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It goes both ways. I will turn 30 next week (a small but notable hill) and most of my older friends who call themselves gearheads really don't know what's going on under the hood. Every time I put a wrench on the Volvo, I feel like I'm crossing a frontier which was skipped by an entire generation of my elders. I have a neighbor who is in his 70s and he knows how to rebuild engines. My grandfather used to go to junkyards and build printing presses out of parts he found lying around. But my own father never worked on cars, and neither did any other folks in my midst from the prior generation.
From what I observe, the trend alternates by generation. With that in mind, I regretfully expect my children to not know (or be interested in) how to work on cars. That doesn't mean I won't try, though.
I think I am very lucky--I tell my wife that the more I work on the Volvo, the more I love it, and she gets excited and echoes my passion about the car. I remember when we first got the Volvo, I had to work pretty hard to get her into the habit of using the trip odometer to keep track of the number of miles traveled on a tank of gas. I couched my argument on the grounds that changes in mileage may help us anticipate engine problems before they become really expensive or critical. At first it was a real struggle, but I felt pretty smug when she told me last month that she pays close attention to that odometer now, and uses does the same thing on her motorcycle. She told me recently that the motorcycle wasn't getting such good mileage anymore, and I found a split vacuum line in the carb which when repaired made everything good again.
It makes me think carefully about why people buy cars. I have a friend who bought a BMW a few years ago and only recently found out that the car had been wrecked prior to her owning it. Since she bought it from the dealer, it stands to reason that the dealer should have informed her of the prior damage to the car, but that never happened. Fast forward to this month, when by virtue of litigious threats, the dealer has agreed to replace her BMW with a brand new car of her choice from the lot. This particular dealer's brands include BMW, Range Rover and Nissan. When she told me she was thinking about getting the Range Rover, I could hardly keep my eyes from rolling, and when I presented some fairly objective data to her showing how much the Rover would cost in maintenance over the first five years, she seemed to close her mind to me completely, as if to simply ignore the truth. I even tried to talk her into simply selling the Rover after acquiring it, and buying a different car, but still she didn't see my logic. Oh well.
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