I'm in SA. The discounts have been slipping for a while in my opinion
First shoddy work at Discount Tire.
- Thread starter JustinH
- Start date
Yeah, I do now too. I don't live far from Discount so I check them when I get home but that may even be giving them too much credit. I also check to make sure they put my locking lugnut key back.
DT has been great for me. They have made a couple of minor mistakes, but the manager has rectified quickly. Regarding TPMS, when the sensor batteries started dieing in my 2010 Camry a few years ago I bought a used TST system of eBay and installed. It has screwon cap sensors. I now can see my pressure and know if I have a leak or hole, and when to add air when the cold weather comes.
While I don't think TPMS is very complex, I agree with your position with regard to adding crap to cars. Whether people like the systems or not, all these safety enhancements are basically the result of congressional intervention. Congress can't balance a budget or control fraud, but can mandate TPMS, backup cameras, etc.
For over 100 years we had these things called eyeballs and tire pressure gauges, and checked tire pressure every week or two. And to back our cars we actually turned our heads and looked around. Imagine that. Now people just stare at dash monitors for both.
Maybe...but an experienced driver can absolutely tell by feel if he/she is losing air. Significant air loss will induce noticeable pulling and/or drifting, and often some degree of howl. I've been there a few times in my 40 years of driving. That's one of the key unintended consequences of all these safety nannies. People rely on sensors instead of those feelings in the seats of their pants -- borne of experience. All these nannies (TPMS, backup cameras, blind spot monitors, etc.) can actually prevent driver maturation and cultivation of good habits.
TPMS will do nothing to alleviate catastrophic loss of air pressure, such as that induced by severe tire damage. Too late.
Again, same thing with backup cameras. Turn your heads and look! Can't tell you how many times I've seen people carelessly back out of parking spaces while staring at their dash monitors...not understanding their cameras' field of view doesn't capture blind spots.
Back up cameras save lives. Mature people do not have the mobility in their necks as they get older. That's not fiction - that's a fact. In the case of a backup camera- its completely benign to the driving experience until you put your vehicle in reverse. To argue against one is non sensical!
And that may be an indicator it's time for them to "hang up the keys."
I'm not arguing against them, per se. I'm talking about the detriments of over-reliance on these technologies. The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard that gave us these cameras requires only a 10' wide x 20' deep field of view (FOV). That's not enough for complete safety in backing. That FOV will not pick up people or obstructions in blind spot areas, such as approaching pedestrians, strollers, etc. As such, most owner's manuals still instruct drivers to turn around and look. Here's a snip from one of mine:
My point is while all of these safety systems were designed to be supplemental, many of today's drivers treat them as primary. There's nothing inherently wrong with any of them; the problems come from abandoning good habits and relying on tech alone. As one of my neighborhood's resident "car guys," I see this all the time vis-à-vis routine maintenance. I hear it all the time..."Why should I check my tires when I have TPMS?" "Why should I check my oil or coolant when I have warning lights that tell me if they're low?" This laziness extends to the roadways as well. Those little blind spot lights and beeps have, for many, replaced looking over one's shoulder before changing lanes. It's all fine and good...until the people with those habits jump into an older car and pull the same thing. Oops!
I think most people will not drive attentively or maintain their vehicle properly anyway. Through a decade at an auto parts store, people are oblivious AF.
I'll start with the "vehicle maintenance" part of things:
The number of people that come in because their car "engine is louder than it seemed before" and "the check engine light has been on for weeks" and you pull the codes to find a VVT code (which is generally oil pressure controlled) and then you check the oil and there's nothing on the dipstick and you end up adding three quarts to get the oil level back to normal... is truly insane.
On the other hand, people coming to buy a quart of oil because their dashboard says "add a quart of engine oil" is a daily occurrence and I think this is a much better approach. Let's face it... 99% of the people who are doing what that message says (adding a quart of oil) would NEVER have checked the oil and if they're car didn't have that sensor, would have been in the prior group of people.
One of the reasons that I am not a fan of buying used cars at this point unless you know the history of it.
Now, the driving attentively (or lack thereof)... I think driver aids and driver assistance technology is VERY important to road safety, but a bad driver will always be a bad driver. We have a lady at work that is a very nice person but shouldn't be driving. Her delivery vehicle is a 10+ year old Frontier with zero driver aids or driver assistance. Why she is even still employed, IDK, after now many other cars she has backed into... she would greatly benefit from a newer vehicle. BTW, we did try to put her in a 2024 Frontier... she couldn't figure out how to start the car no matter how many times we showed her (and if you're not completely stupid you should be able to figure it out given that the dash display shows a picture of a brake pedal and the start button and says PRESS BRAKE AND START TO DRIVE in big letters)... and she calls the store upset because "the car is broken it keeps stalling out at red lights" (yep, you guessed it, it has start-stop)... so some people just shouldn't be driving haha.
Now, does ADAS make a driver worse when they're then put back into a car without that stuff? ABSOLUTELY. After 3/4 of a year with Tesla and FSD I drove a five hour round trip to Modesto in my ex's Equinox EV... How stressful! I think people must have thought I was drunk... I couldn't even maintain a consistent speed and almost ran a few stop signs and got honked at at least twice for not going at a green light... but I never crashed into anything LOL. When I get me used Tahoe next week I am going to entirely have to relearn driving LOL. It'll be interesting...
I'm as knowledgeable with vehicles as probably the average bitoger. I can tell you that coolant, transmission, power steering and brake systems are all sealed these days and I don't check them. Yes- the computer will tell you when most of those fluids are low. There is alot of " old school thinking" on here that quite frankly doesn't translate to late model vehicle ownership. And to prove this- next time you go on a long road trip- report back to us how many broken vehicles you see at the side of the road. I'm done...enjoy your beaters.
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I think this is a very common misconception. At the end of the day, unclip all the plastic and you still have a four-cycle heart whose principles of "suck-squeeze-bang-blow" have been the same for over a century (for most cars, obviously). They still require oil, filtration, coolant, etc., and that hasn't changed a bit. This is sort of the same logic that influences so many people into paying for every little service when they can be DIY jobs. How many people say "You just can't work on cars today!"? Pure B.S.
My newest vehicle was a 2020, so I'm not 100% certain on brand new stuff; however, I've never seen any of these systems "sealed." Sure, some manufacturers have gotten away from transmission dipsticks...but that doesn't make them sealed. Sealed brake systems? How does that work? Not being a smart-aleck...I've just never heard of such a thing. And a lot of power steering systems have gone to electric racks, so not relevant here.
My wife and I road trip every month. Either a few hours to San Antonio, a full day along the Gulf Coast, or a 1,000-mile cruise back to the Midwest to see the kids. There are always broken down cars along the interstate. Not sure what you're trying to say here.
I do...every day. And not broken down, either
Ford chrome-like PVD wheels are known for chipping so I can’t entirely blame DT, but when I took my F150 to them to have tires mounted, they chipped the hell out of the rims. I was expecting they might get chipped a bit, but it looked like they mounted the tires with a carbide scraper. That was the last time I went to DT. Ended up replacing the rims a couple years after because the chipping bothered me so much.
