The cost of new technology in modern cars

Motoring Motoring: Chat / Discussions
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Five years’ ago, just before retiring, I bought a new Volkswagen Golf 1.6 BlueMotion TDi SE, a brilliant car by all accounts. Well-built, very economical (54-62 mpg) and reliable. New technology plays a big part in the car. Like a lot of cars today, a computer on wheels.

As I don’t do that many miles these days it’s covered in total just 17,000 miles and had two MoTs which were passed without any problems. Not even a new tyre as yet.

Driving through the country lanes of this rural area, I rounded a bend and a family of pheasants decided to cross the road. No chance of stopping or avoiding them but they managed to cross, except one straggler which went under the front of the car, banging on the bodywork as it did so. Sadly no chance of survival whatsoever.

I checked the car over on arriving home, no damage at all, not even feathers inside the front grille. Next morning started the car only to see warning icons displayed. One was the Adaptive Cruise Control, the other Assisted Front Braking. Both not working and very useful, but not essential to have. Checked with the Volkswagen garage as to what this meant and it was expensive, very, very expensive.

Both these functions are controlled by a sensor, actually a radar camera, mounted beneath the front number plate and behind the grille but within an opening in the grille. Basically very poor design.

Shock, horror at the cost! To recalibrate the sensor / camera (to plus 0.8º or minus 0.8º) – £400. To supply and calibrate a new sensor / camera if the existing one is broken – £1,400!

All this technology is very nice but beware the cost when damaged or something goes wrong. For the first time in 57 years I have had to claim on my insurance. Protected No Claims Discount fortunately but £150 Excess. No other vehicle involved, nobody to claim from so my insurance will increase by approximately £110 next renewal – an expensive pheasant, and there are thousands of them here ‘out in the sticks’!

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None of our cars have ever had anything more than central locking, can’t imagine it’s all needed TBH. Had a lift home the other day from hospital and it looked like the driver had an airplane cockpit display in front of him !

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Quite agree with you about what’s needed. My first cars were those that had a heater and radio, at additional cost and in those days just what was central locking? Even the car before the VW Golf only had electric windows and central locking as standard.

Nowadays there is competition between manufacturers as to who can offer the most new technology to secure sales. The VW Golf was not available without all the ‘goodies’ so no choice really if I wanted to buy the car. When this incident occurred I just thought I would not bother to have it repaired as it’s not necessary, but of course that lowers the value of the car by the cost of repairs should I wish to trade it in.

I often wonder how a young person, a new driver, the novice manages with all this gadgetry while driving? But then of course, in the case of youngsters, their brains seem to be wired differently from ours! :slight_smile:

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I have to say it worries me all those distractions can’t make for a better driver.
When my husband taught the kids to drive he didn’t even allow them to use a radio until they were competent drivers and passed their tests, can’t stop them after that but while he could he made sure they concentrated.

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With modern cars you can’t even change a battery as the electronics have to be reset on a diagnostic machine. My car has all the bells and whistles even down to which tyre has low air pressure in it. it really now is information overload

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Tell me about it, mine’s the same. Even more annoying when I used to service and repair my cars. The VW Golf also has the ‘stop / start’ feature for fuel-saving. Very useful to be informed of low tyre pressure, even though I am an ‘old-fashioned’ driver who checks his car over once a week. Hitting a pothole for instance can knock some air out of the tyre and you may not realise. For a lot of this I have to refer to the vehicle’s handbook which needs a degree to understand anyway. A lot more easily understandable information is to be found on You Tube. For instance, recently a warning came up on the dashboard screen that the key fob battery was low and needed replacing. I could find nothing in the handbook and no doubt it would be costly at the main dealers. The You Tube video showed exactly how to do it even down to the battery number. Cost: £2.40 for batteries (two so I have a spare for when the spare key fob requires a battery) labour costs: zero! :slight_smile:

