Comment by mindslight

Comment by mindslight 3 days ago

Throughout my entire life, I don't know if I have ever seen anyone measuring their tire pressure or checking their oil at a gas station. Visually assessing tires can be quite misleading as well - my TPMS indicator was just on, visually it looked like one tire (its pressure was fine), and the tire that was 10psi low looked normal.

Falling back to an attitude of not needing automation and instrumentation is a cope, and often a poor cope at that. The problem isn't the dash warning lights of the past several decades, it's the built in corporate surveillance hardware of the past single decade (and the corresponding violation of user trust in favor of corporate control).

jeroenhd 3 days ago

I don't see it often either, but my government has been very active trying to get people to do bi-monthly tire pressure checks at the very least.

I don't think most people know how to do it, to be honest. Partially because people seem to think reading two pages in a manual is some kind of sisyphean task that no mortal should ever be cursed with.

It's pretty crazy how little people care. Even if you don't care about the safety aspect, keeping your tires inflated well saves you a ton on fuel and tire replacements.

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rkomorn 3 days ago

Tire pressure management was one of the striking differences between my experiences in France and in the US.
In France, we'd check tire pressure at gas stations on nice machines that had built in dial gauges and were free.
In the US, I had to use one of those hand gauges and the air pumps needed quarters (in most cases, especially if you weren't also buying gas).
In Portugal now, the gas stations also have free air and pretty good pumps.

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- maest 3 days ago
  
  > the air pumps needed quarters
  I landed at JFK and was looking for a stroller to stack my suitcases on. The kind of stroller that is free in every single airport I've been to.
  I was shocked to see it costs $7. The guy who (I presume) worked there sardonically exclaimed "Welcome to America."
  
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  mattclarkdotnet 2 days ago
  
  Presumably you mean a “trolley” not a “stroller”, because strollers are for moving children not luggage
  But yeah, free airport trolleys are are an easy marker of evolved civilisations, and the USA fails this test.
  Countries that have passed this test for me that I can recall: Australia, Greece, Singapore, China, UK, Thailand, Italy, Spain…
  
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- ponector 3 days ago
  
  Many new cars have a tire repair kit instead of spare tire nowadays. At least there is a compressor in the kit which you can use to inflate the tire.
  
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ghaff 3 days ago

Checking oil at once universal full-service gas stations used to be extremely common. Think it pretty much went away in late-70s petroleum shortage in the US. With modern cars, it just doesn't make a lot of sense given any semblance of scheduled maintenance adherence.

I (again) have a low pressure warning on one tire (getting colder in the Northern Hemisphere). It looks fine but I'll get my compressor out tomorrow and make the computer happy. A lot of modern tires can look pretty good even if, as you say, they can be quite a bit below recommended limits.

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mylifeandtimes 3 days ago

maybe an age thing? When I was in high school I worked at a gas station where we would pump the gas for customers at the "full service" lane and also check their oil. The game was to upsell people an oil change. Point is, everyone saw people getting their oil checked every time they filled the tank.

And checking tire pressure was a 1x/week thing.

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mindslight 2 days ago

My point was that this is not any sort of widespread normalized behavior in the US in the past few decades. I was responding to a comment preaching as if this was routine behavior, and that people not doing it are simply being "inattentive".
I do get that it used to be a thing in the past. But that was also when oil was rated for 3k miles (I think? maybe it was even lower) and engines would routinely burn oil (ie consume it without leaving a drip spot on the ground). Whereas in the modern day, 15k synthetic exists.
FWIW, I probably do more of my own maintenance than the median HNer. I'll admit I can let intervals slip more than I'd like and I'm working on that, but this idea that everyone is checking fluid levels all the time just seems wildly off base.

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everdrive 3 days ago

>Falling back to an attitude of not needing automation and instrumentation is a cope, and often a poor cope at that.

A lot of modern automation is not really automation. A washing machine is automation: it takes a task which would have wasted hours of your day and reduces it down to a few minutes. A lot of modern "automation" doesn't save you any actual time time, but just saves you from being attentive:

- Checking your tire pressure doesn't take much time, but TPMS is a privacy problem and an added maintenance cost that you cannot opt out of.

- A power rear lift gate actually takes _more_ time than just shutting it with your hands.

- Power windows don't go down any more quickly than power windows. The only only benefit here is that you can open all 4 windows simultaneously. However this is a luxury, not something which saves you time. You never _need_ all 4 windows down. So maybe people like it, but it's not like the washing machine that actually saves you labor.

- etc ....

People think that needed to do or attend to anything is wasting time, but often modern automation saves no time whatsoever, and has other downsides. (privacy, maintenance cost, vehicle weight, etc.)

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baubino 3 days ago

As someone who grew up in the pre-power-window 1970s and 80s, they absolutely do save time. You have to remember that manual crank windows went along with a lack of air conditioning. Being able to quickly roll down the windows (especially all four at once) in a hot car mattered.

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- toast0 2 days ago
  
  My 2003 s-10 has AC and crank windows, my 2007 Ranger did too. Power windows sure are nice when you want to talk to someone out the passenger side and you don't have a passenger though. Or if you want a breeze regardless of AC.
  
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  mindslight 2 days ago
  
  > Power windows sure are nice when you want to talk to someone out the passenger side
  Presumably the fundamentalists think you just need to yell louder. With neo-luddite opposition like this, its no wonder the surveillance society is winning.
  
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  toast0 2 days ago
  
  I mean, I could always stick my torso out my window and talk over the cab, I guess.
  
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mindslight 3 days ago

It takes real time to get out a pressure gauge and check the pressure on each wheel, no? Furthermore, attention itself is a limited resource.
For example, power windows were always handy when getting on/off the highway and coming up to a toll booth where I'd have to give/take a ticket. It's much easier to hold a button (or even have a latching button) while spending my attention on actually driving.
I have one car with TPMS that's entirely done through the ABS controller measuring the relative diameters of the wheels. That's not a privacy or cost problem. Furthermore the privacy problem where wireless TPMS sensors are interrogatable is better framed as a security vulnerability in their design, rather than something intrinsic.
Weight is a red herring as I'd guess the fuel savings from having properly inflated tires outweighs the fuel spent on the extra mass.

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elzbardico 3 days ago

You don’t see people checking tire pressures where you live?

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