💾 Archived View for gemini.ctrl-c.club › ~stack › gemlog › 2023-06-05.car.gmi captured on 2023-06-16 at 16:47:00. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-06-14)
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Almost exactly 11 months ago, on the 4th of July, rats had chewed through my car's wiring harness in the middle of a hot Manhattan night. After the towers lost it and several garages refused to repair it, it wound up at a Ford dealer in New Jersey for five (5!!!) months. At that point I gave up and booked a flight out of NYC, and sure enough they called for me to come and get my car. So it wound up sitting in my cousin's driveway for another 6 months. And now I have it back, having paid a year of insurance for no good reason.
As an aside, the rats chewed through 3 wires, and it would take me five minutes to repair _if_ I could reach behind the engine, which of course is not possible. Several garages outright refused the job saying things like "You don't want to remove the engine", evoking the obvious "Right, I want _you_ to remove the engine" answer from me. Look at YouTube -- every bozo takes their car engine out just for fun -- it can't be that hard...
Eventually one garage took it and sent it to the Ford dealer who refused to take it a few minutes before. The insurance company paid $11,000. We are so fucked.
As another aside, the reason rats are eating the unprotected wiring (how hard would it be to wrap the harness?) is that car companies are using soy insulation. We are so fucked.
It's an internal-combustion engine, by the way. I will continue avoiding the electric car scams for the foreseeable future. If you are not convinced, watch a video of a Tesla fire. Lithium will spontaneously ignite on contact with air. A fender-bender, or a puncture with a nail will ignite a car. Lithium will spontaneously ignite at temperatures lower than gasoline. Lithium burns like something from hell, making you wish it was a simple gasoline fire. It is often impossible to quench a lithium fire, and if you manage it will often reignite.
But anyway, it's nice to have a car, especially one with a pop-top tent for a quick getaway.