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I have a range of cars , one new and that’s a mobile computer , others older with less technology …
One point I was reading about the other day now you mention parts prices … the latest Volkswagen polo headlight bulb costs … whatever , but the faster GTi version headlamp ( you can’t replace a bulb on its own ) is £900 !!!
For years now manufacturers have made cars so reliable they rarely go wrong and soastomakemoney aftermarket they put all kinds on then knowing you will be back needing ‘spares’ and often they won’t work even if you fit them yourself as you need their laptop to tell your car the part has been replaced so no getting around it I’m afraid

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While at the VW dealers about getting the ACC sensor re-calibrated / replaced I was speaking to the service manager about the cost of the sensor, he commented on the cost of headlamps as you mention. In a minor shunt it could be a plastic bumper replacement plus two new headlamps, just the headlamps alone £2,000 plus new bumper and on top of that the labour cost. That came as another surprise when I asked what that was – £90 an hour and that’s just increased!

My other car is now 36 years’ old, ‘luxuries’ are just electric windows and electronic ignition rather than the ‘points’ system. That car takes 5.5 hours for a full service so at today’s rates almost impossible to have serviced. As cars have become more reliable service times have decreased so garages have just increased hourly rates and the cost of parts. One difference in all this though is that the local village garage charges £50 an hour while the main dealer is £90 an hour, both do the same job for mechanical requirements. However, the village garage cannot access VW’s database so cannot do upgrades to the onboard computer.

As you rightly say ‘no getting round it’! Unless of course taxis are used and that is becoming increasingly more of a viable option as depreciation on cars, the costs of servicing them and running costs become higher and higher, and eventually out of the price range for some. :frowning:

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My land rover defender ( 300Tdi ) I do everything myself and always will … everything else varies as I enjoy servicing myself and most things I can get around dealer ‘needs’ however the newer the car the more dependent you are on them , not because the job is any more complex but because cars go into limp mode today when broken and they have the reset codes so your stuffed !!!

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All these. Safety items on cars are designed to meet the latest euro ncap safety standards, but when it goes wrong it’s usually expensive, if out of warranty, more cars are being written off for relatively minor shunts, but if you consider replacing the front airbags, that’s a complete new dash, expensive and time consuming, a windscreen now has to be calibrated if it’s replaced due to these radar cruise control systems , when you factor in the cost of some headlight systems, ( LED) insurance companies will, in most cases now , write off the vehicle, and it’s can only get worse, the eu, are now proposing that within the next three years, all new cars will have black boxes fitted, and speed limiters linked to traffic sign recognition systems, so the car will keep to the limit, now, it’s all fine if it can help to minimalise or prevent accidents, but once a car is out of the manufacture warranty, it will write off a lot more cars as the cost to repair will be prohibitive

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Quite right in that the newer the car the less the chances are of doing things yourself, the onboard computers rule that out as you say.

Another example of ‘modern technology’ not being good for the owner though, this time keyless ignition, and it’s a later car of the make you have I believe. Recently a Land Rover Discovery was stolen in the early hours from a driveway right outside the owner’s bedroom. Double driveway gates were opened, outside PIR lights came on, the CCTV started recording. The ’no-good’ walked up the driveway, produced a key, entered the vehicle, started it and drove away. That car, costing originally around £60,000 I guess, was never seen again. It was apparently one of two stolen locally using the same method.

The car required a key and another device at the same time to gain entry and start the car. At the time of the theft these were secured in a special ‘safe’ to prevent other technological ways of theft. This ‘no-good’ the police reckon, either had someone at the recent servicing garage who cloned the keys. Or it may have been another method when the car was cleaned at one of the multitude of cleaning and valeting businesses we see lately. This way the keys would have been given over to whoever was cleaning and valeting the car, they were then cloned and a tracker placed under the car so as to track it to where it was kept so as to steal it.

