Removing "wheel locks"

Do you have some of those "wheel locks" on your wheels that have a serrated set of teeth on the outside that a "key" fits over to allow you to remove the wheel? Guess what: Those things are nothing but a waste of time. They certainly won't stop anybody from removing the wheel if they have access to tools. I know, because I just did it.

So I go to rotate my tires, head into the console to get the wheel key, and... err... no key. And no idea where it went. I cleaned the car out so I know it's nowhere on the floor of the car, but it's not in the glove compartment, console, nor in the coin cup, the map pocket, or the door pockets.

What next? Well... I tried getting a pipe wrench over one of the "locks". Nope, my offset's wrong for that. So next I tried hammering a 16mm socket onto the head of one of these things. It went on okay, but didn't bite deep enough and stripped out. So next thing I did was hammer a 5/8" socket onto the head of one of these things and... success. Removed it like it was intended to come off that way. Getting the 5/8" socket off the "wheel lock" took a large bench vise and two large prybars, but if I were intent on stealing the wheels I would have just brought a handful of 5/8" sockets with me... not that anybody is going to steal rusty steel wheels in a size that fits almost no vehicles anyhow, sheesh!

So anyhow, now I've replaced these so-called "wheel locks" with lug nuts from my stash of random junk (what, you don't have a stock of random stuff like lug nuts, tie rod ends, and so forth? Sheesh, next thing you tell me is that you don't even have a torque wrench!). So I'm good to go tomorrow on rotating my tires. But sheesh, what a PITA.

-- Badtux the Wrenchin' Penguin

What the fuck is the matter with cars?

Toyotas that accelerate because they feel like it or won't brake because they don't feel like it. Hondas whose airbags deploy with the force of a stick of dynamite. This shit that just came out where all the Jap cars seem broken is just crazy. But you know what? I ain't surprised, because the Japs have gone for that electronic shit big-time -- electric steering, electric brakes, electric throttles, electric everything. And when electronics go wrong, they fucking GO WRONG, unlike old-school shit.

My Jeep is old-school. The cable from the throttle goes to an air flap at the throttle body. I open the throttle, the flap opens. I close the throttle, the flap closes. A throttle position sensor, a mass air sensor in the air intake and two oxygen sensors on the exhaust manifolds send signals to a small computer that adjusts how much fuel gets injected by the injector. If the computer goes out, my engine don't run -- it doesn't suddenly decide to go zooming across the freeway at nine bajillion miles per hour. Same deal with my brakes. The brake pedal attaches to a hydraulic plunger. The hydraulic plunger pushes brake fluid into brake lines and forces the brake pads towards the disk. There's actually two plungers attached to my brake pedal (one in front of the other, one for the front brakes and one for the back brakes) so that if one of the brake lines gets busted, there's still two wheels that have brakes and will stop me.

All these new cars, though, they don't have that kind of old school setup. What they have at the top end of the accelerator pedal is a sensor that tells the computer how much you've pushed down the throttle. Then a motor under the hood opens or closes the throttle flap appropriately to make the car go slower or faster in the most efficient way that the computer has calculated. So if the computer decides that this flap thingy needs to be all the way open even though you've let up on the gas pedal, well, it'll do it.

Same deal with the brakes on the Prius, the Toyota that's been having the problems with braking. The Prius cars that have been having stopping problems, they don't got that old-school piston shit. They got *electric* brakes. You push on the brake pedal, and it signals a computer to start reverse-charging your battery, using the electric motor in reverse as a generator and incidentally slowing the car down. You push even harder, and an electric pump starts squirting brake fluid into the lines until the car stops. If the electric pump decides it's tired and doesn't feel like pumping, or if the computer decides the electric pump doesn't need to pump, you're fucking *screwed*.

