Car quality

Bit of a tedious link for the title here, but one I feel is applicable nonetheless. Car quality these days has gone uphill, vastly. With more of the cheaper brands wanting to make themselves seem more upmarket, and the upmarket brands making themselves seem more upmarket.

Cheaper cars, like the Ford Fiesta, used to be a fairly basic, cheap family car. Now, it's quite different. The latest generation Fiesta is crammed full of creature comforts (which can be a good or bad thing, see an older blog post on automation) and the price has gone  up to match, all the while staying as Ford's cheap car. A lot of similar cars have done similar things, to try and persuade more people to buy their cars, but it comes to a point. Cars nowadays are so complex that you can't change a lightbulb in them without specialist tools, and when the car goes wrong, it can only be fixed by the manufacturer.

Take my dads CC for example. During the Easter break a few weeks ago, his car developed an electrical fault with the boot. When the boot opened more than about 2/3rds of the way, the boot light went out and the tow hook release stopped working, and if the boot has been remotely opened then the car would lock itself, causing the alarm to go off when the boot was shut. This should have been something he could stop short term by pulling a fuse, for example, but he has no access to his fuse box. This meant that whenever we needed to release the tow hook, which was a lot that week, we had to close the boot partway in order to do it. Not too bad, you might think, but when you're in a hurry and forget about it, then it can be quite frustrating.

Now I admit that might have been a bit tame, so I have another example. On the marina that the boat is kept, there's a new boat manufacturer (English harbour yachts, Oundle. Give them a Google). The boss of that company has a BMW 5-series, with the electric tailgate, and they used that car to lower the boats into the water. This was a great idea until the boot flooded, rendering the bootlid useless, as the electrics had shorted. This could have been avoided if BMW hadn't tried to be upmarket and fitted an electric bootlid, and had stuck with the manual one with an electric option. Now I know that the car wasn't designed to be putting boats in the water, but back in the day you could have used any car which had a high enough exhaust, without any problems

What I'm trying to say is that cars are trying to be too comfortable and easy to use, which means more electrical stuff is put in. This means that there is more to go wrong, and the car would then have to be sent in to the garage to have it fixed, at cost to the owner.

No pictures today because Opera was being weird, and kept crashing