Tesla May Change How Petrol Cars Are Sold, Too.

Tesla, the electric car manufacturer that hasn't been making the papers by going bankrupt (despite a huge influx of taxpayer financing) has found other ways to make waves.

Tesla's found themselves-- usually not by name, mind-- in state legislatures around the country. The problem, it seems, is that they don't have independent dealers; all 37 Tesla stores are owned directly by the company itself.

This isn't the way it works for other manufacturers. Cars, at least here in the United States, are sold by independent dealers. The dealership has Ford or Chrysler or Mazda logos all over the place, but they're not actually owned by Ford or Chrysler or Mazda. The person you talk to in the showroom or in the service bay gets a paycheck from a company entirely unrelated to the badge on the nose of the car.

Tesla wants to change all that-- they want to own their own dealerships. They want to own their own service garages. 

The folks who own automotive dealerships think this is a pretty ridiculous state of affairs-- and who can blame them? If we could buy cars on a website, why would we waste our time with dealers? If Tesla's allowed to own their own dealerships, why wouldn't Honda? Or Mercedes? Or Fiat? Well, maybe not Fiat, they'd be broke without Chrysler keeping them afloat right now.

The auto dealers have some allies. The commonwealth of Virginia denied Tesla a license to open a dealership in the state.

The North Carolina Car Dealers association gave the largest contribution allowed by state law to state Senator Tom Apodaca, so I'm sure it's no surprise that he sponsored a bill that, while not targeting Tesla by name, made it illegal for auto manufacturers to interact directly with consumers using computers or other communications facilities. From the looks of it, I have to assume this one will be struck down. I'm not a lawyer, mind, but it reads like Cadillac can't have a website that's available to North Carolina residents. Do you need to call the Volkswagen regional service manager because the local shop can't fix your problem? Too bad, North Carolina, they're not allowed to talk to you.

It's not all good news for the dealer networks-- similar initiatives were voted down in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York. There's a bill going through process in Texas right now, where the dealer can't currently deliver a car to you. Aside from North Carolina, you can order a Tesla anywhere in the US. You may have to visit another state to actually pick the car up, though. The bill in Texas would allow Texans to have their Teslas delivered direct to their houses.

In the interests of "fair competition", though, auto dealers are against direct sales. 

And I hope they lose.

"Fair competition" usually doesn't require you to pass a law to ensure the way you do it is the way it gets done. Competition means you do it your way, they do it their way, and the best way is the one that sticks around. Fair competition doesn't require courtrooms or legislatures. If there's underhanded dealing, sure, then get courtrooms involved-- but I find it hard to argue that it should be illegal for a car manufacturer to sell directly to the consumer when it's not illegal for anybody else to sell directly. Does the State of North Carolina have a problem with Apple owning Apple Stores, too? I hope not, they gave Apple a huge tax incentive to build a data center there...

What's more, the independent auto dealership is, in my opinion, a huge problem in buying automobiles today. Don't get me wrong-- I'm not saying there's no point in having a local place to buy or service a car. The fact that they're independent, though, causes a few problems.

The first is that they're inefficient. When I ordered my BMW, I'd been to two different dealerships on three separate occasions to test-drive them. I wanted to drive both a 128i and a 135i to determine how much I wanted the turbocharger. I wanted to drive the six speed traditional manual and the 7-speed dual-clutch manual. I wound up at two different dealerships to find the combinations of car I wanted to test to see what I liked.

BMW, the manufacturer, was doing a rebate through my insurance company, USAA. In order to qualify for the rebate, I had to use USAA's car buying service. USAA's car buying service wound up pointing me at yet a third (and fourth) dealership, and the one that earned my business wasn't either of the ones I drove cars at.

This is a problem, because it means I wasted those other two dealerships' time. If they were all owned by BMW, then my money would've gone into the same account that paid the other two dealerships-- but that's not how it works. The folks I bought the car from profited from labor done by two completely different companies.

