Don’t forget that maintenance is super cheap AND most people, with only the most basic tools, can do the work in their living room or even just on a sidewalk. And if I don’t get it right and the brakes don’t work perfectly I probably won’t fuckin’ die.
Hi, car owner here. I do all the work myself and it requires a fair bit of knowledge, expensive tools, space, and a childhood where I was never told I couldn’t do that work if I was thoughtful about it. That’s a high fuckin’ bar and requires a whole lot of privilege-oh there it is, too many people with privilege like to shit on those without and most of North America has dogshit for public transit or bike infrastructure and the “freedom of movement” with a car is all there but heavily artificial. Thanks auto industry and their lobbyists.
I do my own bicycle and auto repair, and the bicycle is way easier. Maintenance is:
clean chain every so often (500 miles or start of the season) - get a chain cleaner tool thing ($10-20) and 50/50 Simple Green ($10 will last many years) and water, and then rinse, dry, and lube ($10 lasts years) - total process, 10 min?
replace chain - $20 or so, plus a tool for $10 or so; do every 2k miles or so
replace brake pads - $10-20
tires ($50 for a fancy fire) and tubes ($10) - replace tires when bald, tubes when flat (or patch them), and get some tire levers ($5-10) to make it easier
For tools, you need a wrench set, and probably only like 2-3 sizes.
My yearly maintenance costs for all of our bikes (1 adult, two kids) combined is about $50. If that. You could also go to your local bike shop instead for about double that.
Also this is a healthy maintence regime. In my experience most cyclists do nothing on that list except swapping flat tubes and their bikes still ride just fine, if not merely sub-optimally.
Honestly have never done preventative maintenance on my bikes, only necessary repairs.
Still thinking about repairing the shifter since I’ve been missing 1st gear for about 7-8? years now.
True. If you’re just riding casually, you don’t really need any maintenance.
But if you’re relying on it every day, keeping up on maintenance can reduce costs long term. Dirty chains destroy the cogs (inexpensive) and drive train (expensive), stretched chains cause gear slippage and inefficient power delivery, worn tires increase chances of flats and reduce grip, and worn pads reduce stopping ability, which could result in nastier accidents.
If you’re riding a lot, keep up on maintenance, just like you would with a car. If it’s just occasionally like once or twice/month, you can probably get away with some neglect.
A quick tip on bike chains; if you are using lubricant you should never use heavy degreaser on the chain. The factory oil is the best lubricant and normal lubes don’t penetrate between links enough.
However, if you are going to degrease you chains, you should use paraffin wax instead of lube. I have an 11 speed chain with 3000+ miles and it’s only showing around 1% stretch. I don’t even use fancy bike specific wax, just food grade gulf wax. Another plus is the whole drive train is dry; doesn’t get your hands dirty if you need to remove a wheel, cassette, or derailleur.
Admittedly waxing the chain is a pain in the ass, but some of my chains are like $70 a pop so getting as much life from them is more important.
I have an 11 speed chain with 3000+ miles and it’s only showing around 1% stretch.
Wow, that’s a solid chain. I usually need to replace mine around 2000-3000, but my chains are like $20-30, and I don’t treat them very well (I stay on high gears on short climbs a bit too long).
I haven’t bothered with wax, maybe I should. I just do a decent job lubing everything a few times per year. I degrease (chain only, I’m careful around the derailleur and hub), rinse thoroughly, dry thoroughly, and then lube and wipe 2x. I don’t get any squeaks and it rides smoother after a cleaning, so I think I’m doing a decent job.
But I’ve heard wax is more of a one and done thing. Maybe I’ll try it the next time I replace my chain.
Oh I’m sure you’re doing a decent job and wax isn’t a perfect solution for everyone. I’m just saying that one of the reasons you may only get 2k miles out of a chain is the degreaser takes away the factory oil. When I was on lube I was getting about 1% stretch per 1k miles, but it also depends a lot on the drivetrain and what kind of riding you do.
I would definitely consider wax though, especially if you move up into 10, 11, or 12 speed drivetrains. Everything is so damn expensive on them that wax is well worth the extra work, not just the chain but my cassettes look almost new still.