Now, I've thought about upgrading to one of those new-school Jeeps with the electric throttle and shit. They get better gas mileage and you can fit bigger tires to them without worrying about breaking shit, because their wheel wells are bigger and their axles are sturdier. But I tell ya, there's something to be said for old school. I can't think of a damned thing that'd make the throttle stick on my hoary old Jeep, and same deal with the brakes -- yeah, old-school master cylinders wear out over time, but they fucking *give you warning* that they're going out, the brake pedal starts going down closer to the floorboard and you might have to pump the brakes, and that's when you know it's time to put another master cylinder in. But that electronic shit... when it decides it ain't gonna work, it just don't fucking *work*. Which is a big-ass problem if you're talking about *stopping*.

What we have here, ladies and gents, is a case where the geeks who programmed these cars have forgotten what the wrenches knew years before the geeks finished kindergarten: cars ain't a place to experiment with shit that could kill people if it goes wrong. I'm stickin' with my old school Jeep. Yeah, it's crude and ugly as shit, but you can fix the goddamned thing with a big fucking hammer and a pair of pliers, and it don't decide it's going to go galumphing down the freeway at a bazillion miles per hour just because some goddamned computer geek forgot to carry a digit somewhere in his code. As someone who programs computers for a living, I'm happy as a clam that the only computer in my Jeep is the one that handles the fuel squirters and spark plug sparkers. If they quit squirting and sparking, all that happens is that the Jeep stops going. Which sure the fuck is preferable to what those goddamned Toyotas with their little electric-motor-controlled throttle thingies have been doing, yessiree.

-- Badtux the Old-school Penguin

The Two-story Outhouse Principle

The average GM assembly line worker makes $27/hour, the average Toyota assembly line worker makes $25/hour (but with profit sharing and overtime, the average GM worker makes $29/hour and the average Toyota worker makes $31/hour). So clearly the wages of line workers are not the problem with competitiveness. But the "corporate culture" of the United States cannot assign blame to management and government policies because that violates the hierarchical principal underlying all large organizations, the most sacred of which is "sh*t falls downwards". That is, no executive in American corporate (or governmental) culture today will ever admit that blame lies in flawed management decisions. That conflicts with the culture of arrogance. Rather, all blame will automatically be passed downward until it reaches the level of people unable to pass the blame further down even if said people have nothing to do with the decisions that led to the current problems -- line workers, in the case of Big 3 auto makers.

-- Badtux the Auto Penguin

Should we save General Motors?

There's been a lot said about General Motors - that the straits they're in are because they made bad cars or not enough small cars. Thing is, they sold more small cars last year than Chrysler and Ford combined and their cars were pretty good technically, if a bit cheap in the fit and finish department (plastick-y interiors and such) because of rampant cost-cutting. If I want a work truck, for example, I want a Chevrolet. Ford and Dodge trucks are designed for rich suburbanites as penis enhancement devices, Chevrolets are designed for work, which is why they have wider and lower beds than Dodge and Ford trucks (who wants to lift a hay bale up five feet into the bed of a jacked-up Dodge when they can lift it up three feet into the bed of a Chevy?). Then there's the notion of bad management. Well, their management certainly isn't the best on the planet, but it's no worse than any other automaker's management.

So what's the deal, then? Well, the deal is simple: HEALTH CARE. General Motors turned into a health care provider that sold cars. There is more health care than steel in a GM car, on a dollars and cents basis. The cost of providing health coverage for 1.1 million GM workers, retirees and dependents is over $10 billion per year. So we can say to GM, "okay, you can go bankrupt". But then 1.1 million people lose their health care coverage. Hundreds of thousands lose their pensions. Probably half a million Americans who are paid directly or indirectly by General Motors lose their jobs, as the failure reverberates through GM's suppliers, most of whom themselves would end up going bankrupt.

So while there's something to say about the notion "GM should not survive", this isn't the time. A down economy such as we have now simply can't take that sort of hit without going further into the hole. In the long term, we need to fix the health care system to take that burden off of GM's back and then do something about GM's management, which has not done a good job of thinking long-term over the past thirty years. But in the short term, unless something is done quickly GM is dead. And we get another half a million people without jobs on the street, and 1.1 million people with no health care. That's called "economic death spiral", folks. And no matter how much you detest GM, we can afford that even less than a bailout of GM.

-- Badtux the Economics Penguin