Tiny Little Miracles

I was having a conversation with  my brother this weekend about how great it would be to own an Alfa Romeo, but how it couldn't be your only car due to Alfa's legendarily fickle reliability.  This led to a discussion of how even Alfas are relatively reliable these days, and how there really is no such thing as an unreliable modern automobile.

Take for example, the tools supplied with cars these days.  In the fifties, nearly every sports car manufacturer offered full tool kits, including a full set of wrenches (or "spanners" if your car was European), screwdrivers, a wire tool, a pipe wrench, pliers, sockets, pry bars, a lead mallet, and a ball peen hammer (for those delicate repairs after you've tried everything else).  I opened the trunk of my modern European car, and all I could find were these:

The leftmost is a key for my locking lug studs, the second is a tool for removing the little caps over the nuts, the 3rd a jack, the fourth a lug wrench, a small screwdriver (flat and phillips reversible!), and a tow recovery hook.  As you can see, they pretty much all deal with a flat tire or driver error, aka driving into the ditch.

Do most modern drivers know how to gap a spark plug?  How about cleaning and setting points?  Rebuilding a carburetor?  How about something simple, like changing spark plugs?  Cars used to require some basic understanding of how the things worked, and a slight bit of handiness to constantly adjust and dial in the car as it went down the road.  Now, BMW doesn't even offer an oil dipstick on it's cars.   How will you know when you're burning oil, as you most certainly are?

Speaking of which, most drivers these days don't even know how to use a dipstick.  For some odd reason, there's a modern-day myth that cars don't burn oil anymore.  It's not true.   Depending on your driving style, oil type, and engine (rotary and turbocharged engines will burn more than small, normally aspirated engines), you may be burning more than a quart of oil between oil changes.  In fact, most manufacturers consider 1 quart of oil every 1000 miles to be totally normal and  acceptable.  When's the last time you checked your oil?

Yet, despite the relative ignorance of automotive engineering, symptoms of eminent problems, or general maintenance, most cars these days last a few hundred thousand miles.   Yet we get upset when the car needs the occasional $500 repair every 30,000 miles or so.   A machine with thousands of interacting, moving parts, rotating at 7,000 rotation per minute (over 116 times per second), propelled by tightly contained explosions, at high temperatures, and we get frustrated when one of those parts doesn't work every few years.

 Someone should call the Pope.  We have a million little miracles driving around the planet every day.