Comment by hnburnsy
16 hours ago
If you love cars or Top Gear, watch Mat Armstrong on YouTube. Mat restores crash damaged cars. The BS he has to go through because car manufacturers either won't sell him parts, won't sell him repair manuals, and unnecessarily cryptographically lock parts to the VIN is sometime heartbreaking. He has run across this pyro fuse issue many times. Sometimes he has even has to buy two cars just to repair one because of this nonsense. Like the article points out it just leads to more waste and it has to contribute to higher insurance rates for us all.
Bumping this. Mat went through the exact same crazy process with the Revuelto. Audi/Lamborghini overengineers the heck out of these cars its really absurd.
https://youtu.be/m37tN54FdQE?si=zXCnQTCOou13l10O
To be fair it's a lambo, not the pinnacle of maintainability or self repairable
Meanwhile, if you work on old Landrovers from the Defender 90/110 to early RR L322, you need this: https://rangerovers.pub/downloads/rave.zip (500MB zip, PDFs of all service and user manuals).
Even if you don't work on them, grab yourself a copy. You never know when you might need to know how to rebuild a Borg Warner transfer box or ZF 4HP24 gearbox.
100%. I watch him literally just to see how much bullshit he has to go through to get modern cars running again against the wishes of the manufacturers.
I get it, though. Cars are becoming like iPhones where the manufacturers are totally against you making any repairs at all. We've just grown used to cars being one of the most commonly repairable items we buy. At some point in the near future car ownership will probably diminish significantly as robotaxis flood the market and the manufacturers will become even less interested in self-repairs.
The funny one is the Ferrari he is working on now where not even the Ferrari techs could figure out why the car wouldn't start, as they couldn't get the car to spit out codes and they didn't know why it didn't do that.