Just need to vent...

People outside the US do not have a word for 'pull through' parking because they do not NEED one.

This is because, outside the US, getting a driving license requires a little bit more than just taking 15 laps around the nearest star.

Oh....and it's probably a "little bit" more expensive to get some of the things that are optional here in the US such as inspections, insurance, registration, etc....

 

Okay, my apologizes to anyone who like Ford Motor Company but THEY SUCK!

HORROR story about Ford "quality". My co-worker, who just moved here from Alabama, has a 2018 Ford Fusion Hybrid. He said it's been making a strange clunking noise so we car nut people suspect a lose muffler or intake manifold. Nope, he took it to our Ford Dealership and they told him it's a broken transmission mount. What?? The car is only 5 years old! They told me, get this, that it was installed BACKWARDS at the factory, that's why it broke. So a free fix, right? Nope, it's "out of warranty" and they want $2,000 to replace it. I checked out his car it was made in Mexico and I know a good mechanic who I talked to last night and said he'll help out by doing it for $600 which includes the part. What a blessing he is!! I'm so mad at Ford....ZERO quality and NOT standing behind their work.

After he gets it fixed, I'm going to work with him to mail a copy of the estimate from the Ford Dealership and a copy of his fix to Ford Corporation and see if they can reimburse for THEIR screw up.

 

3-cylinder engines have come on a lot since I took driving lessons in an Opel Corsa in the 90s.

Except for Opel Corsas of course. I had a rental Corsa last week (I think it was a 2020 model) and that gutless, rattly engine transported me back in time...and not in a good way A guy I work with has a '21 Honda Civic (1.0 turbo I think) that's reasonably quick, and pretty refined compared to the Opel . It's no Type R but the tax is only €100/year

 

LED light bulbs are great these days, but the selection is still a lot more limited if you're looking for ones that don't say "not for use in totally enclosed luminaires".

When I moved here, the kitchen ceiling light would accept, at most, two 60 watt incandescents. So it would draw 120 watts and give me 1600 lumens, which was just adequate to make the kitchen seem kind of dingy and dreary.

So I replaced it with something modern at the time, a 40 watt 2C circline on an electronic ballast, which gave 2800 lumens of 82 CRI light, not quite double the light for a third of the juice.

I had to replace the tube once, so I got about 8 years on a tube, and 16 on the ballast, which went kazott this week.

Nowadays there's less action in those odd form factors and more happening again in medium screw base bulb shapes. So I went back to two medium screw bases, and put in two 17.5 watt LED bulbs, so I'm now down from 40 to 35 watts, and up from 2800 to 3200 lumens at 90 CRI.

It's actually seeming like too much light. I may have to go shop again for slightly lower output.

I bet my 2800 lumen tube hasn't really been 2800 for a while and I was used to that. Flipping the switch on 3200 feels almost like a physical impact.

 

My local Home Depot had these garage "TriBurst" LED lights marked down so I got one and, man, glad I did....really lights it up when working on cars out there. (And you can adjust the beams where you want them.)
Bell + Howell TriBurst 10.5 in. 144 High Intensity LED 4000 Lumens Flush Mount Ceiling Light with 3 Adjustable Heads 7090 - The Home Depot

 

I replaced a couple of those duplex-A19 ceiling fixtures in my house with slimline LED fixtures. I think they're good for 3200 lumens, and with adjustable color temp I can match the other light sources. Made the house look a lot nicer for very little money spent.

 

A co-worker first ordered a Chevy Bolt last October and was just told it will be delivered shortly. She plans on keeping it a very long time so I asked her if she's ever searched for how much the traction battery costs to replace and she didn't.
So she searched, $16,000! I'm not sure she's going to buy it, now. (I told her how much it was to replace a Prius battery.)

 

When I married my significant other (56 years ago), we ended up with two cars: My Chevy caprice and her 1965 ford mustang. We sold the Chevy to pat our first year's rent and kept her 6 cylinder Mustang. It was a mistake. The ford 6 cylinder engine needed periodic de-carboning and the front suspension (from the Ford Pinto) was not adequate and I had to replace strut bar bushings regularly so that the front suspension could hold an alignment.

After that experience I swore to never buy a Ford again, but in 1990 I relented and bought a Ford Probe (a pseudo sports car that was actually a Mazda 626 in disguise). The Transmission (the only part of that car that was made by Ford) quit at 118k miles. So I priced a rebuild at several facilities including my original Ford dealer. They gave a reasonable price (only 25% higher than the others), but the repair manager asked me if this was my second transmission. I said no, this is the original. He exclaimed, "You got 118k miles out of that transmission?". It turned out that Ford used the same transmission in many cars and they seldom lasted much past the warranty coverage (60k miles). Ford knew that the transmission had defects and never fixed them as they often showed up after the warranty expired. I have never considered purchasing a Ford again.

JeffD

ps: My son destroyed the rebuilt transmission 3 weeks later by cracking the case (he said he didn't hit anything, but the whole underside was ripped up). The insurance company was going to total the car, until my mechanic came up with a salvaged, low mileage, transmission installed for $600 with a one year warranty. Lesson learned, check for salvaged major parts before financing a rebuild. I could install three salvaged transmissions for the price of a rebuild.

 

An engineering firm I worked with in Detroit regularly got consulting work from the automakers.

I never really looked forward to site visits at GM plants. The labor/management hostility there always seemed thick enough to cut with a knife, and because crews regarded consultants (like us) as scabby, they would hide our tools and stuff, or just be really punctilious about rules like having a plant electrician following us around every minute.

