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decrepit said..

Mark _australia said..>>>>>could never get it into second or higher no matter what I did with revs - so not always. Trust me, 100km up the highway I reallllllly tried.

So what did you do, I bet you couldn't get it back into first either, stop and restart in first? Wouldn't start in second downhill?

A hill? In WA?

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Ian K said..>>
A hill? In WA?

Well I have come across one or two, but I guess you're right, if there was one, it would have been in the last 5ks

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decrepit said..

Mark _australia said..>>>>>could never get it into second or higher no matter what I did with revs - so not always. Trust me, 100km up the highway I reallllllly tried.

So what did you do, I bet you couldn't get it back into first either, stop and restart in first? Wouldn't start in second downhill?

Nah - 60km to the nearest hill, Ian was onto it lol
Towed.......
after the second union hose blew, I figured it was due to the slightly heavier pressure plate in the HD clutch I had fitted (BTW the Daikin Safari Tuff is fkn awesome bit of kit) was just too much for standard Mitsi garden hose. It really was not that much higher pedal pressure but anyway. Got enzed to make up a braided line with same fittings and it was same price as factory and 10X stronger..

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slammin said..
CVT has no gears. Just two variably sized cogs. Kind of like bicycle gearing except the cogs expand or contract. The engine just sits at 1500rpm regardless of speed. Unless you gun it the engine just stays at the same revs so it's really easy to be speeding and not realise.
Highway driving at 110 I get 5l per 100ks. Which is phenomenal for a heavy sedan, I can only imagine how much less if I sat on 90ks.

Anyone here remember Alby Mangels [World Safari home movies]
Alby and his mate had a DAF van with a very early version of CVT. [lacky band transmission]
Alby and co. tried hard - but they just couldn't kill the thing

WOW, glad that modern cars stop people from driving around for months in dangerous unroadworthy vehicles like a lot of the story's from the above posters from back in the day.
Tech stopping people from making there own decisions on what "they" might think is safe is obviously a good thing based on what some use to do back in the 1900's , putting other road users at risk.

WOW!! What a load of moralistic clap trap. The driver controls the vehicle, not the opposite.

Yes very true, the driver controls the vehicle, but the dodgy crew driving non road worthy cars like many above are saying they do, dont have a choice now cause the computer puts them in crawl mode. Safety first

I didn't realise how many vehicles now have CVT. It wasn't that long ago that it was just a few of the micros, but now half of the family sized cars seem to have it. How long are they expected to last, and will they be worth repairing or replacing?

I think you will find that people driving vehicles unsafely is a far greater risk than people driving unsafe vehicles

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Harrow said..
I didn't realise how many vehicles now have CVT. It wasn't that long ago that it was just a few of the micros, but now half of the family sized cars seem to have it. How long are they expected to last, and will they be worth repairing or replacing?

More and more cars will have CVT's as they are used in all the hybrids and electric cars which is all you will be able to buy soon.
All the major car manufacturers are planning to only build electrics and hybrids by 2026 (not far away) and are already starting to phase out petrol and diesel car production.
Awesome and exciting times ahead.

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lotofwind said..
More and more cars will have CVT's as they are used in all the hybrids and electric cars which is all you will be able to buy soon.

And what is their longevity? I'm still happy with my 430,000 km Camry that has had nothing more than fluid, brake pad and timing belt changes, and a starter motor refurb. I'm wondering what the chances are of achieving that with a CVT?

Do they have the equivalent of a lock-up torque converter once you are on the freeway, or is there always constant wear on the steel belt? Do you maintain them, or toss them out?

I'm wondering if CVT's will lead to a new generation of disposable cars. I've no qualms about buying a 2nd hand car with 200,000 km on the clock, but not sure I would feel the same if it was fitted with a CVT.

It depends if you have a quality built cvt or one of the many cheap and nasties some car producers have used.

Yeah you will be right about disposable cars. They will go down the same way as tv's, fridges etc. where it ends up cheaper to replace then repair. I use to rewind burnt out electric motors, water pumps, pool pump motors etc., but got out of that line of work as it got cheaper for people to recycle them and buy a new one than to pay me to rewind the copper.

Most people I know now only keep a new car for 5 to 8 years, till the warranty and free servicing is finished, then sell it and upgrade.

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Carantoc said..
I think you will find that people driving vehicles unsafely is a far greater risk than people driving unsafe vehicles

To Right!
The computer does warn me if I'm in danger of hitting another vehicle in the bum, but it doesn't stop me tailgating. And if somebody was up my bum at 100km/hr and I was suddenly limited to 30km/hr, I don't see how that improves safety

It stops you driving around at 100kms an hour for 3 months in a dangerous car till you decide to fix it. Keeping you and other road users safe.
You do realize that if you are doing 100kms an hour and the car has a fault that it dosent suddenly lock up the brakes causing the car behind you to hit you .lol.