This has been happening on cars made by that group who also make the Mini and Jaguar I believe. Nobody’s car is safe nowadays, the police are now even advising owners to also use another method of securing their car, the gadget that fixes to the steering wheel preventing it turning or something like the old ‘Krooklock’ method. We are going backwards when it comes to having to use these I reckon. :frowning:

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My car has all the bells and whistles.What I find most useful is the sat nav.
And the interactive voice recognition
“Find nearest hotel.”
Book it, pay for it, get directions. All from the driver’s seat.

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My focus has keyless entry and I too have to resort to the old steering lock and amazed daily when I see the car outside as I just know one night it will be stolen

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You can put your car fob in a tin or you can even buy special bags to store them in, it creates a faraday cage so as to prevent the signal being boosted, some cars now come with a setting on the fob that disables it so it cannot be boosted

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How do you think I’ve kept it this long !!! Lol

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I’ve got a Golf with those doo dads on and I don’t think I need them. I’ll have to be careful - never realised they cost so much to fix.

My son has just come home with a Lexus Hybrid car tonight and brought it round to show me. He has it on trial for four days to see if he fancies having one and I have never seen anything like it. Talk about bells and whistles. It looks lovely and I like the hybrid idea. I had a drive of it and thought it would take me a month of Sundays to get used to this lot. I can’t think it is all necessary. Fortunately if he has one it will be a lease arrangement through work and he will sacrifice his car allowance. He does about 20,000 miles a year which at the moment all goes on his own personal car, so probably not a bad idea to lease, but I don’t think he would ever buy it.

Needless to say this old fogey will not be having one. I dread to think what the cost would be if anything went wrong, but that won’t be his problem if it’s a lease. I have the feeling that an awful lot of the fancy high spec. cars on the roads today are on lease.

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One extra was not on the Golf, at £1,200 more it was omitted in favour of a sat. nav. app on my mobile phone. Waze is brilliant and works well for me with my limited mileage these days. It’s even interactive, allowing drivers to add anything they may have seen on their journey like mobile speed checks, accidents or dangerous objects in the roadway.

Great unless you are unfortunate enough to stutter though! Just my warped sense of humour, please excuse. It’s all very clever though and must be very useful if you do the mileage.

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You may be lucky as it was only the early Golfs, the Mk7.5s, that had the sensor as mine is. Mine is a 2014 car, on the later ones it is located behind the grille so protected from the type of incident that I experienced. The later ones still have it located in the bonnet badge well out of the way and those sold in Germany, so I understand, have the sensor located between the back of the rearview mirror and windscreen as it ‘reads’ changing speed limit signs and slows the car to the correct speed so saving being caught out should you miss the speed limit sign. All very clever but at a price should there be any problems with the sensor.

It used to be reckoned that one-third of cars on the roads were company cars so most if not all of those would probably be leased, it’s financially favourable for companies to do that. With the way costs are going the average person would not be able to buy and run a car soon. Electric cars for instance with a Mini costing £39,000 and an Audi at £100,000 with a ‘cheaper’ model at £79,000 how can an ‘average person’ afford that kind of money?

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The first few years and cars are under warranty so new car /first owners are cushioned ( how do you think jaguar land rover sell so many of the worlds most desirable but unreliable cars ?!) it’s after the 3 years most are in the used car market and this is were they start going wrong as they get older and why electric cars will never be top sellers as the car may well be high mileage poor condition one day but a new battery at £20,000 ? For what you’d call a £500 banger ? … big changes ahead in the motor industry me thinks

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Oh my goodness,£20,000 for a battery!! Maybe hybrid cars are the way to go then. I have not looked at the hybrid cars before, but the one my son has on trial is self charging and I was impressed. It’s fully automatic and when going down hill,braking and other stuff it charges itself. It is so quiet when it sets off and the petrol kicks in if the car needs a bit of power and that’s when it charges itself as well (I think). I know nothing about cars, but it does seem very clever. I never knew that Lexux is really Toyota either - learn something every day.