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| Even Ford's new, entry-level petrol engine contains sophisticated tech. |
Tri-turbo
diesel engines, suspension that ‘sees’ the road through cameras and adapts itself
accordingly; engine start-stop technology that calls into action a starter
motor eight times stronger than a normal one, and automatic transmissions with
no less than eight forward gears.
They
are all incredibly impressive and would blow the minds of car engineers from 50
years ago. But what if something goes wrong? A used VW Golf with a dual-clutch
gearbox might set you back 10 grand, but if its transmission gives up the ghost
you are looking at over 75 percent of the car’s value to replace it.
Nowadays,
every diesel engine has a turbo and now petrol motors are getting in on the
act. Ford’s one-litre, three-cylinder Ecoboost motor packs a turbo, which as
well as mighty fine efficiency figures, grants enough performance to make not
just the old, naturally aspirated, 1.6-litre engine redundant, but the 1.8 as
well. It is expected to sell by the bucket load, but how many of those
thousands and thousands of buyers know what it’ll cost to fix a blower if it
fails?
Technology
in cars is good, infectious even; once a car maker breaks new ground, the rest
soon follow. Yet at the same time, technology brings complications, expensive
complications. And what really frightens me is that such complex kit is now
found on new, everyday metal – the stuff I might want to buy used in three to
four years time.
After
say 40,000 miles, can I really trust a sexy, swift acting DCT to not eat
itself, or a turbocharged (and thus more stressed) four-pot to not start
guzzling oil or blowing steam through a gasket?
I feel
we are on the brink of something big, driven by as much as anything, Western emissions legislation, which continues to put pressure on car manufacturers to produce ever more high tech vehicles to meet CO2 and NOx targets. Ultimately, the
buyer will pay the biggest price when something immensely complex
like a tri-turbo engine, start-stop system or eight-speed gearbox goes wrong. And they will
because no car is 100 percent reliable.
We
could become a throw-away society, moving from sophisticated new car to
sophisticated new car after our three-year contract is up. And on the face of
it, that would be good because we’d all be driving factory fresh vehicles built
by companies with increasingly strong new car sales figures – endowing them with more capital to invest into R and D, to make even more brain scramblingly
brilliant products...
The
downside, though, would be a faltering and eventually imploding used car
market; nobody is going to buy someone else’s potentially ruinous problem. A
decade old, MK1 Ford Focus is relatively straightforward, mechanically, and
thus hardly a frightening used buy today. But the current MK3 in 10 years time?
The only way is up as far as bills are concerned, a theme that has already
begun and I can only see getting worse as the years progress.
