only dealers can do things beyond the oil change level.
As someone who likes to be able to work on her own car, I will mention here that while it is true that new cars have fewer genuinely user-serviceable parts in them than older cars ... the quality and longevity of modern new components is actually improving a lot. For instance, a car maker may design a car in which you have to do something completely insane, like drop the transmission in order to change the spark plugs ... except that the days of spark plugs needing to be replaced every 40,000 miles are fading away. In a new car, the spark plugs should last 100K miles or more, meaning that in the 'average' lifespan of a car the dropping-the-tranny-to-change-spark-plugs will never even crop up. ~shrug~ It's an idea that is taking some getting used to. (I will need to buy a new car soon, so these are things I'm thinking about.) Of course, if you get in an accident and the car suffers traumatic damage you'll also be unable to do much about that yourself - but most of us don't do our own body work even on our older, user-serviceable cars, either.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2011-03-15 08:36 pm (UTC)As someone who likes to be able to work on her own car, I will mention here that while it is true that new cars have fewer genuinely user-serviceable parts in them than older cars ... the quality and longevity of modern new components is actually improving a lot. For instance, a car maker may design a car in which you have to do something completely insane, like drop the transmission in order to change the spark plugs ... except that the days of spark plugs needing to be replaced every 40,000 miles are fading away. In a new car, the spark plugs should last 100K miles or more, meaning that in the 'average' lifespan of a car the dropping-the-tranny-to-change-spark-plugs will never even crop up. ~shrug~ It's an idea that is taking some getting used to. (I will need to buy a new car soon, so these are things I'm thinking about.) Of course, if you get in an accident and the car suffers traumatic damage you'll also be unable to do much about that yourself - but most of us don't do our own body work even on our older, user-serviceable cars, either.