A huge problem has formed in the automobile industry. Well, actually problems...
The covaids lockdowns disrupted the flow of goods and parts, and this ended up with a lot of automobiles being almost complete, but just not ready for sale. Still some auto parts are incredibly difficult to obtain.
The automobile industry has taken it upon themselves to embody planned obsolescence, and worse. Cars, instead of becoming easier to fix have become extremely difficult, extremely complex, and extremely part interdependent. (as in one part breaking, like the tail light, can cause the engine to die.)
And the mother WEFers want to remove car ownership from poor people. (if you are not a millionaire, you are a poor person) Cars are becoming extremely expensive, through price manipulation and increasing interest rates. While the normal person is finding it harder to make ends meet.
The BRICS are getting together to make a currency to rival The US$. When this happens, America may find it much more expensive to import goods. Especially from China. And this means a good deal of our replacement parts as well as a good deal of the parts that go into new automobiles is going to go up in price, or become unavailable.
The American automobile manufacturers are on the ropes. Even after being bailed out, these corporate giants are still finding it hard to produce cars economically and make a profit. This could be the end of the American automobile. And this may have been planned.
Will America have to become like Cuba to keep our cars running?
Cuba, after being embargoed from American imports/exports turned to their machinists and mechanics to keep their cars running. They borrowed, copied, fixed, welded pieces to keep their automobiles on the road. And they did a really good job, so that you can go down there (not from The US) and see a seen right out of the 60s.
What happens if America gets isolated from the world of replacement parts?
What if GM goes out of business. Or just stops building cars in America?
Well then, we are going to have to become really good at jerry rigging cars, finding workarounds to keep a car running.
Or, we start building cars ourselves.
Distributed Manufacturing
The manufacturing line was a great improvement on efficiency. However, there are many problems with it, such as:
- it is very costly to build the the thing that moves the car around while getting assembled.
- there is only so much time for each step... and some steps take much longer than others.
- you need an incredibly large building that is tied to doing only one thing. You have to close down this building to change it over to do something else (new car line)
- there is very little you can do to the manufacturing line. You can't speed it up, you can't slow it down. You can only make so many automobiles, there is no way to change this number.
With distributed manufacturing, you can build your products in much smaller buildings, including, your garage. It is easy to change these spaces over to building something else.
You can scale up by getting more space. (Just have to beg your friends to use their garage.)
You can grow smaller.
And although you need a more intelligent person to do this kind of assembly, you get a better product because you have someone with a larger knowledge base of how all the pieces are to work together.
When designing something for small scale manufacturing, you usually end up with a product that can disassembled to be fixed. (ie parts being bolted together instead of one way processes like snap together or welded.
New technology and new ways of making things are bringing what used to take mile long factories down to garage sized.
This will be the new future as controls and product manipulation make the old way undesirable for so many reasons.
- Parts becoming wicked expensive
- Repairs becoming impossible, and often more expensive than a new car.
- Supply chain issues making cars unavailable.
- Insane, WEF based, green energy laws make normal cars unavailable. (all electric by 2025... and we know they can't make enough electric vehicles buy then.)
This will be our answer to the mother WEFers trying to limit our ownership of things.
We will make them ourselves.
I quite loathe manufacturing for profit... It motivates the most ghastly things!
Born To Fail (9 min): https://odysee.com/@amaterasusolar:8/born-to-fail:6?lid=eeff9e0c80138ce03e22d76bcd5f2f873ff46b72
i am unsure we share the same view on the word "profit"
My thoughts are that "profit" means that you are doing something right, that you are providing a needed service to the people.
However, what we have in America, in the auto industry is a monopoly. It may seem like a few corps, but they are really all one, doing the same exact thing, going in the same direction and charging a price that is developed in marketing and has no bearing on the actual construction cost.
To Me, "profit" is when You can take something that is more than what You had to give to get it. You might be interested in these pieces I did that explains things as I see them:
Born To Fail (9 min): https://odysee.com/@amaterasusolar:8/born-to-fail:6?lid=eeff9e0c80138ce03e22d76bcd5f2f873ff46b72
Money Is The Hook (article): https://peakd.com/informationwar/@amaterasusolar/money-is-the-hook
The HOW and the WHY (5 min): https://odysee.com/@amaterasusolar:8/the-how-and-the-why-5-minute-video:b?lid=eeff9e0c80138ce03e22d76bcd5f2f873ff46b72
Make Money! (11 min): https://odysee.com/@amaterasusolar:8/make-money-11-minute-video:f?lid=eeff9e0c80138ce03e22d76bcd5f2f873ff46b72
I have a 2001 BMW 5 series and I'm not planning on getting rid of it anytime soon for this reason. I can make all the repairs myself and I have made my own improved parts to make it better than factory. I can't even imagine working on a brand new 2023 vehicle. It's not even like there are any improvements worth a damn on the new cars.
