diy maintainable car by design

Quite - it would be extremely hard to prove. But that's why I said "strictly speaking."

Yup. This is one of the reasons why a Ford dealership has done most of Kermit's modifications...

If you put a 1990 engine into a 2000 car, the emission rules are from 1990. Kit cars, well, if you have a 2004 chassis but a 1984 engine, the emissions are from 1984.

Modern kit car engines will pass emissions...

Eh? In this respect cars and computers are all alike. The computer needs to compute things. The car needs to drive. Windows or MacOS (or t'others), petrol or diesel (or t'others). Cars can be all sorts - two seat mid rear V12s, seven seat diesels and everything inbetween.

Just like computers.

Think the closest we have ever come is the old style London Black Cab. Watched a program about them a while back and a whole engine replacement took some ridiculous amount of time (ie, very quick) etc

Steve

some good points you raised peter.

i am interested in the japanese cars you mentioned. which models should i look up on the internet?

i am wondering maybe military vehicles incorporate these ideas too? are they meant to be stripped in the field (like rifles) or are they made with the assumption that they will be serviced by specially trained technicians with loads of special tools ?

well i guess at least the enemy wont be able to service captured vehicles. ; )

Oh dear..

What the f*ck?

Car does one task - transports the contents from A to B. No matter what options, engine combinations etc you want to quote, the end result is exactly the same. Somebody sits in the drivers seat at point A, operates the controls and ends up at point B.

That's a good idea. If anything it gives you recourse for action should anything go wrong.

Guy King wrote on Mon, 9 May 2005 19:33:56 +0100:

I think floppy drives are the only peripheral that hasn't advanced in the past 15+ years (or since the 3.5" 1.44MB variety was introduced, whenever that was).

Ethernet cards, modems, video cards, hard disks, cd drives, printers, scanners, sound cards.... they've all been "improved" in various ways. The attempts to replace floppies with zip/jazz and that other thing i've forgotten already failed miserably though.

I now finally have a computer with no floppy drive. I do however also have a computer with a floppy drive...

There are the super floppy drives. The drive takes normal floppys (I think it reads them at a faster speed too), and 120Mb floppys which are the same size as normal ones. I don't think they were very popular because recorable CD technology was getting quite cheap. IIRC I think they came out a while after the Iomega Zips. I've recently aquired one, which I will fit when I get chance (my dad still uses floppys lol).

i think the modular concept would make sense even to those who are not intersted in doing any service work themselves

when you need to repair your car engine you could swap out your current engine, and swap in a reconditioned temporary replacement while they rebuild your engine.

i think this idea is also used in formula 1, but the london cabs are a better example (applying formula 1 technology would be beyond most peoples budgets)

petermcmillan snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote on 9 May 2005 13:57:40 -0700:

The 120Mb "super floppy" drives were the thing I'd forgotten the name of. LS-120 or something?

Now it's possible to boot from a CD-RW there's not much need for floppies. USB keychain, networking and bootable CD's do all I ever used floppies for, faster and better.

Err, and the coolant and fuel connections? Those actually would be fairly easy. But a plug in system for the exhaust - and more so power transmission would be very costly. And all on an edge connector?

BTW, for one who would like to have us assume you know about computers you seem to have a problem with quoting and formatting newsgroup text?

Why do you think the only computer is a PC?

So what makes you think having diagnostics would allow you to fix the problem? Most are sensor faults cured by replacement of them. Same as changing points or plugs, really. Actual hardware or software problems on the ECUs are actually rather rare.

But then you've got f*ck all understanding of cars, do you? Or computers, come to that.

The message from "David Taylor" contains these words:

Three of ours don't, but I still keep one machine on the network, just in case.

Buy a Willys MB, Ford GPW, or Hotchkiss M201.

Not the fastest thing on four wheels, but:

all parts available and interchangeable. New body tub £800, new engine £1600, gearbox/axles/transfer box ~£100 each; loads of specialist parts makers, specialist repairers, and you get an appreciating asset.

Three years ago a good M201 went for £4000, now it's £8000.

What no swear words!

Wrote too soon!

Taz (me@home) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :