John Simister
John gets a rush of well-being from fettling a modern
John’s classics are all behaving, but his modern… not so much.
‘The little engine felt punchier, as if its head had cleared’
When our classics go wrong, it tends to be in predictable ways. The ailments and their causes generally make themselves obvious, and the cure is equally so. That’s part of the rewarding, hands-on nature of old cars. New cars aren’t quite so transparent. Trip-wires abound. Suppose a sidelight bulb blows. This happened to someone I know with a recent BMW 1-Series. She took it to the dealer, who charged a lot of money to replace the bulb (simple) and then perform the diagnostic check to tell the car that it had been fixed, so the bulb-failure warning light could be extinguished.
Suspicious things, these multiplex CAN-BUS electronic systems. They like to be sure. Not all recent cars are so needy, luckily. My Fiat 500 Twinair blew a brake light bulb, so I replaced it in the usual way and no strop was thrown. I was pleased to discover that the bulb was exactly the same as has been used in cars since the Fifties, so that was reassuring. The bulb now installed, taken from my spares stash, is at least a decade older than the car.
Digital ailments
However, the Fiat recently developed a fault unlikely to occur in a classic car. Like most modern machines, its odometer uses an LCD display rather than a mechanical rotating drum, and this display started to flash on and off at one-second intervals. Was it trying to tell me something? If so, it was nothing that the handbook could clarify, so I went on the useful Fiat Forum. My car’s malady was not uncommon, and the official Fiat advice is to take the car to dealer for a CAN-BUS realignment. A what?
Apparently it’s something to do with the car’s central control computer trying to synchronise itself with other modules and bits of network as the car starts up, and failing. I don’t really understand, but nor do I want the aggravation and expense of taking the car to a dealer to fix the sort of fault that could never have happened when cars were analogue and understandable.
But there’s a computer involved, and what do we do with naughty computers? Turn them off, leave them to stew for a bit, allow the rogue electrons to sink to the bottom, then reboot. That’s what I did. I disconnected the battery, let it sit for two hours, then reinstated the 12 volts into its nervous system.
It started properly. The date and time displays had gone back to the beginning of the century, 11 years before the Fiat was born, but all the radio settings and station presets were still there. And the odometer was flashing no longer.
The little two-cylinder engine felt punchier, as if its head had cleared, and all of this is down to the newly-accurate processing of digital data, a stream of ones and zeros which controls how much power it produces, when it produces it, and what comes out of the exhaust pipe afterwards.
We develop a strong relationship with our classic cars, because they respond to us as we do to them. Can we do this if digital electronics, representing a world of intelligence to threaten our own, are involved? Well, fixing my Fiat gave me an oxytocin surge (the ‘well-being’ hormone). So yes, we can.
Some ‘modern classics’ have ECUS, and some of those ECUS are starting to break down. Even new-old-stock ones can’t be guaranteed to work, and an industry is building up around new, modern ones able to the same – or often a better – job. Lancia Delta Integrales are prone to this, I’m told, and that’s definitely a classic car.
So there’s no shame in an emotive response to a digitally-controlled device, and it’s going to be happening more and more often. All it needs is a bit of demystification, so I can understand what’s actually going on in those microchips. Or perhaps I should be careful what I wish for…