I totally agree with your rules here, however I recently helped my mom buy a new car (2023 Nissan Murano) and while sitting with her in the finance room deciding on warranty stuff I realized that cars are mostly 100 interconnected computers on wheels. This means the most likely thing to break on a car is a computer. This is something only the dealer can fix probably. Because of this you can’t get the same kind of warranty on a used car, only new.
The warranty my mom on this new car is great and it will cover any kind of computer issue for years. If she had gone and saved a bunch of money by picking a used car from the same year or 1-2 years old she could not get that warranty, and if a computer issue popped up years later it could be terribly expensive.
The computers are, by far, the most reliable parts of a car. They’re not subject to mechanical stresses or wear, and the real-time/embedded operating systems are far more fault resistant than desktop/phone OSes. The computers also mean that you can buy a $20 OBDII scanner and have the car tell you what’s wrong with it. Maybe an extra $10 for an app that will decode most of the manufacturer-specific codes. The difference between those $30 diagnostics and the $10,000 system the dealer uses is mostly that the dealer system includes all the manufacturer codes and step-by-step directions for fixing each fault.
Maybe an interesting aside, i have an associate who makes a living being the guy mechanics call. When they can’t figure out how to do what the computer is telling them to do, they have a contract with his company where he’ll walk them thru the repair. He can see all the data from their shop obdii thingy too, and helps troubleshoot remotely.
He says the effect of this system over the years (in his experience) is that in-shop mechanics are increasingly untrained guys ‘off the street’ who ‘don’t know shit from shit’
Just thought that was an interesting tidbit about the industry or even a sign of the future of that job
Thanks for this, it makes a lot of sense actually. Oh well, my mom has her car and the warranty she will hopefully never need, but it’s there if she does. I guess it all comes down to care tactics in the dealership, pressuring you to buy warranties and such that you may not need and cannot buy at any other time except right then.
I’ll be sticking with the recently used philosophy for the future though.
On any device with moving parts, the parts that fail most early and often are the moving parts. Solid state electronics are not moving parts.
