The Honest John motoring website & forum will close in about 5 days.

[howardbParticipant @howardb]

The HJ website, started in 2000 by the car journalist Peter Lorimer – AKA “Honest John” -went bust in 2020 and was bought out of administration by a car sales company called Heycar which is owned by Volkswagen Financial Services.

Now, Heycar is closing down. https://www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk/mag/featured/volkswagen-shuts-down-heycar-after-heavy-losses/

So the HJ website and forum will go down with it  – unless somebody or a company buys it out.

[vic neweyParticipant @vicnewey60017]

I am not surprised to see Heycar has failed, seeing their tv adverts showing an aggresive nutcase at the wheel must have put countless people off buying a car from them

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Sad, but I wonder if the need has gone.   My dear old dad rated Honest John highly, and for good reason. Me too, as a young man. Back then buying motor cars was a minefield.  Lots of old-bangers, and UK manufacturers were losing the plot, making hopelessly outdated models and dubious new ones.  Huge quality problems because labour relations were rock-bottom and factories slow to modernise.  At the same time, foreign competitors imported anything from cheap and nasty Warzburgs up to promising, but unproven, Japanese models.  And in the middle, plenty of European makers with serious quality and other problems.  US cars were gigantic gas-guzzlers that were hard to park, couldn’t go round corners, had sickeningly soft suspensions, and unaffordable spare parts.   Buyers worried about MPG after 1973!   Mergers, in the UK and abroad. found firms competing with themselves to sell near identical marques; one of them had to go, and customers had to judge which one was for the chop.  And merged production meant I owned a car with metric, unified, BA, and BS fasteners – insane!  Unfortunately, in the midst of this chaos, the motor trade had more than it’s fair-share of crooks and dodgy sales practices!   And honest dealers struggled with old and new marques with uncertain futures, some of whom couldn’t or wouldn’t support their products.    Necessary for Joe Public to worry because even cheap cars were expensive as a percentage of income.  Buyer beware and Honest John identified the good, the bad and the ugly.  Very helpful!

When I’m in rose-tinted mood, I remember working on cars as fun and interest.  But this is highly misleading:  cars that let me down repeatedly were no fun at all.  Essential to have Haynes Manuals and a set of basic tools, not just a hobby.  May be a shock to petrolheads, but most people just want a vehicle that gets them reliably from A to B in reasonable comfort.  The majority have no interest in how the thing works, and no desire to maintain it themselves.

All change!  Today improved regulation and advanced manufacturing make it hard to buy an outright lemon.   All the too cheap and unreliable makers were forced out of business.  Cars are relatively cheaper and we get more for the money.   Very few people do home maintenance.   Second-hand cars come with a warranty and can be insured against major repairs. New cars are often hired rather than bought: my neighbour & his wife have a new car each every two years.  Now relatively few maintain their own cars, not least because even simple jobs have become difficult without a lift and the right tools!

So Honest John has less to say and fewer people need his advice. Time marches on.

Dave

 

 

[howardbParticipant @howardb]

Honest John in it’s present soon-to-be defunct format has only been going since 2000.

HJ was started by the motoring journalist Peter Lorimer who was notorious for the pseudonym “Honest John” because he told the truth about cars.

If the car he was reviewing was a dog, he would say so.

Maybe that was his downfall – we cannot have people telling the truth about cars can we?

[howardb]

On howardb Said:…

Maybe that was his downfall – we cannot have people telling the truth about cars can we?

I think the truth is that today’s cars are mostly reliable and thus very boring.   40 years ago everyone had a fund of stories about their cars.   My youth was wasted discussing remoulds, rust buckets I have owned, oil leaks, condensers, starting problems,  duff alternators , chokes and other nonsense.  Now the youngsters in my family rarely talk about cars and if they do it’s about features, not keeping them going.

Mind you, when a modern car does go wrong, it’s likely to be exciting – something big and expensive, but rare.   In contrast old cars suffered a multitude of minor faults, cheaper individually, but shocking if you added the bills up and especially so if you couldn’t fix it yourself.

In the spirit of Honest John, are there any modern cars to be avoided at all costs?  I can name several from the past, none today!  But I’ve lost interest, finding cars tedious unless they’re impractical bling. Though I secretly lust after a bright red sports convertible with a clumsy roof that leaks in the rain, it’s not going to happen…

Dave

 

[Chris CrewParticipant @chriscrew66644]

I still have the Sykes-Pickavant clutch aligner, valve spring, piston ring and coil spring compressors and all the other tools needed to keep the old wrecks running in my younger days. Whole weekends wasted working on mine and my late mother’s cars and scratching around scrapyards for parts just so we could get to work on Monday morning. Now, not so long ago for my latest car, I had to read the manual to find out where the bonnet release was so as to top up the washer bottle!

[Robert Atkinson 2Participant @robertatkinson2]

If you want to look at the website when it’s gone there is always the wayback machine
https://web.archive.org/

Modern cars have their issues, even what used to be considered “quality” brands. BMW timing chains come to mind.
I think better consumer protection both laws and enforcement has helped a lot. The downside seems to be that technicians seem to be less aware of issues and unwilling to do more diagnostics than just changing boxes. This can result in cars being written off for what is in reality a minor wiring fault.
A british manufacturer of oscilloscope based diagnostics has some interesting case studies that include some examples of this.
https://www.picoauto.com/library/case-studies

Robert.

[Nick WheelerParticipant @nickwheeler]

Modern cars to avoid at all costs? Just as in the past there are several:

 

Any Ford with a 1.0l Ecoboost; an engine with nothing to recommend it.