$50 and a couple YouTube videos gets you everything you need for the first few years of maintenance. You can get fancy with a bike rack thing, but I never bothered and I’ve been fine.
If you screw up, go to a bike shop and they’ll get you sorted for $50 or so, and they’ll probably teach you how to do it right if you ask nicely. If you have a bike coop, it might be free.
Bike maintenance is a matter of what kind of equipment you’re riding, how far, what conditions, how much you weigh and how strong you are. When I was putting 40 miles a day commuting, my cheap bike needed maintenance about once every 2-4 weeks depending on the weather and taught me that I fucking hate cleaning and repacking my bottom bracket.
The proliferation of Ebike caliber equipment changed a lot at least for durability and comfort.
Salted roads during the winter, dusty conditions in the summer. The salted roads when it’s too cold to rinse the bike would usually work its way in and the bearings would be creaking before spring.
We only get snow about every other week here, and it’s rarely so cold that I can’t run a hose to rinse it off. I’m glad I haven’t had to deal with that nonsense.
For the newer cars, the lockout of self repair is real. You need an EEPROM reader to get the diagnostics out, and only then using firmware found on a chinese forum. Fixing a part requires you to just order a replacement, and once you take apart the car and put the part in, you then need to tell the cars electronics to accept the part as part of its diagonistics or it wont fucking start, even if its non-critical and everything else is fine.
Yea that’s nearly 100% untrue, though. TPMS sensors can be a little weird but no one is changing tires themselves, only whole wheels for summer/winter.
Brakes, sparkplugs, tierods, suspension, all oils, many sound systems and/or parts thereof, filters, batteries, and even a whole headlight assembly are all things you don’t need to tell the car about. I put a backup camera in my car and it just figured it out all on it’s own since there was technically an option for it, and I wasn’t even using an OEM camera. And the car usually doesn’t even know what’s wrong but if there IS a code you can just use an OBD2 reader, they aren’t exactly expensive and they’re super easy to use.
You either have no idea what you’re talking about or are a mechanic that I’m glad I’m not taking my vehicle to. My 2015 BRZ that has literally none of that, not even TPMS sensors(I know 2015 is not that new anymore but people have been saying this shit for decades). This is exactly why I show people how it works, so that they can understand that it’s not that hard or complicated.
P.S.: if it’s a German vehicle just shoot yourself, it’ll be a much less painful experience than realizing that a bunch of high-paid engineers with great reputations among the laypeople are really just the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet. Also less physically painful, too. You can still do the work, they just put everything in terrible places and use bolts that have needlessly unique and more fragile heads. Fuck you, VW, you idiots.
I’m talking about my own woes with the cars that I have, roughly 2005-2010ish. My current is an automatic with a manual gearbox in the background driven by an RTOS. Getting diagnostics out and putting parts in are exactly as I described above.
It sounds like the car’s you deal with are fairly modern then, and it actually gives me hope to see that the newer stuff allows for more plug-n-play tech, since I was envisioning pure vendor lock down for the newer stuff.
I’m sorry I don’t follow what you’re saying with the transmission thing. Like, I do, but I don’t know what car you have or if that’s stock or anything but if you’re talking specifically some kind of highly specialized transmission then ok, but you led with saying that it’s every part in the car.
Ultimately, there’s just no possible way for a car to actually know 99% of what you’re gunna do to it even if they tried without astronomically expensive sensors and RFID chips and a whole lot of other stuff. The only thing that can really confuse them is doing stuff like completely removing the air filter so there’s too much air(which actually hurts performance most of the time anyway) or changing the timing to where it’d be running like garbage anyway. But oh boy can you still fuck up a lot of stuff without the car having a single clue that it’s about to fuckin’ die. Hell, you could set the toe angle to 10deg and put the wrong brake pads in backwards and it wouldn’t even notice.
Fun note: On a 2018 Jetta I had to make spacers for the rear brake caliper because we tried FOUR calipers and they were all wrong, ending up with something that was the right diameter but the wrong offset. The weekend was over and we just had to get it done, but it still works fine years later. Never buy a VW, they are just dogshit and a massive pain in the ass.
