Okay, it happened again. A buddy of mine is a contractor and spends his spare time buying houses and flipping them for a profit. He’ll do all of the wiring, plumbing, heating and air-conditioning work on a house. He’ll even tackle the framing, drywall and finish work, too. He’s got some nice old stuff in the garage, and he has no problem ripping into the engine of his 30-year-old muscle car or his vintage Norton motorcycle. He’s good with tools and a very competent mechanic. But he won’t work on the modern car he drives everyday–or his new truck or his wife’s car. “Too hard,” he says. “The computer controls everything, and I can’t figure it out.” I get that line all the time. They say modern cars are way too technical to be repaired by ordinary folks. And I hear that from average PM readers all the way up to the professional restoration mechanics who work in the aftermarket auto repair side of the business. You know what? It’s a bunch of baloney. First of all, 90 percent of the stuff on a new car today hasn’t changed since the ’50s. For example, look at disc brakes. Yes, they have ABS added on, but there’s still a caliper full of hydraulic fluid that squeezes a pair of friction pads onto a cast-iron disc. Driveshafts still have U-joints that need to be greased, and half-axles still have CV joints with rubber boots that crack and split open. Oil filters still dribble oil down to your elbow if you’re not careful. Fuses might be blade-style instead of glass cartridges, but you still hold them up to the light to see if they’re blown. Tires still wear out and go flat. Exhaust systems are made of much better steel than they used to be, but they still rot out their hangers and leak after you run over a stump. Fenders and doors are sometimes made of plastic instead of metal, but they’re still painted with a spray gun, not a molecular bonder. Common people, replacing a light bulb might be a little different in detail, but it hasn’t turned into rocket science. “Aahhh,” they say, “What about the computer?” What about it? Okay, twenty or more years ago, if the throttle linkage had a problem, you opened the hood and wiggled the rod that moved the throttle blades. If it didn’t move at all, it was stuck. If it moved poorly, it was just sticky. If one end moved and the other end didn’t, something was broken. Pretty cybernetic. Most cars today are throttle-by-wire. The computer sends electrical signals to an actuator and that device moves the throttle blades. Your foot moves a pedal with a variable resistor attached to it to send data to the computer. It’s a layer of complexity removed from a mechanical linkage, sure. But the systems analysis to figure out what’s wrong is the same, and systems analysis runs on the same basic principles for mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic systems. You don’t need to be a poindexter to figure this stuff out. Hundreds of thousands of high school and vocational ed students learn how to repair cars every day. Being good at math helps, but mostly you need to know how to read a shop manual and use a computer, in addition to the usual mechanical skills. You might need some new diagnostic devices, starting with a scan tool. They’re only a couple hundred dollars, and not significantly more expensive than a good tach-dwell meter and a timing light would have cost back in the day, neither of which you need on any modern car. For that matter, a lot of chain auto parts stores will loan you one for as long as it takes to download trouble codes and run a couple of simple diagnostics. That’ll be in addition to a good multimeter, which mechanics have always needed. Service data is available online from dozens of places, so you might not even need to buy the shop manual. I do realize that some of you dinosaurs out there will have to buy some metric sockets and wrenches, though. Deal with it. Most of your toolbox is still adequate to fix just about anything on a new car. News source: Popular Mechanics