A Fight Over the Right to Repair Cars Turns Ugly

My inherited 88 Caddy was also not pro-serviceable. The GM mech trusted by my friend and his friend who built cars from scratch, was unable to keep the POS from accelerating all by itself. Ultimately he found that a certain part was not only unavailable from GM, it wasn't even available from wrecking yards -- IF that would have fixed it.

Its bad behavior evolved, but it never stopped trying to kill me. The only reason I wasn't happy to see it crushed (Thanks, State of Kalifornia) was that I'd just given it a new braking system and tires. I really hope the wrecker was able to (illegally, of course) salvage some of the brand new stuff.

A faulty IAC has been known to do that.

I'm pretty sure you don't mean Infrastructure As Code here. The guy opined that there might be instantaneous computer problems that would allow the thing to reset itself in pedal-to-the-metal mode, but that was just a guess. The only symptom was sudden total acceleration requiring serious hard braking to stop. I don't think my mom could have done it. Get to the side, turn off the key, breathe deeply a few times, restart and everything is normal. It first happened 3 times in 90 miles, but mostly only once/day thereafter.

OK, Idle Air Control valve. What I read said that its failure caused stalling, not maximum acceleration.

Luxury car makers seemed to start this non-serviceable mess earlier.

Why is it illegal to salvage parts from a scrap yard? Yards/wreckers near us sell parts until the car is picked clean before it is crushed. Used tires and all.

Requirement of Cash for Clunkers.

We have a wrecking yard called Pick-a-Part. They take some stuff out of the wrecks, but most stuff is removed by the prospective buyer. I think they'll loan you basic tools, but my son brought his own when he needed a door handle. I like wrecking yards and the people who run them.

Kalifornia will pay you $1K to crush your old smog-emitting car. You have to get approved and then drive to a certain wrecking yard who verifies that your car has all required parts and can move 50 feet forward and backward under its own power. The intent is to get old cars off the road. Forbidding the re-use of parts is just another way of doing it.

I really hate the concept. I don't like waste. I believe in recycling, re-use etc. I hate that it's hard to find old not-antique cars on the road any more. I think it drove the price of used cars up even before the recent Troubles -- all the really old ones are gone. I could have got $250 for the Caddy if I'd driven it to a wrecker. I got $1K for destroying it. Stupid to do the right thing. I hate Kalifornia.

The smog is certainly better now than when I and my children were kids, but we've hit the diminishing-return threshold. Now it's just the smog-control industry (and regulators, of course) staying in business. Several years ago the Powers That Be thought it would be a good idea to pave all the dirt roads in LA County to keep down the dust (particulate matter). Fortunately cooler heads prevailed. Tons of s*it like that, though. Thank god we don't need gas-powered snow-blowers here; they're going after the leaf-blowers now, and probably lawnmowers next.

Indeed. I have a car with a fuel pressure regulator that wasn't used in any other car, so out of stock for years. If I were in California, I would be s*it out of luck.

It's what people did after automatic chokes, but before fully controlled injection systems.

A -modern- car has a computer that logs everything, and so you could actually see what was going in and coming out during the incident, after the fact.

An -old- car has a mechanically operated throttle so you could physically inspect the throttle mechanism and cable and see possible failures.

The problem is that THIS is a car that is in-between the -modern- and -old- eras. It has a computer system, but not a very good one, and not one with proper diagnostic interfaces. It's in a gap.

--scott

Err, no. I meant Idle Air Control.

Failure closed - stalling, yes. Failure wide open and the car can get up to 40mph+ just on that IAC alone.

The first time it happened scared the s*it out of me. I had to decide whether to drive the 80 miles home or call the auto club. I drove. The next 10 or so were just a problem to be dealt with, ultimately by buying a Corolla! Nothing but brake pads, oil changes and a "cabin air filter" in 6 years.

There was some sort of code that could be read out, but NOBODY knew what it meant. It may simply have been garbled.

There were parts of the system that were replaced, and they possibly cause the different behavior. OTOH, it could have just been an evil car. I lean toward the latter explanation.

Damn thing deserved to die, but I'm really sorry about the money I spent on it and the new parts that probably got crushed. I would have thought that things that weren't specific to that car might legally be saved -- tires, for instance.

I would guess it STARTED at 60 (my guess at my freeway speed -- medium traffic, slow lane) and jumped to whatever it was before I slowed it down -- I wasn't about to look at the speedo!

There are many reasons that I'm glad that I don't live in California, and now I can add another to my list.

There are a lot of places in California that I'd like to see, but I won't cross that border under the current conditions in that state.

Everybody should see Death Valley, Yosemite and Sequoia/King's Canyon. Optional: Vasquez Rocks because you've seen it in so many movies. Aside from those, the 4-corners states are way better.

OTOH, hardly anybody freezes to death if they sleep outside in winter in Los Angeles and we have the numbers to prove it!

I'll gladly travel there. I plan, at some point in the relative near future, to drive across country and back. It will probably take me a month to be satisfied seeing enough. I'll likely never go back, but I'd love to see San Francisco, and many other areas. That being said, I certainly never want to live there.

If you're going to walk the streets of SF, bring your galoshes.

All things considered, if you exclude governments it's a pretty good place. The air is nowhere as thick and poisonous as it used to be, honest.

The best things in San Francisco are the Exploratorium and the Sutro ruins, if you can still walk around in them. I don't think they let tourists drive down Lombard Street, but in took my leg a couple of days to recover from the trip down in the 1968 Dodge Tradesman van. The rest of it is tourist crap and homeless junkies. And Muir Woods, of course.