THE MIDDLE LANE
The days of dad tinkering on the family car on the driveway are long gone, says TGTV’s Sam Philip
For much of my childhood my dad was just a pair of legs
To clarify he had a torso and arms and a head still does for that matter but for much of the Eighties and Nineties they were hidden beneath a Ford Sierra or Orion or a beige Volvo estate A pair of oilstained jeans surrounded by a scatter of tools and halfdrunk mugs of tea
My dad wasn’t a mechanic He had a day job but when he wasn’t doing his day job he was mending cars Not a hobby as such more penny pinching He suffered a morbid aversion to paying someone else to do something he could do himself even if doing it himself involved a fortnight of research into the intricacies of Citroen wiring looms the purchase of some specialist equipment from a shady chap with a Latvian phone number and thereafter a series of increasingly violent electrocutions accompanied by increasingly violent swearwords
Man the shocks My dad treated electrocutions not as a hazard but as a thumbsup from physics proof that he was really getting to the nub of the problem He also had an uncanny ability to electrocute himself when carrying out a task that didn’t obviously involve electricity in any way He’d often wander in from say performing a simple oil change sporting a wildeyed look and smelling of burnt chips muttering “Now that was a lively one ”
“MY FECKLESSS GENERATION PREFERS AVOCADO TOAST TO PROPER MANUAL LABOUR”
His sole concession to safety was a pair of rusty ramps that would periodically buckle under the weight of the car leaving him pinned beneath somehow unscathed whistling patiently until a family member might arrive with a trolley jack But somehow he always got the thing going after a couple of days of banging and swearing there would eventually emerge a triumphant “aha!” followed by the phutphutphrrrr of an engine firing to life then the faint zap of a small celebratory electrocution
He wasn’t alone Most men of my dad’s age spent most of their weekends beneath cars fiddling fixing getting electrocuted It’s not something you see so much anymore the enthusiastic amateur wedged under a car having a good rummage Partly this is because my feckless generation prefers avocado toast and chia smoothies to proper oily manual labour But mostly of course it’s because new cars are becoming ever more complex requiring ever more sophisticated diagnostic kit and ever tinier fingers to tackle
Electric cars? Worse still From a powertrain perspective at least they’re pretty much a closed sealed shop to even the most gungho home mechanic No everything wasn’t better in the good old days when you could fix a car with nothing more than brute force and a sharpened flint but let’s face it the dawn of the electric era probably spells the end for the enthusiastic driveway tinkerer This feels a shame Not because it represents a fraying of the onceintimate symbiosis between driver and machine blah blah but because EVs surely offer the amateur mechanic the chance for some immense and satisfying electric shocks?
Sam Philip is the TopGear telly script editor and a mag and web regular for over 15 years. He also enjoys racing classic Ferraris, restoring air-cooled 911s, and lying about his interests
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