My car’s off the road – again. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to take it into the garage over the last 18 months and I’m beginning to get a little bored with it. I’ve had a brake calliper which sticks on and another which sticks off (both known faults apparently – thanks Ford) and a myriad other niggly problems. What annoys me is that this is the newest and most expensive car I’ve ever owned, yet I’ve had more trouble with it than any of the old bangers which preceded it.
This time it started with a worrying rattle under the bonnet. The sort of thing that you hope is just a loose exhaust but you know isn’t. My friend who looks after my cars for me used the highly scientific method of putting one end of a long screwdriver against the engine block and his ear to the other end to identify the problem. This method amplifies the sound and enables him to locate exactly where it is coming from. He’s tried a stethoscope but nothing works better than the screwdriver apparently.
It turned out to be the auxiliary belt tensioner, a small piece of metal with a spring inside and which costs £120. Look at it and you’d be hard pushed to see how it cost anything like that to manufacture. And my friend has a theory about this. He’s convinced that as manufacturers have been forced to keep the cost of new cars down, they’ve had to look at other ways of maintaining their profits, and the easiest way is through hiking up the cost of spare parts. Which is why any work you have done on your car these days is costing far more than it used to – it’s not labour costs which have increased, it’s the price of spares.
My friend has been in the business for many years and had seen it all, but he’s become suspicious of late of the number of cars of certain makes which all suffer the same component failure at exactly the same mileage – almost as if it’s planned.
Typical components which give out all at the same time apparently are crankshaft and camshaft sensors, and ignition coils. He’s mentioning no manufacturers by name but in talking to other mechanics, including those at main dealers, he’s begun to see a pattern emerge on the lifetime of some components. Which is rather worrying. It means that there are parts of your car which have built-in obsolescence – they are programmed to fail after a certain length of time.
Or how about the manufacturer which charges £75 for a headlight bulb? You can pick up one of their bulbs for a lot less than that of course, or they’ll even give you one for free, but they’ll charge you £75 to activate it. Can you believe that? Components not only have a built-in shelf life but can be electronically and remotely turned on and off.
Some manufacturers already use telematics to monitor your car and warn you when a part is about to fail. How far away is that from pushing a button to cause the part to fail deliberately?
One person I knew some years ago refused to buy new cars, arguing that they’d let someone else iron out all the problems first and only buy one about two or three years old. I don’t think that argument holds now. Better to buy a new car and sell it on before the built-in obsolescence starts to kick in.