I think you guys are getting confused that the computer makes someone a safer driver,,,,,,well of course not, lol
it makes the CAR safer.

lotofwind as you get older, you may or may not, notice that the people that have accidents due to poor maintenance are generally the same no matter what. They will be the same whatever age they survive to and they will do things the same way they always have.

I used to assume that people got more responsible as they got older, but no, I don't think that way anymore. They stay the same.

A car with all the gadgets can be safer, but the driver is the one that makes the final call.

A work colleague/friend drove up to Newcastle from Sydney in his brand new Golf and was always talking about the tech in it. On the way back, on a three lane freeway, in light rain, he was happy to sit behind another car at 110kph at only 2 car lengths. I had to ask him to change lanes or sit further back as it made me uncomfortable. I am sure he drives like that all the time.

The accidents I have seen seem to be from people just taking a chance or pushing the limits of what their car can handle.

Then again, you may end up being one of these people that assume all the tech is taking care of you and when you hear a sound that is unfamiliar you may just ignore it and end up with a problem.

lol, did you read my above post.
No one is saying the computer makes the person a better driver.
The car its self is safer. Going into crawl mode, the drive HAS to get the dangerous car repaired instead of driving around for months in an unroadworthy car like some dodgy crew are posting.

Some one above posted that if the car goes into crawl mode then they have to drive at 30kmh on a 100kmh highway with blind corners.
Thats a dangerous driver. Not the computers fault.
The computer has slowed the car because its faulty, then the driver made the idiot Darwin award decision to keep driving instead of pulling off the shoulder and getting towed as he was on a bad road.
So yeah, the car can tell the drive the cars faulty, but the human decision above will kill innocent families.

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lotofwind said..
lol, did you read my above post.
No one is saying the computer makes the person a better driver.
The car its self is safer. Going into crawl mode, the drive HAS to get the dangerous car repaired instead of driving around for months in an unroadworthy car like some dodgy crew are posting.

Some one above posted that if the car goes into crawl mode then they have to drive at 30kmh on a 100kmh highway with blind corners.
Thats a dangerous driver. Not the computers fault.
The computer has slowed the car because its faulty, then the driver made the idiot Darwin award decision to keep driving instead of pulling off the shoulder and getting towed as he was on a bad road.
So yeah, the car can tell the drive the cars faulty, but the human decision above will kill innocent families.

you seem to laugh a lot. LOL.

Of course I read your response. Just because I don't agree with you does not mean I didn't read it.

There are a tonne of things that can go wrong in a car that are not monitored by sensors. The same people that ignore the things covered by sensors will ignore things that are not.

When the gov brought in rules to remove the need to get an annual roadworthy check in NSW they found a lot more "new" cars running around on bald tyres. People just don't care or don't realise.

I think in this example the car flagged a fault and limited the speed to 30kph and its probably not a good example. It was clearly not a real fault and not ongoing, but limiting the speed to 30kph may create a dangerous situation. I remember driving along the hills through Yass years ago before they fixed things up and at night with no visible areas to pull over with semitrailers sitting up your backside, 30kph would be a major problem. Similarly I travelled a long way recently and some of the places were good with heaps of room to pullover, but others were narrow with steep roadsides and roadtrains all over the place, not a good place to have an emergency.

Lately governments seem to be keen on removing emergency lanes and converting them to traffic lanes with spaces every few kilometres to pull over. This is crazy as every problem I have had with a car has meant I can't travel that far. I recently had a flat tyre and I was lucky it was in a good location, but driving a kilometre like that would have been crazy if not suicidal. I think they are losing sight of what an emergency really is.

Not so long ago I drove between Ivanhoe and Wilcannia and it became a dirt section for almost 30kms, with no notice that there was construction work going on. If I found the car decided it was faulty because of lots of bumps and limited itself to 30kph I would be pissed. I was pissed as it was being limited to 60kph in the middle of nowhere with crap roads, and not road signs to warn me before I got there.

Limiting a car to 30kph for a comms fault is probably a great idea in a city where it has heaps of places to stop... i.e. almost nowhere.