It never felt that way in Ford plants, that I noticed, anyway. There seemed to be mutual respect between management and labor, and there was none of that hostility to us. Their electricians were usually happy to take us back to our stuff and leave us there while they went and did other things.

So I had a favorable impression of them on that score, anyway.

 

Had a 1996 Taurus new to 130k miles. Only issue was the PCV(also a problem with Ranger and Sable) and the EGR valve, which was the push to trading it in. The Ranger once stalled on me, and got a new computer under warranty. Later, had to replace the speed sensor in the differential. That might have just been an iron filing causing problems. Went to my father, who kept it til over 100k miles. The Sable only had 77k miles when we got rid of it. Rusting was leading to issues, but it was also over 15 years old in the rust belt.

 

I guess I visit TV stations a bit like the way you visited car factories, seen similar treatment both good and bad. Your descriptions are at once familiar.

But back to Fords... I really enjoyed my Ford Ranger truck. Wonderfully reliable, nicely designed for the purpose and reasonably fun to drive.

The only disappointment was the bath I took between buying it and later selling it. I've never had another vehicle lose so much resale value so quickly. Some of that I can ascribe to economic conditions of the times, but it was still painful. When it finally sold, I'd just driven it from Los Angeles to NYC, and it was probably the only rust-free Ranger in the tri-state area.

 

Yes, the Ford trucks seem to be built better than their cars. Maybe the truck division has managers that care about their customers.

JeffD

 

I just wish they still made a simple work truck. Seems like most of their current output are minivans for people who care what the neighbors think.

 

I had a Bronco II—the Ranger-based SUV. I really liked the turning radius—i could do a U turn on a side street without using three points. Replaced that with the Gen 1 Prius, which could do the same thing. I was bummed that the Gen 3 can't.

The BII was an interesting contraption, what with the Canadian body, German engine, Japanese transmission, and Borg-Warner transfer case. All the fasteners were metric except the ones holding the transfer case to the transmission.

Mine had the carbureted 2.8 L, not the later fuel-injected 2.9. I didn't think the quality was awful, but it came from a weird period in engine controls. The carbureted engine could run (if poorly) with the ECM removed from the car; I drove it to a shop that way once so they could arc weld on it without worrying about the ECM. There were just little solenoids and motors hanging off the carburetor in all directions, which the ECM would use to tweak it while running.

The idle control motor tended to be a trouble spot, as did the position sensor on the EGR valve. It was, overall, more complicated than either a straight old-school carbureted car or a purely computerized one, and had the drawbacks of both.

Every time I did a carburetor rebuild on it, the truck would end up with a different personality. I'd buy the same rebuild kit, follow the same repair manual instructions, make all the same adjustments the same way with the same instruments, and it would be like a different truck every time. One time I really liked the way it turned out.

 

LOL I was raised on SJ-series Jeeps, they were mystery meat from the get-go with GM transmissions, AMC engines, Ford brakes and probably a few bits from a 1947 Roswell Saucer salted in there for funsies.

The worst was my grandfather's 1983 Wagonneer. It was the last horrible gasp of the "283" inline 6 2bbl with EGR, oxygen injection and three or four other stupid electromechanical pollution controls.

Later this engine was reborn as the "JEEP 4.0™" with computer fuel injection and... it actually rocked many a fine Jeep. It blossomed. I drove a few and it was much more powerful and easier to drive in every situation. Taught me a lot about the value of electronic fuel injection.

 

There's a fashion here among what we call CUBs - Cashed-up Bogans (kind of very wealthy rednecks) - to buy the giant American trucks.

We've had smaller trucks - the Ranger, and its direct rivals like the Toyota Hilux, VW Amarok, Nissan Navara, GWM Cannon and LDV T60 - for a long time, and they're popular. @Leadfoot J. McCoalroller - those Chinese trucks might fit your wish for a simple work truck.

But what the CUBs are going for now is stuff like the Ford F-150, Chevy Silverado and Dodge RAM - they're all now available in Australia in RHD, for somewhere around US$100,000. My neighbour has a Silverado Z71 which makes a stupid noise and which he can't park.

They might work in America, but here they are stupid. Our streets are too narrow. There's a mini-roundabout near me, and I once saw someone in a RAM take nine attempts to go around it, just to turn right. Also, they say they need these trucks "for work" because a Ranger "doesn't have the grunt I need", but I have never seen one of these giant American trucks in Australia with anything at all in the tray: it's like the trays are just decorative.

 

I get that. The place where I live is American CUB country. We have other terms.

I feel like I can make this link only because I once spent a busy month in Sydney involving a few pub wrecks with the same sort of CUBs...

They were KONE lift mechanics, as I recall. It was more of a Toohey's old sort of place that poured a lot of VB as a front.

 

I don't mind a bit of Toohey's Old once in a while. VB, though. Mmmmmm...... like a cold, fizzy glass of yeast infection. When I am king it will be banned.

I know the kind of pub you mean, though. My favourite such place is the Great Western in Cobar - a town I often stop in on the way to Broken Hill. It's 200km West of Dubbo, and 500km East of Broken Hill, and there is nothing else anywhere nearby. The Great Western has excellent food, but the front bar is full of people who are definitely murderers.

 

The simple work trucks are hidden in the fleet sales division.

 

Good point. Here, all the Japanese companies sell "mine spec" utes (Toyota Hilux / Mitsubishi Triton / Nissan Navara) - very basic, with a flashing yellow light on the top. You can buy them as a private buyer, but it is a challenge to do so: they're generally just sold to mining fleets.