Certainly depends on the car. Also they aren’t so much full-fledged “computers” in that sense as electronics with simple relays and formulas to do stuff like make ABS work, supply the correct fuel/air mixture, or turn your automatic headlights on. Most anything the average person will be doing with their vehicle on a regular basis is completely outside of the electronics.
As far as having a right to work on your vehicle that you own goes, yes that’s absolutely a problem that you would be locked out of those systems but you probably won’t be anywhere near them, either. As far as bike vs car maintenance goes it doesn’t matter how easy or open the car is, shit’s still difficult for many people, time consuming, and incredibly expensive.
Note: I’m pushing back right now on that one point because the idea that modern cars somehow know everything you do is complete horseshit made up by people who are afraid of technology and act like you need a computer science degree to unplug a sensor and plug a new one back in.
Most anything the average person will be doing with their vehicle on a regular basis
That’s kind-of the point right? In the past it used to be common for people to do a lot more maintenance on their cars. These days because they’re so complex and involve locked down electronics, the average person will only do something like change their oil. Anything else requires taking it to the shop.
I’m specifically saying that quoted bit in regards to the fact that general maintenance is not complex or locked down. It wasn’t even the next sentence, it was the same sentence. No one except for enthusiasts are reprogramming their ECUs and after that there really isn’t much else getting in the way. If you put it all back how you found it the car has no clue. There’s almost nothing I can think of that’s actually locked out and when I ask for examples I don’t actually get anything back.
People just aren’t tinkerers as much these days and it’s not even really 100% their fault. They don’t have the money to buy tools/soace and DIY has actually gotten more expensive in many cases. People also don’t have the money to fix fuck-ups and lean towards caution, and they’re constantly told that these things are way harder than they are(like you’re doing here, actually), often by their parents who have enough money to just pay mechanics or plumbers or whoever. That said, people are starting to do more of that stuff again as paying for labour starts to get too much for our shitty salaries and outweighs the risk factor. Whenever I help a friend with cars, woodworking, luthiering, or literally anything I always get them to do it while I supervise so they can build confidence.
The biggest barrier to car repair is shit like the Germans having zero clue how to do their jobs and now you need a whole bunch of expensive specialty tools. Hell, doing the brakes on my friend’s BMW needed a 16mm wrench when nearly all packs of wrenches go straight from 15mm to 17mm. VWs are horrendous even with the right tools. Audi has “the service position” which is basically just removing the whole front of the car.
But for the most part brakes, oil, sparkplugs and wires, headlights, taillights, and changing wheels with the seasons are all easy. You can also do all the suspension work yourself with little more than a sturdy vice and maybe some spring compressors(if you’re clever you may not even need that and can still do it safely). Tie-rods are simple enough, though you need to buy or rent the tool for it. You can even replace broken fuel injectors without much issue. Serpentine belts are mostly accessible, especially if you have a Subaru, too.
TL;DR: You don’t know what you’re talking about. “Lockouts” only exist in highly niche cases and none of them have to do with basic maintenance.
Mechanical work comes pretty easy to me. I have no doubt I can fix virtually anything on my bike, short of things that require welding (we might see about that someday too…).
But cars mechanical work? Tried it some times. Frustrating as hell, don’t even want to touch it. I hate everything about cars, including the way they’re built.
I think it heavily depends on the make. Both my families mustang and f150 were terrible to repair. But my camry by comparison is a joy. I can tear it apart almost the whole way with a 10 and 12 mm in an afternoon.
I’ve done work in soft manufacturing, so i know how to use a wrench, but never worked in cars.
I acknowledge bikes are way easier BTW, can fix almost any problem in my bike in a few hours, just think repairability should be on people’s minds.
Trick is to buy a Subaru. Everything is just nice and simple, and there’s lots of space to do everything. I’ve only owned them but I’ve helped family and friends with all kinds of other makes and it sucked.
