That design looks horrible.
My little folding bicycle has a 5 speed Sturmey-Archer epicyclic gear which is extremely easy to operate - it requires no movement other than the thumb and a momentary interruption of pedalling. I can’t see any real advantage for a CVT on a bike as what you lose between gear ratios you get back in efficiency.
In the same way I think motorcycle foot pedal transmissions are much better than the standard car design. You don’t have to take a hand or foot off anything.
These are cases where the additional weight and complexity of an auto transmission doesn’t seem to outweigh any gain in convenience or safety.
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Did you see top gear trying to kill a hylux?
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No, but I’d pay good money to watch a self-driving one try to run over Clarkson.
(Not really).
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Didn’t one try to drown him in a pond?
Edit: Ahhh, yes!
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Ftfy
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Much like recent great shifter “innovations” from FCA that probably killed Anton Yelchin.
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Ford was good at interoperability as well.
I used to have a 1968 Firebird and GMs of that era had a wonderful design “feature” where the starter solenoid was mounted to the starter motor itself. The heat soak from the engine would just kill the solenoid making hot starts very unreliable.
I fixed this by bypassing the GM solenoid on the starter and wiring it to a Ford solenoid mounted high up on the firewall.
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Yes indeed… and GM kept the solenoid there for years after the problem became well-known. Various heat-shields were their band-aid. The Ford solenoid hack is a common GM hotrodder’s trick to this day.
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It just boggles the mind.
“Hey, we have a heat sensitive component that can prevent your engine from starting when it gets overheated. I know, let’s put it right next to an exhaust header!”
It took moving the solenoid and a heat blanket on the starter motor itself to finally lick that problem on my 'Bird.
I do miss that car.
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My Leaf has a similar shifting mechanism, where park is a push button instead of a shifter position, but Nissan at least had the forethought of automatically putting the vehicle in park when it’s turned off.
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Surely a bug not a feature? There are cases where you may want to roll a vehicle a short distance without turning on power (for safety reasons). An auto park when turned off would prevent that.
I am not nostalgic at all for old style handbrakes that had limited friction*, required frequent adjustment and occasionally had cables break, but modern solutions seem to be a whole new can of worms.
At one time I worked for a company next to a children’s centre on a steep hill. Social workers seem less able than normal people to pull on handbrakes. On one occasion we had to rescue a car that had gone down the hill and was overhanging a drain, using a forklift. The owner wasn’t too happy but we pointed out that if we didn’t move it then it risked going still further and reversing uncontrollably onto a busy road. On another, we just used the forklift to block a car that had started to run downhill. The owner started to complain about damage to the bumper.
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The Leaf is an all-electric vehicle that runs on batteries. You plug it into a wall socket to charge it. Expecting it to be maneuverable “without turning on power” might not be realistic.
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I guess your garage must be much bigger than mine. Sometimes I need to move cars a metre or so. Just disengaging handbrake with drive in neutral means I can easily do this without having to get in and out of the seat, and I know there’s zero risk of bumping into anything.
Actually, one of my sons in law and I tried to dissuade the other one from buying a Leaf. He’s now discovering the difference between “range” and “how far this thing can actually go on batteries”. Regen isn’t very effective so if you live in the hilly part of the country in winter and have to drive in the dark suddenly the numbers drop badly.
Perhaps one day we will be nostalgic for the good old days when if you ran out of fuel you hitched a lift to the next garage and filled a jerrycan, instead of waiting for the man with the generator truck. The other day I saw for sale (and was slightly tempted) a militarised Honda C90, which apparently really was a thing. It actually has a little jerrycan integrated with the rear carrier.
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Portable supercapacitor, maybe?
Or this?
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If you had a portable solar panel to recharge your Leaf where my s-i-l lives, of about 1 square metre, and during winter, it would take about six months to recharge the battery.
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For some reason, I thought of this song this morning:
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Well, it’s not a strictly new problem. For decades now, many (if not most or all) cars will not permit the ignition switch to be turned fully off (and you can’t remove the key unless it’s fully off) unless the shifter is in Park. And many of those older cars won’t let you shift out of Park unless the ignition switch is on (even though the motor need not be running). In more recent decades, one can’t shift out of Park unless the switch is on and the footbrake is depressed.
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I’ve been thinking recently about how someone used to be able to know all of a subject, but now we have become more and more specialized so it’s literally no longer possible. I was thinking in particular of my grandpa, who knew how to do ‘everything’, as far as I was concerned, from hunting and then using every scrap of what he killed (I grew up eating things like venison head cheese, and liking it) to properly maintaining all of his knives and other sharp implements (you might see where I’m going with this), to canning from his garden, to fixing any car, etc.
And I was also thinking of craftspeople like blacksmiths, who could make anything needed at the time, but from a very limited range of materials in comparison to what we have now, which affected what they were expected to be able to make.
I think that we cling to the idea of being highly skilled in at least some area. It’s very human. So the more that we develop alternatives, and alternatives that are much harder for the average Joe to fix/maintain, the more we try to find at least some areas where we can shine (witness the conversations about knife sharpening here and on the BBS, for example).
This thread has gone fully automotive in recent days. There’s a huge difference in what a single person in their own driveway can do with their car in comparison to 20-30-40-50 years ago. But we want to have ownership of our stuff, not just monetarily but with our own sweat. We want to have skin in the game.
One day these will be the “good old days of tech”. Each year there is less and less we can do to have our own idiosyncratic control over our lives.
I guess what this thread has made me think about is all the old tech that I’m very glad we have better options for now, because a lot of what I use in my life is stereotypical “female” stuff. I always joke about my “power tools”, meaning the washer and dryer, dishwasher, oven, etc. These tools, they are so much better now than they were in say the 1950s. You ever tried hauling your own water for washing from an outside pump, or using a wrangle instead of having a machine spin most of the moisture out of clothing/sheets/towels? I used to have to do that at my grandparents’ home. The fact that my grandpa wouldn’t be able to fix most problems with today’s washing machines, because they’re largely motherboards now, doesn’t matter as much to me as the fact that on a daily basis my household workload is so much easier than his was.
I darned socks until I was in my 30’s, when I finally realized that new socks cost so little now that there was no point in taking the time. I still have my manual typewriter, which could probably go through a nuclear war, but much prefer the ease of typing on a keypad. I am proud of myself for fixing my dad’s old (20+ years, the company is out of business and no manuals exist anymore) treadmill. It feels good to be able to fix things. But it also feels good to not HAVE to spend so much time fixing things, and for those things to be a lot easier to use.
And geez Louise, the safety factor alone in new cars is worth all the lost bells & whistles. Those huge boats with fancy styling? Death traps.
A bit of a ramble here. I guess the thread is just making me nostalgic but in a slightly different way than the rest of y’all.
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I love the fact my 2004 Honda has spent less total time at the mechanic’s than my ‘66 Dodge Dart did in three months. Things have gotten a little out of hand, though, with putting computers in things that don’t need ‘em. There’s a sweet spot for simplicity vs. complexity.
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