do things that I wouldn’t recommend to others because I don’t think they would pay attention to the warning signs of trouble.”
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I’ll have to admit that I often think about exploding tires when I’m working on them. Back about 1958 the neighbor had a fuel route with a truck with split rims. Filling the tire the rim came off and he was laid up for quite a few months. I remember the casts but can’t remember if it was his arms or what that were broken. Never get close to split rims without a cage and of course cars don’t have them but still think about the damage.
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The durability and expected future repair costs of Continuously Variable Transmissions, EV Batteries and the new Safety Equipment like Collision avoidance systems, etc.
Cars have become increasingly electronics dependent but they’re still a long term purchase so are they becoming like a laptop which basically nonrepairable after 5 years because of lack of compatable parts or changes in technology etc?
For example, would hate to buy an EV only to find out 7 years later that changes in the charging equipment or unavailability of a chip has rendered it unrepairable.
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I like the topic of safety. Especially how many cars are designed for a particular set of crash tests. The maximum speed tested is still only 40 MPH. Sometimes optimizing for a particular crash test and trying to reduce injuries to zero on that test can have a detrimental effect on other types of crashes that happen in the real world. Talking about seat belt load limiters in new cars was my first discussion topic here. Everyone knows what airbags are, but hardly anyone has even heard of a seat belt load limiter.
There are some scary real numbers about safety, such as there being a 1 in 1667 chance of a belted driver like you or me dying in a fatal car accident over 100,000 miles driven. If you look at it that way it’s a bit unsettling.
A friend told of volunteered to help a cute girl put air in her tire. He paid attention to her instead, chatting her up, warning about the dangers of over-filling tires, when it blew.
I think this is a common tactic. GEICO pushed my rate up more than I thought was merited, so I switched to Progressive. A few years later, when their rate went up, I got another quote from GEICO, cheaper than what they had quoted me earlier. If you’re a driver with a good record you can probably save by shopping.
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In other words, you’d have to drive well over 150 million miles to statistically have a decent chance of dying. That’s less likely than your odds of dying from drowning over your lifetime. Most people do not get anywhere close to that in their lifetimes. I am, of course, operating under the assumption that your statistic is accurate, because I haven’t checked.
Plus, statistics can be misinterpreted. If the odds for dying from some action are 1 in 10, that does not mean that if you do that thing 10 times, you will definitely die.
And statistics can cause absurd reactions as well. People will refuse to go into the ocean because they’re afraid of sharks, but they’ll also decline getting a flu shot for various reasons. Your odds of dying in a shark attack are 1 in 3.7 million. Your odds of dying of the flu are 1 in 63.
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Am I the only one thinking TROLL?
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I don’t have the statistics handy, but the VAST majority of accidents happen at 40 MPH or less. There’s a reason they focus on testing in that range.
And you wanted advice on how to bypass or adjust them when they aren’t designed to be adjustable (which thankfully you weren’t given).
It’s not at all, I’d advise you to reread what @shadowfax said.
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Not sure if ( TheWonderful90s ) formally ( InvisableSnowman ) fits the definition of Troll .
But uninformed confused and not open to real facts does apply.
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Maybe not troll but what else would you call someone like him?
Not a decent chance of dying – you will die statistically with a probability of 1 on average. I don’t know what the proper terminology is. If you have 1000 people in a room, and all of those people could come back from the dead after a fatal car accident and continue driving, after about 150,000,000 miles driven per person there will be 1000 deaths. Some will die multiple times and come back from the dead, and others will make it through without dying.
Per hour swimming? Total odds for all Amercians?
Sure most accidents are low speed fender benders. Take a walk through a junk yard or a body shop. Why do we need seat belts if so many accidents occur at under 5 MPH? But I think you are right if you mean that many fatalities occur at under 40 MPH. But this statistic likely includes non belted occupants, as such statistics usually do. What value does this statistic have to someone who does use a seat belt? I would imagine that it also becomes quite costly to make a car perform well above 40 MPH, and there are probably certain compact cars that can’t really ever achieve it.
Maybe someone who never takes things at face value.
Close to 40 years ago, when people were getting excited about computers, a group at work put together a program to estimate life spans. The idea was to encourage healthy life spans. I was a sport and took part. When I got my analysis, I was told the computer thought I’d be dead by 35 years old. The reason? I drove 120 miles a day and had one alcoholic drink a month. So the computer combined the two and thought the likelihood of me driving under the influence would do me in shortly.
Still here though irritating people and still don’t worry much about what a computer tells me or calculated odds. Some people actually believe this stuff. Woe to the 1000th person that fails to buckle up. Dead dead dead.
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It amazes me how many [ otherwise intelligent people ] who believe that if is on the TV or the internet that it has to be true.
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So, are you a vampire or a zombie now? 
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A group who didn’t know what they were doing, obviously. Not sure I’d take a life lesson from this experience…