BMW have had serious issues with under-specced timing chains for twenty years, compounded by fitting them at the back of the engine. The worst one I saw had done less than 5000miles; I dumped it by the dealer’s sign that bragged about The value of perfect engineering…

Jaguar/Land-Rover timing chains aren’t much better.

BMW and Porsche’s plastic coolant fittings have a well deserved reputation for crapness.

VW’s DSG gearboxes have a number of wallet busting failure modes that are hard to accept just for the bragging rights of milisecond gear-changes.

Do you miss having to weld cars for their MOTs? Buy a Mazda 6. Or a Transit. Sprinters aren’t much better.

Electric parking brakes are a terrible solution to an invented problem.

[noel shelleyParticipant @noelshelley55608]

Scope based ? Sun Tune ? Robert.

Dave ? Modern and reliable – look into anything with a WET belt, one big maker comes to mind. At least the 2.3 vauxhall/Bedford could break it’s belt and all you needed was a new belt – not a new engine. Some makers got away with flawed designs for a long time, the pinto cam and followers, the accountants saw the roller follower as to expensive, the evidence was on the follower casting. The list is a long one ! Noel

As for Daves dream of a red sports job Etc I made one in the 70s from a badly written off MGB and the aluminium sheets from an old caravan but that’s another story ! N

[Robert Atkinson 2]

On Robert Atkinson 2 Said:

… The downside seems to be that technicians seem to be less aware of issues and unwilling to do more diagnostics than just changing boxes. This can result in cars being written off for what is in reality a minor wiring fault….

About 1980 I read a case study into the reliability of military electronics.  Cruising off Vietnam, the US Navy found reliability much improved compared with costly peacetime routine maintenance.  Two reasons:  switching equipment on and off is damaging, AND, humans often do more harm than good.  The discovery isn’t exactly new:  “if it ain’t bust don’t fix it”.

The study also looked at modularisation. Found that conventional kit was much less reliable than modules, and cost a fortune to maintain because that required an army of well-trained and well equipped diagnosticians.

Though diagnosticians were good at fixing small faults, modules were more reliable, and availability was improved because modules can be swapped quickly by semi-skilled staff.    On the downside, entire equipments were sometimes scrapped because of minor faults that weren’t mended simply by module swapping.    The case study found this didn’t matter:  despite mistakes, modules still saved 80% of the budget.   The advantage of modules wasn’t apparent to the workforce, who, convinced they had jobs for life, only gradually noticed they were being phased out.  The accountant knew what was going to happen to them years in advance.

A third factor was rapid progress in electronics:  kit, especially computers, became obsolete in a few years.  More chance of managing rapid change by swapping modules than having to replace an entire conventional equipment.  Still nasty though – modules have to be version controlled!

Electronic modules became extremely complicated, difficult to understand, and very difficult to work on.  Even highly trained practitioners are in trouble – no manuals, and the beasts are often made in ways that resist dismantling.  Interestingly, most faults identified in the case study were mechanical rather than electronic.  Cracked traces, plugs & sockets, tarnish etc.

Add it all together, and broken modules, for whatever reason, are scrap.

Though electronics are the obvious example,  modularisation’s been a trend in other fields for at least a century.  Electric motors,  bearings, white goods, tools, and many other sealed-for-life examples abound.   In 1950 most garages had a small lathe because older cars had many parts that could be repaired (or bodged).   Pretty much all gone by 1970.   In half a century of motoring I’ve never been in a garage that repaired parts: they’ve always swapped them.  Oilite bushes were conceived as a cheap maintenance free bearing intended to only last the life of the equipment.  They can be replaced, but the maker never intended they should be!

Though I understand the advantages of not repairing stuff, I worry it’s not sustainable.  Depends on cheap materials and energy, and they can’t stay cheap forever…

Dave

[Robert Atkinson 2Participant @robertatkinson2]

Sod said “On the downside, entire equipments were sometimes scrapped because of minor faults that weren’t mended simply by module swapping. The case study found this didn’t matter: despite mistakes, modules still saved 80% of the budget.”
That is fine when the govenment owns lots of the same thing and is responsible for all costs and huge budget. Not good for a private individual with a single car that may be their second most expensive possssion…

Robert.

[Howard LewisParticipant @howardlewis46836]

Like others on here, still have enough tooling to equip a small old style garage.

Last major use was in helping a friend to build a Locost

Over the last twenty years, with reliable cars, garage servicing (‘cos home servicing is no longer practicable apart from oil and filter changes) and long warranties, The most that I’ve had to do on the last twenty years was a brake light bulb of each of our cars, and that was ten years ago!

But we are spared wet belt drives!

Howard

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

My father in laws car developed a minor fault so he took it back to the VW dealer (against my advice). They diagnosed an engine management computer fault and replaced it at huge cost. No better. Took it to the local specialist who swapped the Lambda sensor, very cheap. Believe it or not he managed to get a full refund from VW

[SillyOldDuffer]

On SillyOldDuffer Said:

…
About 1980 I read a case study into the reliability of military electronics.  Cruising off Vietnam, the US Navy found reliability much improved compared with costly peacetime routine maintenance.  Two reasons:  switching equipment on and off is damaging, AND, humans often do more harm than good.  The discovery isn’t exactly new:  “if it ain’t bust don’t fix it”.

…

Dave

The Formula 1 folk found similar results when the rules changed about working on the cars after practice and prior to the race itself. The number of in-race failures dropped dramatically since they avoided the over-night rebuilds with all the opportunities for failing to tighten something, etc.
I still run an early 1970s classic, but have less interest in working on it and wish at times that it would “just go”…..Most changes I have incorporated have been with the intention of extending the time before I need to address that particular component again – or ideally, never…

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