Loto I sort of agree in principal, but the coders have got to get it right!
At least give some info about what's going on. If there was a brake problem that needed urgent attention. I'm happy to make a call for help. But there was no problem with the car, there was a loss of communication to the brakes, so the computer couldn't ascertain the current brake condition. But the brakes have been 100% for the last 50,000 km. Why assume there's suddenly an urgent enough problem to slow you to 30km/h. And even when communication is restored maintain the 30 limit?. Having to pull of the road and restart the engine is enough of a pain, but how many people would even think of doing that?
There's also the annoying habit of the lane assist thingo to try and throw you off the road, onto the gravel verge, on narrow country roads, not fun at 100km/hr

I guess the good thing is all new car have to have these safety systems in them these days to get a safety rating and be sold in Australia, which is great.
so love it or hate it, its here to stay and will be even more in them in the hybrids and electrics shortly. Cant wait to see the next generation of cars in a few years. Exciting times.

I do find it kinda funny though that you guys are saying car from the 1900's are safer than the car of today with computers in them.......but you are driving modern cars.

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lotofwind said..
I guess the good thing is all new car have to have these safety systems in them these days to get a safety rating and be sold in Australia, which is great.
so love it or hate it, its here to stay and will be even more in them in the hybrids and electrics shortly. Cant wait to see the next generation of cars in a few years. Exciting times.

I do find it kinda funny though that you guys are saying car from the 1900's are safer than the car of today with computers in them.......but you are driving modern cars.

Who is saying cars from the 1900s are safer? I think I agree with Decrepit, in that the software developers need to be a bit more clever with their software. Comms fault, okay, how long is it there for? If its sustained for long enough to make the car go into limp home mode, lets check its valid and if it is make sure the error code can only be cleared by a scan tool.

One of my first jobs in Sydney was working for a company that sold and deployed stock market trading/monitoring tools onto company networks. This is relatively early days of PC networking in the mid nineties. Customers started reporting that the software would become buggy on their networks. The developers turned around and said 'it works fine on our network so it must be the customer's problem'. What the developers were doing was developing a platform on a network with no other traffic, so of course the software ran fine. There were no delays and no need to re-transmit. Clearly to anyone analytical, the problem was the development didn't take into account that the development environment was not correct.

Back to the older cars are better thing, sometimes there is a point where they are safe enough, but with correct development they can be better. Would you prefer a Tesla car that every 325.7kms requires a reboot or would you prefer a 1996 commodore that just drives and only has front airbags and ABS? There should be no need to choose as the newer car should be better... but?

Id go the modern Tesla, even though you need to reboot it every 325.7kms, cheaper to run, less repairs.
the Holden from 1996 is over a quarter of a century old and would be a mechanical nightmare needing constant repair to try keep it roadworthy.
But then again, the 25 year old car may go up in value soon? How old does a car have to be before being called a vintage car? Must be close.

Part of my problem is that I've learned to distrust computers. Given the number of passenger planes that have killed all on board because the computer got it wrong. And back a few decades, a therapy x-ray machine killed a couple of patients, because again the computer got it wrong.
So I don't like being dictated to for no reason, by some programmer, a few years ago, and several thousand kilometres away, who thinks he knows more about what's going on on the road than I do.

And loto, I think formula was talking about new cars, not 25 year old ones. Personally I'd prefer a new 2006 commodore, that had more room and fitted much more gear in. Not quite as smooth to drive perhaps, but more practical

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lotofwind said..
Id go the modern Tesla, even though you need to reboot it every 325.7kms, cheaper to run, less repairs.
the Holden from 1996 is over a quarter of a century old and would be a mechanical nightmare needing constant repair to try keep it roadworthy.
But then again, the 25 year old car may go up in value soon? How old does a car have to be before being called a vintage car? Must be close.

Who cares about whether 25 year old cars go up in value? I sold a 2005 commodore a few months ago for $8k and my sister sold a much newer mazda for $3k. So what? Second hand cars that I would buy have gone up in price due to Covid. Some are almost the same price as new and already at least 5 years old.

Its funny when people compare running costs on cars. They often forget about the purchase price. Things are also different if you are mechanically minded or not. Most cars are expensive to maintain if you need to pay someone else to do it.

A 1996 commodore is simple to maintain. That's why there are so many of these older cars still running around. A lot of the work can be done by the owners themselves. You get a reliable car that gives you most of the comfort of a brand new one. They are not going to get a brake fault that will put the car into limp home mode, and as you don't seem to know anything about brakes, the braking setup will be pretty much the same as what you get on most newer cars, aside from DSC.

I guess a 1996 commodore would not have a smartphone charging port so you would be lost trying to browse facebook as you drive.

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decrepit said..
Part of my problem is that I've learned to distrust computers. Given the number of passenger planes that have killed all on board because the computer got it wrong. And back a few decades, a therapy x-ray machine killed a couple of patients, because again the computer got it wrong.
So I don't like being dictated to for no reason, by some programmer, a few years ago, and several thousand kilometres away, who thinks he knows more about what's going on on the road than I do.

