When younger and cars easy to work on no problem ,
older now cant do what I used to do and cars cant be worked on with out special tools.
Your old Corolla is high maintenance compared to today’s cars. Corollas made during the last 8 years require 1/3 the maintenance of you old car.
You want a General Motors Tech 2 scan tool included in the purchase of your new car? The EPA won’t allow manufactures to provide self diagnostics to the consumer, this would enable the owner to choose which faults to ignore.
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Probably not doable in real life. Some items would be a plus. like accessibility to regular maintenance items.
The lifetime access to service manuals is an excellent idea and easy to provide.
This is an excellent idea. I don’t have time now, but in the future I would like to discuss it further.
It has been done before and was, I think, taken a little further. The guy that did it didn’t periodically, gratuitously change the parts as is done now.
It is considered good manufacturing practice, and not bad ethics, occasionally to change designs so that old models will become obsolete and new ones will have to be bought either because repair parts for the old cannot be had, or because the new model offers a new sales argument which can be used to persuade a consumer to scrap what he has and buy something new. We have been told that this is good business, that it is clever business . . . .
Our principle of business is precisely to the contrary. . . . The parts of a specific model are not only interchangeable with all other cars of that model, but they are interchangeable with similar parts on all the cars that we have turned out. . . .
Ford, Henry, and Samuel Crowther. My Life and Work. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1922. 148 - 149. Print.
s15317 yahoo com
I haven’t found much increase in difficulty of DIY upkeep in the cars I’ve owned over a 31 model year span (1975-2006), just differences.
All but one ('76 Nova 6 cyl) have been Japanese 4 cyl cars.
Taking the valve cover off the 2006 Matrix (valve lash check) is more work than the '81 Accord, but now I’ll do it 1/3 as often.
For my 2010 Insight, the intake manifold has to come off to do this.
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If they did, they really screwed up big time. When they then introduced Classic Coke, everyone I know knew on first tasting that it wasn’t the same.
Personally, I grew up on the real Coke. When they replaced it with New Coke 17 years ago, I stopped drinking Coke entirely. When they later said “Oops!” and came out with Classic Coke, I knew it wasn’t the same. I simply stopped drinking Coke entirely. Now that I’ve had some Mexican Coke, which only became available in my area these last few years, I’ll have an occasional one of those… they’re the stuff I grew up on… but they essentially lost me as a customer forever in the year 2000. The numbers would suggest that there are millions like me.
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That stinks.
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Reminds me of what my boss was told once when he said “maybe I’m just paranoid”. He was told “you’re not paranoid Bob, people really are out to get you.” OTOH just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you. Intuition is a great thing.
I personally don’t think Coke did it on purpose because all the IYIs (intellectuals yet idiots) that did the test market studies were so sure of themselves and proud of what they came up with. Then Coke tried to convince everyone that the new stuff really was better and get used to it. Then when the whole thing tanked, they finally relented. It was a big big screw up like Edsel. So I don’t think they would have done it on purpose.
Maybe you folks have already covered this, but my understanding is before the switch to New Coke cane sugar was the sweetener. Then the first switch to New Coke which contained both a different sweetener (HFCS) and a different flavor formula. Then b/c of the yech effect of New Coke, they reintroduced Original Coke , but this second version of Original Coke wasn’t the same as the first, it had the same flavor formula, but it used HFCS rather than cane sugar. The number 1 business reason for all the switching I’d guess was to reduce the cost to manufacture by switching to HFCS, and so they were able to squeak by with that goal in place by keeping the same flavor formula and still using HFCS. Do I have that correct?
That’s the claim, wonder if it’s true.
Nice story, not true:
“The change in sweetener wasn’t anything that diabolical. Corn syrup was cheaper than cane sugar; that’s what it came down to. In 1980, five years before the introduction of New Coke, Coca-Cola had begun to allow bottlers to replace half the cane sugar in Coca-Cola with HFCS. By six months prior to New Coke’s knocking the original Coca-Cola off the shelves, American Coca-Cola bottlers were allowed to use 100% HFCS. Whether they knew it or not, many consumers were already drinking Coke that was 100% sweetened by HFCS.”
I think that’s true, but the question , rumor, whatever, is whether the plan all along was to introduce a bad tasting version, the switch back to the original, but keep the HFCS and hopefully customers would focus on how much better the original tastes compared to the new, and forget that the original w/cane sugar tasted even better. I doubt that was the plan myself. I’d guess they wanted to switch to HFCS and decided to change the flavor profile a little at the same time is all, thinking now’s the time to make few changes in the product.
Check out the Snopes article.
I don’t think I’ll ever have enough time to read that long of an article … lol … but from what I can tell the article agrees with me that there was no nefarious plan involved, just they made a marketing mistake. the first part of the article doesn’t really address the cost issues of the two different types of sugars, don’t know if it does later.
HFCS came before New Coke, not after.
Ok, I didn’t realize that.
Edit: The article however states that while bottlers were allowed by Coca-Cola to use up to 50% HFCS as much as 5 years before the New Coke introduction, it wasn’t until 6 months prior to New Coke that the bottlers were allowed to use 100% HFCS.
The lobbyists were successful in pushing through EPA-CAFE standards that put the $40,000+ behemoth pickups on the showrooms and dropped the chicken tax imports out of the market.So we have a virtual corporate/legislative committee deciding what we will drive rather than allowing the market to decide. Of course the lobbyists and legislators decided we would have ethanol whether we wanted it or not also. We can be somewhat certain that unless the corporate bean counters and their lobbyists write legislation for basic transportation there won’t be any on the market.
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What is/was the chicken tax imports? & How did the CAFE standards cause $40K pickups?
I believe the chicken tax started during President Johnson’s administration. Among other things, it targeted imported small pickup trucks. Which led to some trucks arriving by boat in an “incomplete” status, such as the Subaru Brat, which was officially a truck. They arrived on the boat with the rear seats uninstalled.