Another reason that independent car dealerships are a problem is that the oversight from the manufacturers is apparently minimal at best. Most people I know dread buying a car. Most of them (my wife being an exception) don't hate the test driving, the researching, the finding out what's out there or even choosing between them. What most people hate is actually completing the deal. There are huge websites out there trying to teach you how not to get screwed by an auto salesman. They go over the "tricks of the trade". At most dealerships, the actual purchase feels more like going into battle than buying something we want to enjoy.

This has brought about an industry of car-buying services, which hope to get us the best price possible. Saturn came about with no-haggle pricing, but couldn't survive. CarMax has done something similar with their dealerships, and I wish them all the luck in the world. Most dealers, though, employ salesmen on commission whose job is to soak you for as much as they think they can get.

But imagine if you can actually order any car online, like the Tesla model. Tesla's web site doesn't go drawing four quadrants on a piece of paper and try to plow over you with numbers. It doesn't have to waste your time by bringing in the sales manager to vet a deal both you and the salesman know is reasonable. It simply asks you what options you want and presents you with a price.

If manufacturers own their own dealerships, like Tesla, and allow online ordering, then the local dealer can't try to screw you. There's no arcane mystery to getting the best price when you buy a car, unless it turns out you get a few bucks off by waiting for Black Friday or something. Your ability to get a fair price is no longer directly correlated to your ability to negotiate.

Now, in your local auto dealer's defense, they're not all like this. Both Amy and I bought new cars this year, and we both worked with dealerships that made the transaction almost entirely painless. I'd recommend the dealerships we worked with to anybody. (In fact, I'll do just that, because an exception to the "auto dealers are slugs" rule deserves a quick plug: If you're looking for a Toyota, talk to Steve Yang over at the Laurel CarMax. If you want a BMW, chat with Mark White at Passport down in Suitland (er, Marlow Heights). Neither dealership steered us wrong, and both salesmen/client advisors/whatever-they're-called-this-week knew a good bit about their product.) The entire industry shouldn't be painted with the same brush. 

We'll still need local dealers. There's no amount of online research that's going to tell me how the car drives on the other end of a computer-- and this is coming from someone with a steering wheel attached to his computer.  People who aren't me need to be able to talk to someone who knows more about the car than they do so they can get educated about it and make a wise decision. 

Good luck, Tesla. You're still outside my price range, but you build an interesting car, and your electric cars may not just change the way cars are powered in the future-- you may well change the way cars are sold, as well.

College cars

I finally finished up with the fifth season of Babylon 5, so I needed something new to watch on the elliptical. The current fare is the US version of Top Gear. It's nowhere near as good as the UK version, but it's good enough to keep my mind off how much it sucks to push an elliptical machine and never get anywhere.

On Wednesday, the episode was about college cars: the old beater you had in college. Their challenge was to determine which of the three of them had the best college car back in the day, with all the inane stuff that goes with it.

Oddly enough, their college days didn't look too much like my college days. Not that it would have mattered if I were in, because I would've won their challenges, too. 

Now, I did take eleven years to finally escape college, so I didn't have "a college car"-- I had more than one in that era. Mortis, the 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass, didn't survive to the end. My '99 Dakota R/T, wasn't really a college beater. And I'm not really sure what to think of the '70 Plymouth Fury III convertible, except that perhaps it would've been a better college car had I been in Navy ROTC, where my classmates could have practiced carrier landings on the trunk.

On the other hand, the car most people think of as my "college car", that'd be Scottie, the '81 Chevy Suburban. There's a reason people think of her as my college car: unlike the three beaters the Top Gear US chumps had, I had the ultimate college car.

Now, don't get me wrong. Scottie wasn't a spectacular car by the usual metrics. The air conditioners (she had two, one in front, and one in the back) were flaky at best, for example. She leaked oil and power steering fluid. She never did actually pass emissions; I had to limp her by on waivers. Might've had something to do with the back-woods-of-West Virginia fix to her AIR pump when it seized: the shop just cut the pulley off it and installed a shorter belt.