Sure there are! One of the new dodge trucks needs you to remove the cab to change the spark plugs or other maintenance.
What has been done isn't about making the car better, it is about making the car have to be taken to the dealer for any repair.
I miss Local Motors. The idea of a DIY automotive manufacturing company devolved into a cute little driverless bus manufacturer for corporate campuses, and dissolved into ignominy after producing one of the most amazing off-road racing vehicles ever conceived: the Rally Fighter.
They went from that to this.
Apparently, they quit letting people vote on what to make, abandoning the wisdom of the crowd for the rationality of bean counters.
I have had people tell me that the engine in their car needed to be removed from the car to change the distributor cap, spark plugs, or oil filter. These kinds of engineering issues clearly are intended to make working on your own car impossible. I used a 40+ year old truck as my daily driver for years, and intend to bring it back to usability (I live right on the ocean, and the body has become afflicted with rust to an unacceptable degree), but am giving a lot of thought to remodeling. While my VW caddy managed to get many things done, the bed was too small for 4x8 sheets of material, which made me struggle to carry loads on top of the canopy (and to keep them dry in the monsoon season, i.e. fall, winter, and spring), and while the canopy was low enough to enable me to stack material on it, it was so low that getting things out from under it was like doing the limbo with an anvil in your hands.
Getting parts for 40 year old mechanically fuel injected foreign truck is also becoming more challenging. I have long ago replaced the headlight switch with a dash mounted toggle, gave up on the dome light, picked up all the pieces of the tail light lens and superglued them back together after bumping a stump, and etc. I considered just coating all the body panels with fiberglass, but the additional weight would turn the snappy little truck into a lumbering slug. I have a 3D printer, but snapping ~200mm pieces together to make a new body makes me giggle at the sheer absurdity of it. Neither would PLA, nor exotic carbon fiber blends, be able to support the ~1/2 ton or so I have lugged on top of that canopy in the past. While such a body wouldn't rust, it might blow apart in a stiff breeze. I have considered replacing the glued together tail light lens with a 3D printed one, but it's working fine, so I am not inspired to fix it.
I really want a robot arm I can mount that print head on that can print body panels, but I don't want to spend $40k on a robot arm either. It's kinda weird being between not being able to contemplate 3D printing something, and being able to actually 3D print something. Born too late to conquer the New World. Born too early to conquer the stars.
I have, however, in the last week gained access to a building with 5 garage bays at no charge, and my feeble neurons are both banging against each other as I struggle to conceive of possibilities.
I will come up with something.
Thanks!
That's the thing about keeping the old cars running, is that they are getting REALLY old.
My 1965 chevy pickup, a great truck, would be 57 years old today.
I am really thinking about making a truck
companyloose connection of parts producers that offer all the parts necessary to bolt together your own truck. However, we are probably on the edge of having floaty vehicles. So, what do you do?And i am unsure of the actual future need.
I don't feel we are going to do as much driving in the future.
And what i should be designing is small farm equipment.
You know, building a little dump truck... something like a Unimog
I just don't know.
Building a larger 3D printer is an issue of accuracy. The bigger the distance, the more the play in the bearings means being way off, and you have to account for metal bending. But, i think you could do this with a camera system that positions the print head via sight, and then just deals with the slop in the robot arm, or the flex in the gantry.
That's a purdy truck. I doubt I'll be able to get away with less driving, as I need to transport tools to jobs, and that I cannot do on a floaty thing, bicycle, or afoot. As to locating print heads, the Bambu Labs X1 Carbon has recently incorporated lidar, which is presently limited in that device to accurately siting the first layer of a print. However, I can see that lidar can quickly be extended in utility for such purpose as we discuss. Not being a coder, I will be pretty slow (or more likely remain incapable) to add such functionality, while better minds than mine might well do so with facility. Even a relatively wobbly arm compared to solid cartesian printers might produce accuracy within acceptable limits by using lidar to continually correct print head location. I sure hope someone is already on it, at least.
The unimog is a wonderful truck... if you live in Europe. It has attachments! Even a backhoe.
Unimog owners like to brag how they pull humvees out of the mud.
It has a geared wheel hub (so the axles are way up, but top speed is 50mph)
I would make one for america, but there are things i haven't found a good solution for...
like tires. Those tractor tires are great... if you are on the farm. Shitty if you need to drive interstate. Which you do a lot of out in the fly over states. So, what kind of tires? And that basically decides the rest of the truck.
I found one here last year, but it was $10k with bad brakes, and I have other objectives than squandering my fortune on Mercedes truck parts.