My first car was a 1968 VW Beetle. This was an honorable tradition in our family — my Oma drove a 1959 Beetle, and my mother had a 1973 "Super" Beetle. I am (was) a third-generation Bug owner.
Technologically, a '68 Beetle was trailing edge even in its day. Everything was mechanical; no fancy fuel injection, no electronic ignition, none of that. On the plus side, this retro-tech made it practical for an owner to do a lot of the maintenance themselves.
Being young, impecunious, curious, and naïve, I did just that. I got a copy of the venerable How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot by John Muir.[1] I studied that book for hours and hours, learning to do oil changes and tuneups — there were many greasy fingerprints on my copy. I eventually graduated to the daunting task (see earlier: naïve) of rebuilding the engine, led carefully by Muir's steps and Peter Aschwanden's brilliant drawings.
Aschwanden's illustration of a Volkswagen's brake system(The engine ran and took me all the way from Denver to Seattle, so my work and/or the step-by-step instruction was apparently good enough.)
Doing a tuneup and oil change in my uncle and aunt's driveway, Bakersfield, Aug 1979. I look a little perplexed, not sure why.
Shifting gears (haha). Sarah's car died yesterday; she parked it for an errand, and when she was ready to head home, it wouldn't start. So this morning I cleaned the battery terminals, and that seemed to resolve the no-juice issue. But the car was running noticeably rough.
If this had been my 1968 Bug, I would have known what to do: get a small screwdriver and adjust the idle speed, which is something you can (could) do via a spring-loaded screw on the carburetor.
I knew, of course, that Sarah's car doesn't have anything so manual — we're several (many) decades beyond carburetors and idle-adjust screws. And I don't have a book about how to keep your 2005 Toyota alive for the compleat idiot. But now there's Google and YouTube.
What I discovered is that if the battery has died or been removed, you need to "reset the idle". When there's no battery, the car loses its mind and has to be retaught basic functions, like what speed it's supposed to idle at, weirdly. There are no screwdrivers involved — basically, you start the car and then put it under different load conditions (A/C on, idling while in Drive) until its memory has been reset.
I don't entirely miss the days of having to get your hands dirty (literally) to do car maintenance. There are many ways in which having the car be "smart"[3] improves the performance and probably life of the car.
Still, it does feel a little more … distant? is that the word? … to not be able to find a knob or a screw someplace and be able to turn it to adjust the engine.
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