Don’t forget that maintenance is super cheap AND most people, with only the most basic tools, can do the work in their living room or even just on a sidewalk. And if I don’t get it right and the brakes don’t work perfectly I probably won’t fuckin’ die.
Hi, car owner here. I do all the work myself and it requires a fair bit of knowledge, expensive tools, space, and a childhood where I was never told I couldn’t do that work if I was thoughtful about it. That’s a high fuckin’ bar and requires a whole lot of privilege-oh there it is, too many people with privilege like to shit on those without and most of North America has dogshit for public transit or bike infrastructure and the “freedom of movement” with a car is all there but heavily artificial. Thanks auto industry and their lobbyists.
I do my own bicycle and auto repair, and the bicycle is way easier. Maintenance is:
For tools, you need a wrench set, and probably only like 2-3 sizes.
My yearly maintenance costs for all of our bikes (1 adult, two kids) combined is about $50. If that. You could also go to your local bike shop instead for about double that.
Also this is a healthy maintence regime. In my experience most cyclists do nothing on that list except swapping flat tubes and their bikes still ride just fine, if not merely sub-optimally.
Honestly have never done preventative maintenance on my bikes, only necessary repairs. Still thinking about repairing the shifter since I’ve been missing 1st gear for about 7-8? years now.
True. If you’re just riding casually, you don’t really need any maintenance.
But if you’re relying on it every day, keeping up on maintenance can reduce costs long term. Dirty chains destroy the cogs (inexpensive) and drive train (expensive), stretched chains cause gear slippage and inefficient power delivery, worn tires increase chances of flats and reduce grip, and worn pads reduce stopping ability, which could result in nastier accidents.
If you’re riding a lot, keep up on maintenance, just like you would with a car. If it’s just occasionally like once or twice/month, you can probably get away with some neglect.
A quick tip on bike chains; if you are using lubricant you should never use heavy degreaser on the chain. The factory oil is the best lubricant and normal lubes don’t penetrate between links enough.
However, if you are going to degrease you chains, you should use paraffin wax instead of lube. I have an 11 speed chain with 3000+ miles and it’s only showing around 1% stretch. I don’t even use fancy bike specific wax, just food grade gulf wax. Another plus is the whole drive train is dry; doesn’t get your hands dirty if you need to remove a wheel, cassette, or derailleur.
Admittedly waxing the chain is a pain in the ass, but some of my chains are like $70 a pop so getting as much life from them is more important.
Wow, that’s a solid chain. I usually need to replace mine around 2000-3000, but my chains are like $20-30, and I don’t treat them very well (I stay on high gears on short climbs a bit too long).
I haven’t bothered with wax, maybe I should. I just do a decent job lubing everything a few times per year. I degrease (chain only, I’m careful around the derailleur and hub), rinse thoroughly, dry thoroughly, and then lube and wipe 2x. I don’t get any squeaks and it rides smoother after a cleaning, so I think I’m doing a decent job.
But I’ve heard wax is more of a one and done thing. Maybe I’ll try it the next time I replace my chain.
Oh I’m sure you’re doing a decent job and wax isn’t a perfect solution for everyone. I’m just saying that one of the reasons you may only get 2k miles out of a chain is the degreaser takes away the factory oil. When I was on lube I was getting about 1% stretch per 1k miles, but it also depends a lot on the drivetrain and what kind of riding you do.
I would definitely consider wax though, especially if you move up into 10, 11, or 12 speed drivetrains. Everything is so damn expensive on them that wax is well worth the extra work, not just the chain but my cassettes look almost new still.
Exactly!
People over-state bicycle maintenance.
$50 and a couple YouTube videos gets you everything you need for the first few years of maintenance. You can get fancy with a bike rack thing, but I never bothered and I’ve been fine.
If you screw up, go to a bike shop and they’ll get you sorted for $50 or so, and they’ll probably teach you how to do it right if you ask nicely. If you have a bike coop, it might be free.
Bike maintenance is a matter of what kind of equipment you’re riding, how far, what conditions, how much you weigh and how strong you are. When I was putting 40 miles a day commuting, my cheap bike needed maintenance about once every 2-4 weeks depending on the weather and taught me that I fucking hate cleaning and repacking my bottom bracket.