For a number of years, I carried around a starter motor and a chunk of re-bar in the back. The re-bar was to smack the starter solenoid once or twice a week to free it up; the motor was because I had to replace it every couple months. This, as it turns out, wasn't Scottie's fault. Once I sprung for the good one (which came with a new solenoid!), it lasted as long as she did. I just didn't think to ask how much more expensive the premium one was until the auto parts store didn't have a functional cheap one on the shelf-- I was a college student, and I was doing things on the cheap. How was I to know the difference in price was a whopping one cent?

Indeed, I learned an awful lot from Scottie-- usually the hard way-- about wrenching on cars. Judging by the list of parts I replaced (and the ones I let professionals handle-- I had no way to deal with a TH350 transmission, ferinstance), you're probably wondering how I could possibly think that I had the ultimate college car. But we were broke college kids. Everybody drove a cantankerous beater; it's tough to take off points because Scottie was one, too.

What made Scottie great was all the things she did. She took me all over the eastern seaboard, and one time we packed most of a dozen people in there (including the woman I'd eventually marry... who knew?) to head out to a crab feast while I was in the DC area with friends. What more could a college student want?

She carried all manner of stuff, which meant she was great when it came time for folks to move. Since moving between cheap apartments is something college students do almost as often as they scrounge through couch cushions for change to hit Taco Bell, having insane amounts of cargo space was exceptionally handy. She also shlepped around more than a few piles of surplus computer equipment and a few arcade games, and once she even shlepped around a few kegs; her utility could also be used for fun.

She was a better off-roader than she had any right to be. I did get her stuck twice-- and both times, it took some pretty heavy equipment to get her out; the friendly passer-by in the Jeep couldn't get us out of the snow bank I put her in, and I made it far enough across the mud pit at the Cobb County dump that they brought out a Caterpillar bulldozer to pull her free. (In my defense, the bag taped over the sign that said to go that way had come loose and blown over the sign telling me to go the way I was supposed to go...)

Her 40 gallon gas tank meant I could usually get to payday before I needed gas again. Fortunately, gas at the time was less than a buck a gallon, so once payday rolled around, I could even afford to fill her up.

Aside from a few oddball design decisions-- there were, for example, exactly two metric fittings that I ever found on what was otherwise an entirely SAE truck (and they weren't even the same size...)-- she was easy to work on. You didn't need wheel ramps to get underneath to replace the starter, which I eventually learned how to swap out in less than five minutes. Parts for a Chevy small-block can be found at Walgreens next to the cotton balls.

She was even fun to drive.  The V8 engine and trailer-towing gearing meant she took off from traffic lights quicker than many other college beaters. Surprisingly good brakes kept me out of trouble I might have otherwise gotten into. And when it came to handling, well, I just didn't know any better, I suppose...

She'd've probably done well enough in the contrived tests the Top Gear folks put their cars through, too, but I suppose we'll never know, 'cause those guys weren't smart enough to have an '81 Suburban when they were in college.

More Gap, More Damp

My plan for today was less driving, more sightseeing. If I'd ever been to Cumberland Gap, I was too young to remember it, so I figured I'd go check it out.

The weather was more of the same from yesterday afternoon-- overcast, off and on showers, and generally soggy. But it's still nice countryside to explore.

I learned some interesting history about the gap. It turns out the guy who discovered the gap (or, well, the first European to find it...) was an Englishman who had been given a grant of land on the other side. When he finally found a way to get to it, he determined that living in Kentucky wasn't worth 800,000 acres of free land from the Crown so he returned home. 

Things really hadn't improved much in the 250 intervening years until the Civil War-- while both North and South believed holding the Gap was key to that area, and compared it to Gibraltar, not only did neither side hold it for long, there were no battles fought in the area, either. They found the same thing that our friend the Englishman did: the middle of freakin' nowhere is tough to supply. Each time a new army moved in and hauled their cannon to the earthworks on the hillsides, they found the previous residents had just up and moved out.

