Car Stress

So, cars... anyone remember when most drivers could fix their cars on the street, when they went wrong? Even amateurs could have a go. A grease and oiled stained Haynes Manual was part of a driver’s toolkit.

Remember those jobs? Car won’t start... uh, yeah, better check the points. Nobody these days knows what the points were! Memory tells me they were a metal ‘thing’ with two ‘arms’ that had to be a thousandth of a millimetre apart or your car would not start or work properly. To measure this precise setting, you had to have a contraption that resembled a pacifist’s Swiss Army knife. It had a number of ‘blades’ ranging from a millimetre thick to minus four thousand light years thin, this latter one being so limp that you had to give it 1960’s viagra to make it work. To set the precise gauge setting of the points it was usually the middle ‘blade’ that did it. More luck than judgement. Once you’d set the points, you closed the bonnet and optimistically tried to start the car.

Then there was something called the distributor cap where you had to spray some kind of anti-moisture stuff into it to dry it out to increase the chances of the engine firing up. Then there was a thing called the choke. You pulled this out, especially on cold mornings, to give your engine a massive fuel fix, bit like an addict getting a first hit of the day, to get it going. Trouble was, you didn’t know whether to pull it out all the way and risk ‘flooding’ the engine so it packed up (hence the weird word ‘choke’, I guess and its strangulation connotations) or just halfway and hope for the best. The good old days, eh!

But modern cars! What a bloody nightmare. In ten years time today’s generation of cars will be seen to be the biggest cause of nervous breakdowns of this current era. You no longer ‘tell’ the car what to do, it tells you! If they are not bleeping with an array of warning sounds that make the Starship Enterprise sound obsolete, they are displaying an avalanche of information messages that set your teeth on edge and cause an involuntary, “what the f*cks wrong now?” curse as you try to make that simple trip to work. ‘Warning. Service required in 346 years’; ‘Diesel fluid additive low. Top up or your vehicle will disintegrate after 100 miles’; ‘Checking tyre pressures. Warning, near side rear tyre 0.00043 lbs per sq.in. less than recommended pressure.’ And then there’s the ‘lane departure’ bleeper with its accompanying screen image that shows a flashing orange warning. “I’m only going through my gates, for f*cks sake. I do this every night. I missed them by fifteen feet... again, like I did last bloody night! Calm down!”

I’m off down the scrap yard to find a Ford Cortina!