Why Cars Have Become Difficult

Last weekend, I had to replace a burned out headlight on my daughter's Chevrolet HHR. I figured this was a do-it-yourself job. So I went to my local auto-parts store, scored a new halogen bulb, went home, and popped the hood.

Roughly 45 minutes and a few choice words later, I got the job done. In the course of replacing one burned-out bulb, I used a socket wrench and pliers to partially remove a plastic liner inside the left front wheel well. I took out about a half dozen fasteners, of two different kinds. Then I had to work my hand through a tangle of wires to get at the offending bulb, disconnect it, twist it out, and then replace it. I did all this by feel, because I couldn't see my hand, wedged inside the fender between the half removed plastic liner and the wires and metal around the light.

When I was done, I had to toss everything I had been wearing into the wash, since I'd wound up on my back under the car during the process of detaching and reattaching the fender liner.

Yes, I read the directions in the owners' manual and did what they instructed. Let's just say the manual understated the degree of difficulty by half.

It turns out amateurs like me aren't the only ones wondering why some of today's vehicles are such bears to repair. The difficulty of replacing broken parts or restoring vehicles damaged in collisions is a growing concern to the auto service and collision trades and the insurance industry.

"Vehicles are becoming more and more difficult to repair," says Denise Caspersen, manager of the collision division for the Automotive Service Association.

In their quest to make cars safer, lighter and more fuel efficient, car makers are using more exotic materials in the bodies of vehicles, such as high-strength steels, aluminum, steel-plastic sandwiches. That presents a challenge to body repair shops, because technicians now can't just assume that the metal they are cutting or welding is old-fashioned steel.

Modern vehicles also have more airbags, and more sophisticated electronics under the hood and throughout the body. The complexity of repairing a badly crashed vehicle has led to a rise in the number of vehicles that are declared total losses by insurance companies, rather than repaired, Ms. Caspersen says.

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Tom Calloway, manager of fixed operations for AutoNation Inc., the largest U.S. auto retailer, says in an email that routine repairs can get "pretty serious" given the proliferation of new technology such as continuously variable transmissions, electric steering or onboard computer networks managing various functions.

Throw in a hybrid drive system, and things get even more interesting. Auto service technicians are going back to school to learn how to work safely on hybrid systems.

The concern about repair complexity is spurring efforts by the insurance and repair industries to persuade car makers to make ease of repair a higher priority.

One group called the Research Council for Automobile Repairs (www.rcar.org) is planning to launch a Web site that will offer vehicle designers data aimed at encouraging them to make vehicles more repair friendly, says Joe Nolan, senior vice president for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Vehicle Research Center.

The IIHS isn't directly involved in repairability issues, he says. But the Institute has highlighted the problem of high repair costs in its tests of vehicle bumpers.

Auto makers, as is often the case, must juggle competing demands. When it's time to change a light bulb or an oil filter, I wish I had an old-fashioned car where you could open up the hood, and see the driveway through the big spaces between the body and the engine. But when I go to the fuel pump, or try to find a parking space, I want a car that's light and efficient -- which means all the bits and pieces need to be very close together under the hood.

The drive to reduce weight by making cars more compact will only get more intense as auto makers strive to achieve the new 35 miles per gallon fleet average fuel-economy standard.

Still, car makers are responding to the service and insurance industry's pleas.

Toyota Motor Corp. spokesman Bill Kwong says in an email that Toyota is also designing vehicles with "front crush boxes," that are designed so they can be unbolted after a collision and replaced. Toyota is also designing headlamps to be more easily replaced.

General Motors Corp., about five years ago, intensified efforts to consider ease of repair during the vehicle-design process, assigning engineers from the service operation to work alongside vehicle designers and engineers, says Joseph Fitzsimmons Jr., chief engineer for the GM Service and Parts Operations.

GM engineers now can use a virtual hand, wielding a virtual wrench, to test whether a design that exists only in digital form on a screen will result in a hard time for a mechanic, he says.

The result, Mr. Fitzsimmons says, is that GM is now designing instrument panels so that there are access panels a mechanic, or do-it-yourselfer, could remove easily to get access to fuses or other components, rather than disassembling the dashboard.

For collision-repair specialists, GM designed its new large pickups so that the frames can be cut in sections so that only damaged pieces need to be replaced. The same trucks are designed so that a new front end can be installed without replacing the entire frame of the truck, he says.

"It does get more challenging when you've got a smaller physical space" in a small vehicle, Mr. Fitzsimmons says. "But it's not impossible."

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Circuit City Tries To Install Navigation System, Causes $12,119 Of Damage To Your Car

Circuit City caused $12,119 worth of damage to VTECnical's 2007 Honda Civic while trying to install a Pioneer AVIC Z2 navigation system. Honda later declared VTECnical's car a fire hazard and told him it was unsafe to drive. Despite destroying the car's heater ducts, stock wiring harness, and dashboard, Circuit City has refunded only $3,190, and insists that VTECnical speak exclusively to their third-party insurer. Hit the jump for Honda's damning condemnation of Circuit City's shoddy workmanship and a video of the damage.