Nowadays with highways, it's easy enough to get to, and with the Mexican restaurant in the town next to it, I had no problems with provisions. Kentucky has been redeemed.

Cars, but no white BMW. The heck?! Which blog is this?

One fun thing I saw were a group of three Model A Fords-- all three with Texas tags. The Sport Coupe I recognized (even if it wasn't painted Old Gold with white trim), the other two I knew were Model As but don't know them well enough to identify-- one was a Victoria, I found out from the owner, but the third remains a mystery to me. They were in town to drive the Blue Ridge Parkway. I'm all for it. Cars were meant to be driven, even 80+ year old ones. I find myself ashamed that I've let the Coronet get to where I can't currently drive it. But I digress.

My next stop was back through the Gap to Harrogate, Tennessee, where I visited the Abraham Lincoln museum on the campus of Lincoln Memorial University. Since it was graduation day, they were waiving the fee to get in. This didn't seem to help: I was still the only one there. One of their displays was on Civil War era medicine, and they noted that modern medicine has gotten to where it could have possibly saved Lincoln-- he probably wouldn't have been able to speak, but they think the bullet didn't strike anything you can't live without. Me, I figure modern medicine probably comes with modern gunpowder and hollowpoints, and Lincoln probably still dies.

I then headed toward the hotel, and as I drove, the weather cleared. Beautiful blue sky, decent road through the valley, great stuff. It was nice enough that I decided I was in no hurry to get to the next hotel, so when I saw a brown DOT sign pointing the way to Natural Tunnel State Park, I figured that sounded plenty interesting enough.

I knew I was in for a hike when I saw that they had installed a chair lift to get down to the thing from the Visitor Center. Except the chair lift was out of order. So I started my way down, and after zigging and zagging thorough enough switchbacks that I thought I might have been transported to the world's least level amusement park line, I got down to the tunnel.

Karst geology is just weird.

The tunnel itself is long enough that you can't see the other side, and since it's got both the stream that carved it and a still-active railroad track in it, there's no room left for visitors to actually go in and explore, which was a bit of a disappointment. Worse, since it was now a beautiful day, I, for the first time all day, left my raincoat in the car.

You can tell where this is headed.

I considered just waiting out the rain in the small 18th century cabin they had down there, but then, thunder echoed in the canyon. The small rain showers hadn't previously been accompanied by thunder. This wasn't going to be a short sprinkle.

When I got to the car, I wasn't soaked by the rain, I had (barely) beaten the first wave of heavy stuff to the car. I was soaked by sweat from charging up a hill steep enough they'd put in a chair lift...

The last time I drove to a hotel reservation in Kingsport, TN, I ran into a snow storm and wound up sinking Scottie into a roadside snow bank. The rain got bad enough this time that I did occasionally wonder if I was going to wind up in another ditch. Fortunately, this time the weather was nothing that reduced speed and good tires couldn't handle.

Tomorrow I drive the rest of the way home. Usually toward the end of a vacation, I'm ready to go home, but so far, this trip's been too short. I miss my wife and my dog, but I'm not ready to go home. Fortunately, I only have to hold out a few more weeks before I blow town again...

A soggy Dragon

Motorcycle people have known about it forever, but not long after they discovered it, car guys found out about the "Tail of the Dragon", as US Route 129 is known on the stretch where it enters Tennessee from North Carolina through Deal's Gap. Oddly enough, even living just a couple hours from the place for seventeen years, I never managed to get around to going there. Which made it an excellent plan for today.

By the time I stopped for lunch in Murphy, NC, it had already been an excellent drive. I left town by way of the area my brother and I used to live, since I knew there were some good two-lanes in that neck of the woods.  Highway 129 was already living up to its reputation as I wound my up through the section north of Desoto Falls, which is still one of my favorite stretches of road.

Now, don't take any of this the wrong way: I wasn't hooning it up. These are public roads, and I'm driving a car that's not broken in-- and she's my ride home. There were no screaming tires, no glowing brake rotors, no drama at all. I won't tell you no speed limits were broken, but I really wasn't flogging the car or anything. I got that out of my system in the Cashmere Silver one on the track yesterday. Shoulda painted that one in a shade named "Red-headed Stepchild" or "Capitals in the Playoffs". But I digress.