The proliferation of Ebike caliber equipment changed a lot at least for durability and comfort.
I have never once touched my bottom bracket, what kind of weather you riding in?
Salted roads during the winter, dusty conditions in the summer. The salted roads when it’s too cold to rinse the bike would usually work its way in and the bearings would be creaking before spring.
Ew.
We only get snow about every other week here, and it’s rarely so cold that I can’t run a hose to rinse it off. I’m glad I haven’t had to deal with that nonsense.
Get a quick link and a mason jar with mineral spirits to clean your chain. Easy peasy.
This was one of the things that surprised me the most about getting a bike. Parts are cheap. The work is easy. Knowing how to do it is valuable.
And if you have a bike with a belt you can replace all chain-related maintenance with “check if the belt looks weird maybe once a year”.
Yup. I recommend taking it in if it looks weird, it’s not worth learning to replace a belt since they’re usually good for many many years.
For the newer cars, the lockout of self repair is real. You need an EEPROM reader to get the diagnostics out, and only then using firmware found on a chinese forum. Fixing a part requires you to just order a replacement, and once you take apart the car and put the part in, you then need to tell the cars electronics to accept the part as part of its diagonistics or it wont fucking start, even if its non-critical and everything else is fine.
Yea that’s nearly 100% untrue, though. TPMS sensors can be a little weird but no one is changing tires themselves, only whole wheels for summer/winter.
Brakes, sparkplugs, tierods, suspension, all oils, many sound systems and/or parts thereof, filters, batteries, and even a whole headlight assembly are all things you don’t need to tell the car about. I put a backup camera in my car and it just figured it out all on it’s own since there was technically an option for it, and I wasn’t even using an OEM camera. And the car usually doesn’t even know what’s wrong but if there IS a code you can just use an OBD2 reader, they aren’t exactly expensive and they’re super easy to use.
You either have no idea what you’re talking about or are a mechanic that I’m glad I’m not taking my vehicle to. My 2015 BRZ that has literally none of that, not even TPMS sensors(I know 2015 is not that new anymore but people have been saying this shit for decades). This is exactly why I show people how it works, so that they can understand that it’s not that hard or complicated.
P.S.: if it’s a German vehicle just shoot yourself, it’ll be a much less painful experience than realizing that a bunch of high-paid engineers with great reputations among the laypeople are really just the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet. Also less physically painful, too. You can still do the work, they just put everything in terrible places and use bolts that have needlessly unique and more fragile heads. Fuck you, VW, you idiots.
I’m talking about my own woes with the cars that I have, roughly 2005-2010ish. My current is an automatic with a manual gearbox in the background driven by an RTOS. Getting diagnostics out and putting parts in are exactly as I described above.
It sounds like the car’s you deal with are fairly modern then, and it actually gives me hope to see that the newer stuff allows for more plug-n-play tech, since I was envisioning pure vendor lock down for the newer stuff.
I’m sorry I don’t follow what you’re saying with the transmission thing. Like, I do, but I don’t know what car you have or if that’s stock or anything but if you’re talking specifically some kind of highly specialized transmission then ok, but you led with saying that it’s every part in the car.
Ultimately, there’s just no possible way for a car to actually know 99% of what you’re gunna do to it even if they tried without astronomically expensive sensors and RFID chips and a whole lot of other stuff. The only thing that can really confuse them is doing stuff like completely removing the air filter so there’s too much air(which actually hurts performance most of the time anyway) or changing the timing to where it’d be running like garbage anyway. But oh boy can you still fuck up a lot of stuff without the car having a single clue that it’s about to fuckin’ die. Hell, you could set the toe angle to 10deg and put the wrong brake pads in backwards and it wouldn’t even notice.
Fun note: On a 2018 Jetta I had to make spacers for the rear brake caliper because we tried FOUR calipers and they were all wrong, ending up with something that was the right diameter but the wrong offset. The weekend was over and we just had to get it done, but it still works fine years later. Never buy a VW, they are just dogshit and a massive pain in the ass.