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The Grand Illusion: The Real Tim Ferriss Speaks

Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?

This is Tim Ferriss. The real Tim Ferriss.

This is the first time I have written a post on this blog since March 30, 2007, 366 days ago, when I penned “How to Live Like a Rock Star in Buenos Aires.”

In the meantime, a virtual pair—Vanhishikha “Van” Mehra and Roger Espinosa—have taken my blog to the Technorati-1000 (around 600 at best) and had their content featured, under my name, in media from The New York Times to CNBC.

I’ve suggested topics and asked explicitly for some when I had photos or video to post, but Van and Roger are the short answer to the common question: how can you work four hours a week if you spend so much time on the blog?

The answer is: I don’t.

The impetus was an on-stage challenge at the 2007 SXSW two weeks earlier, and I resolved to demonstrate just how well the concepts in 4HWW could work. This is one of several pending year-long examples…

Here’s how my longest-term outsourcing experiment to date was executed:

1. Preparation: I used Elance.com to post an online editorial position, and I asked for three writing samples of 250 words on the topics of travel and productivity. There were 11 qualified applicants and four finalists, who further submitted a single 750-word article each.

2. People: Two of the four were selected on a trial basis to produce blog content as a pair.

The first, Vanhishikha “Van” Mehra, an undergrad and computer science major in Bangalore, had an impressive ability to choose topics and spot trends, but her English—learned through private schooling with non-native speakers—contained both British colloquialisms and mistakes common to Indian learners of English. She would be the content originator.

Roger Espinosa, the second, was raised in Chicago until 17 and then educated in Manila to become a systems administrator. He didn’t have the same knack for original content as Van, but his writing was native in appearance and not only grammatically correct but also idiomatically correct (e.g. “peanut butter and jelly sandwich” vs. “jelly and peanut butter sandwich”). He would become Van’s editor and publisher.

3. Process: Roger had sole rights to publish via Wordpress, and their collaborations were were initial proofread by my Canadian assistant Amy, then later spot-checked by her via RSS. There have been fewer than half a dozen corrections after publication. I will often suggest topics on Mondays after checking e-mail and sometimes explicitly request posts that will allow relevant photos and video to be posted.

4. Van is paid $20 per post and Roger $15. Both get 100% performance bonuses if a given post front pages on Digg but must follow a “best practices” spec sheet to avoid violating user rules and getting blacklisted. I offered to increase the bonus to 200% for Van if it was directly applied to private English lessons with a tutor of my choosing, to whom I would remit payment directly. She has elected this since month 3, and it contributed to a more than 20% increase in front paging on Digg and other social ranking sites in the subsequent six months.

5. The “Odds and Ends” updates and miscellaneous are usually selected or created by me but transcribed by Amy after our once-daily 10-minute action item calls.

So, dear reader, there you have what I’ve been dying to tell you all for the last year, but I wanted to see if it was possible to make it to the 365-day mark.

Some of you have noticed TOEFL-esque phrasings here and there, and more than a few have noted the strange inflection of a few comments (Roger has written about 75% of my comments).

Please don’t be upset by this, and I encourage you to view it as I intended it: a major example of how well personal outsourcing and “offchoring” can work.

I’ll be writing at least once per week for the next two months, and we’ll see if my posts are half as popular as Van and Roger’s :) If you have any topic suggestions, please let me know in the comments.

Much more to come,

The Real Tim Ferriss

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Important Postscript!

Happy Japanese April Fool’s Day!

Man, oh, man. I was going to wait until tomorrow, but this post has kicked up some dust, so I wanted to own up. Yessir, it’s an April Fool’s Day prank. Sorry for any confusion! It would have been too obvious on April 1st in the US, so I used the alternate time zone. More to come tomorrow, but I write all the posts (minus attributed guest posts) myself. As _Jon put it in the comments: “a personal blog shouldn’t be work, it should be a passion. If you need to outsource it, you have the wrong motivation.”

I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I’m here writing the posts, including the stupid ones (man crush anyone?).

This little prank has been in my head since Jan. 10th, when the infamous Tucker Max suggested a much better version that I was unable to pull off due to this London trip:

“BTW—I had a hilarious idea for what you need to do for an April Fools prank: Write a post, complete with video, about how you have taken outsourcing to the next level. You’re paying people to workout for you, to eat for you, sleep for you, watch TV for you, do literally everything. The vid would show you sitting in a chair in a white room,
cutting intermittently to people doing things with shirts that have “I am Tim Ferriss” on them. It would be f*ing HILARIOUS. You have to do this.”

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