Part of me didn't want to stop for lunch. It had been a nice, partly cloudy morning, but as the morning went on, overcast conditions were rearing an ugly head. But I was ravenous and we don't have Zaxby's back in Maryland, so I stopped. 

On the roads leading up to the Gap, it began to seem like I was seeing a lot more performance-oriented cars then usual. Instead of the usual hordes of lumbering SUVs and indistinguishable minivans, there were cars that caught my eye. Nothing overly exotic, but a Frisbee here, a Z4 there. A Boss 302 and a "mere" Mustang GT not long after.

If I knew anything about motorcycles, I'd have probably been impressed by the hordes of Harleys and Goldwings. I did recognize a K1600-- I had just read about a motorcycle running around with am inline-6 motor, which I thought was ridiculous (which is to say, I approve heartily).

Unfortunately, the rain found me before I got to Deal's Gap. Worse, that didn't ruin the experience. Honestly, neither did the slow Harley riders-- to a bike, they pulled off to let faster traffic go by. And the various EZ-Ups with banners for killboy.com or us129photos.com shooting pictures that one can purchase later didn't ruin it, either-- but the combination of all that, with a side of how excellent the drive that morning had been, it all made Deal's Gap somewhat  anticlimactic. I'd left plenty of time to go back the other direction, but didn't have an overwhelming desire to do so. I have even less desire to go see what grey-skied photos the hucksters got of my car.

Instead, I decided to do some exploring and hung a right on the Foothills Parkway. Excellent decision. It's not a long road, it's something of a baby Skyline Drive. At Look Rock, I got out and wandered up to the observation post, which is a strange modern concrete structure that contrasts with the surrounding greenery, looking doubly out of place since it's not National Park Service Rustic. 

I got to Knoxville (Alcoa, to be more accurate) and got checked into the hotel, but had come up with further plans on the way through: I had passed a drive-in theater in Marysville playing Iron Man 3, so I figured me and the car could catch a movie after some local barbecue. The barbecue wasn't bad at all.  Smokin Joe's doesn't smoke the pork as long as I do, so they serve it chopped rather than pulled, but it's got plenty of flavor. When the waitress warned me three times that the "Smoke" sauce was really hot, I figured it was right up my alley-- and it was. 

Special Delivery

Today ended nearly ten weeks of waiting: I finally picked up my car at the BMW factory in South Carolina. Even though the factory itself was closed to visitors, it was still a pretty busy day.

After a brief classroom session, we got out to our cars. Well, not our cars, but ones similar to ours. Seven of us were there for delivery. Mine was the only 1-Series, there were three 335is, a 650i, an M3, and an M5. We split up into two groups. I wound up with two of the 335is and first we went to learn about the antilock braking system.

The braking exercise was simple enough-- and I was pretty impressed at just how quick one of these things can whoa down from 55 mph. But mostly, it was an exercise that burned some time until the other group was done with the track over the hill from us.

The track session was, not surprisingly, my favorite part. And since I was solo, I got to run it twice; I went back out after the other two cars changed to the other car. This made up for having to pull into the pits once each session since I'd caught the heavier 3-Series ahead of me. 

The last track session we drove was a demonstration of the traction control mechanisms. We each spun a car out on the wet skid pad with it turned off, then did then went out and did the same thing with the system on. Fun stuff. 

After that, we had the option of one of the instructors taking us out for a lap in one of the M3s. After half a lap of hooning about, he settled in. I thought as he was driving, "Ah, the Scandinavian Flick", and at that point, he started describing what he was doing. "That's called a Scandinavian Flick", he noted...

After that, I met up with my delivery specialist, Nick, who took me to my car's own showroom and spent a good hour and a half going over how all the different greeblies in the car worked. Since I got the Tech package, even though I had already read the owner's manual, this refresher was still useful. 