An AMT, a clutchless manual. They were in that sweet spot of semi-automatic cars before transmission went fully auto
What car is it, though?
Can’t rightly remember but I think it was a Hyundai
Not to mention that modern cars contain multiple computers. Those computers include DRM, making it a felony to bypass them.
Certainly depends on the car. Also they aren’t so much full-fledged “computers” in that sense as electronics with simple relays and formulas to do stuff like make ABS work, supply the correct fuel/air mixture, or turn your automatic headlights on. Most anything the average person will be doing with their vehicle on a regular basis is completely outside of the electronics.
As far as having a right to work on your vehicle that you own goes, yes that’s absolutely a problem that you would be locked out of those systems but you probably won’t be anywhere near them, either. As far as bike vs car maintenance goes it doesn’t matter how easy or open the car is, shit’s still difficult for many people, time consuming, and incredibly expensive.
Note: I’m pushing back right now on that one point because the idea that modern cars somehow know everything you do is complete horseshit made up by people who are afraid of technology and act like you need a computer science degree to unplug a sensor and plug a new one back in.
That’s kind-of the point right? In the past it used to be common for people to do a lot more maintenance on their cars. These days because they’re so complex and involve locked down electronics, the average person will only do something like change their oil. Anything else requires taking it to the shop.
I’m specifically saying that quoted bit in regards to the fact that general maintenance is not complex or locked down. It wasn’t even the next sentence, it was the same sentence. No one except for enthusiasts are reprogramming their ECUs and after that there really isn’t much else getting in the way. If you put it all back how you found it the car has no clue. There’s almost nothing I can think of that’s actually locked out and when I ask for examples I don’t actually get anything back.
People just aren’t tinkerers as much these days and it’s not even really 100% their fault. They don’t have the money to buy tools/soace and DIY has actually gotten more expensive in many cases. People also don’t have the money to fix fuck-ups and lean towards caution, and they’re constantly told that these things are way harder than they are(like you’re doing here, actually), often by their parents who have enough money to just pay mechanics or plumbers or whoever. That said, people are starting to do more of that stuff again as paying for labour starts to get too much for our shitty salaries and outweighs the risk factor. Whenever I help a friend with cars, woodworking, luthiering, or literally anything I always get them to do it while I supervise so they can build confidence.
The biggest barrier to car repair is shit like the Germans having zero clue how to do their jobs and now you need a whole bunch of expensive specialty tools. Hell, doing the brakes on my friend’s BMW needed a 16mm wrench when nearly all packs of wrenches go straight from 15mm to 17mm. VWs are horrendous even with the right tools. Audi has “the service position” which is basically just removing the whole front of the car.
But for the most part brakes, oil, sparkplugs and wires, headlights, taillights, and changing wheels with the seasons are all easy. You can also do all the suspension work yourself with little more than a sturdy vice and maybe some spring compressors(if you’re clever you may not even need that and can still do it safely). Tie-rods are simple enough, though you need to buy or rent the tool for it. You can even replace broken fuel injectors without much issue. Serpentine belts are mostly accessible, especially if you have a Subaru, too.
TL;DR: You don’t know what you’re talking about. “Lockouts” only exist in highly niche cases and none of them have to do with basic maintenance.
Mechanical work comes pretty easy to me. I have no doubt I can fix virtually anything on my bike, short of things that require welding (we might see about that someday too…).
But cars mechanical work? Tried it some times. Frustrating as hell, don’t even want to touch it. I hate everything about cars, including the way they’re built.
I think it heavily depends on the make. Both my families mustang and f150 were terrible to repair. But my camry by comparison is a joy. I can tear it apart almost the whole way with a 10 and 12 mm in an afternoon.
I’ve done work in soft manufacturing, so i know how to use a wrench, but never worked in cars.
I acknowledge bikes are way easier BTW, can fix almost any problem in my bike in a few hours, just think repairability should be on people’s minds.
Trick is to buy a Subaru. Everything is just nice and simple, and there’s lots of space to do everything. I’ve only owned them but I’ve helped family and friends with all kinds of other makes and it sucked.