And loto, I think formula was talking about new cars, not 25 year old ones. Personally I'd prefer a new 2006 commodore, that had more room and fitted much more gear in. Not quite as smooth to drive perhaps, but more practical

No, I was specifically thinking about cars from the late 90s. They were pretty reliable, but I think we can all agree, things improve as they get developed, phantom brake faults aside.

I refer back to my mates purchase ages ago of a Vectra and he had all sorts of problems with it due to modules not communicating properly. The same year model commodore was reliable, but was more low tech.

Lots of cars seem to go CANbus for lots of things now, and I see it as an improvement but also a problem. In the old days your indicator switch connected directly to the lights and if it failed was simple to fix. Now a lot of cars pass that signal across a bus to another module that then switches the lights. Saves on cable and when working its perfect, but when its not, it could be expensive. When 'dealer mechanics' are fond of just swapping out modules, sometimes these faults can be very expensive to fix.

I know some of the P platers around here that rushed in instead of saving a bit more, and have bought the $2000 30yr old cars from the 90's and have since spent thousands in repair to keep passing road worthy each year.
They may have saved on the purchase price but are always breaking down and having repairs to legally keep them on the road .
They learnt their lesson, you get what you pay for.

Do you have to do a road worthy inspection as part of your rego each year in WA ? Might be why you say that heaps of people have them, while over here its usually just the P platers, extra low incomes or restorers doing them up as a hobby . The compulsory rego check every year is great cause it weeds out all the older non road worthy rust buckets.
I know if your selling a second hand car in WA you dont need to get one like the other states, which is pretty dodgy.

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lotofwind said..
I know some of the P platers around here that rushed in instead of saving a bit more, and have bought the $2000 30yr old cars from the 90's and have since spent thousands in repair to keep passing road worthy each year.
They may have saved on the purchase price but are always breaking down and having repairs to legally keep them on the road .
They learnt their lesson, you get what you pay for.

Do you have to do a road worthy inspection as part of your rego each year in WA ? Might be why you say that heaps of people have them, while over here its usually just the P platers, extra low incomes or restorers doing them up as a hobby . The compulsory rego check every year is great cause it weeds out all the older non road worthy rust buckets.
I know if your selling a second hand car in WA you dont need to get one like the other states, which is pretty dodgy.

I have a foot in both camps. I have already changed two NSW cars into WA rego. This is more strict than you would expect as on the initial inspection, they want the car perfect. After that, yes you are right, unless you get defected you could be driving around a dangerous car.

I have seen pretty good examples of 90's cars driving around in country towns in WA. Clearly well maintained and if you have owned a car for a long time you aren't going to get too many random faults. On the other hand the pieces of junk that you are imagining are around don't seem to be too many. I think the cops pick them up for defects and then they don't bother trying to re-rego them or they fail inspections.

Surprisingly I was knocked back here on something that my rego guy in NSW passed for the last few years, but I think here that they figure that if its not going to get inspected again they may as well make sure its right when its transferred across.

Again, car maintenance costs are probably closely related to how mechanically minded you are. I had a mate who had the same car as me spend a lot more money on his, probably because he had to pay a mechanic. You could buy the right 90s commodore and have a reliable car or the wrong one and find it breaks down straight away. With the right advice you could fix the things cheaply.

People laugh at how many old commodores and falcons are still on the road, but when you compare parts costs of them with VWs and the like, you will understand why.

My understanding is that only NSW and maybe Tasmania have to get annual inspections. I think the willingness for cops to defect cars keeps the problem cars in check.

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FormulaNova said..

I guess a 1996 commodore would not have a smartphone charging port so you would be lost trying to browse facebook as you drive.

No worries, an adaptor straight into the ciggie lighter

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Buster fin said..

FormulaNova said..

I guess a 1996 commodore would not have a smartphone charging port so you would be lost trying to browse facebook as you drive.

No worries, an adaptor straight into the ciggie lighter

Hey, I was just teasing. I wanted to see if a younger person could figure out what to do if there is no label that says 'USB'.

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Buster fin said..
No worries, an adaptor straight into the ciggie lighter

Sorry, it's no longer called a ciggie lighter, the PC term is 12v power outlet.

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Harrow said..

Buster fin said..
No worries, an adaptor straight into the ciggie lighter

Sorry, it's no longer called a ciggie lighter, the PC term is 12v power outlet.

Heck, a lot of cars even have labels or notes saying that you can't use a cigarette lighter in the sockets as its not design for that anymore.