Lunch was at the Center's cafetorium, and wasn't half bad. Beat most cafeteria, and had a surprising menu-- as an example, I had a side dish of grilled eggplant.

After lunch, my half of the group went out to the off-road track in a group of X5s. I must admit some hesitance before I went into the water trap after my experience with hydro locking the Mustang during Hurricane Irene.

At one point, to demonstrate the trucks' weight balance, the instructor put the truck on three wheels where a set of moguls held the front right and back left well above the back right, and the front left was in the air. He then got out and lifted the rear wheel by hand to put the X5 on its front wheel. While I knew BMW liked to build cars balanced between front and rear, I had no idea that extended to their trucks as well.

Our last stop was the small museum they have on-site. It's not spectacular, but has a few interesting pieces. It made for a better photo op then anything else. Perhaps I only find it a bit disappointing because I've been to their big museum in Munich.

After that, I was on my way to Atlanta, cruising down I-85 bouncing around between 5th and 7th gears to try to keep the engine RPMs varied during break-in, where I met up with a half dozen or so folks for dinner at the Salad Trough. How surprising...

Train, Plane, and an Automobile

...plus a shuttle bus thrown in for good measure.

My vacation started today, which involves picking up my 40th birthday present and driving it home, so as you can expect, the 'cars' part of my blog's name is on my mind. There should be a bit of 'expedition', as well.

I live about a quarter mile from a MARC station, so my usual way to the airport (assuming it's a weekday) involves walking to the train, taking the shuttle bus from the train station to the airport, and not having to pay to park a car. It's nice and convenient. That covers the plane and the train (and the bus), the automobile was how I got from the airport to the hotel-- a new X5; seems they don't send out the boring ol' Econoline for the BMW customers.

It's a gorgeous evening down here in upstate South Carolina. Supposed to be nice tomorrow, and I hope to be able to include photos then-- the Blogger app on my tablet's not quite as useful as the real computer, but I'm slowly getting used to it. By which I mean 'have given up and gone back to a web browser.' Even still, I seem to be tagging-challenged.

Craftsmanship? Design?

The other day's rambling about the built-in seating at Louis' Lunch got me to thinking about the phrase, "They just don't build 'em like they used to."

In meatspace, I can understand how this phrase came about. It's easy enough to look out at the world and see plenty of objects out there that still exist where, if they were built today, the odds would be against them at that age. My house was built in 1871, but still holds up pretty well. I'm not sure the house I used to live in, built in 2004, will still be standing in 2145. It's even more prevalent overseas; there are roads and aqueducts that date back to the Roman era-- but yet, the new bus station in Montgomery County has an expected life of a mere fifty years. Assuming they actually fix the concrete they poured, but that's beside the point.

Outbuildings at Dover Castle have held up reasonably well.

When it comes to actual gadgetry, the "automata" I reference in the blog title, it feels the other way around. It feels like they now build 'em so much better than they used to. I recall in the mid 1980s that it was highly recommended that we quit playing with our Intellivision when the chassis got warm; the electronics inside would get the outside warm to the touch in about an hour. But today,  would't think twice about firing up a modern console and burning the entire afternoon. Well, I suppose I would, but it would be because I never seem to have a whole afternoon to play these days. Back in those 1980s, many people wouldn't buy power windows on a car simply because it was "one more thing that can go wrong"-- but these days, it's hard to find a car that doesn't have them. The hardware's gotten robust enough that it doesn't break often enough that people care. A vacuum tube had a mean time between failures of 5,000 hours. Now we have integrated circuits that have failure rates 100 times better than that.

And strangely enough, it's been for entirely opposite reasons. In the early days of building stuff, there was less engineering knowledge. Certainly, there existed architects, but design was nowhere near an exact science and was likely to change even for reasons that had nothing to do with the logistics of building-- the dome on St. Peter's Basilica, for example, went through different designs because as they got around to building the place to where the dome could go on, the architects in question-- and the popes who hired them-- died. But even looking past that, we find that piers that hold up the dome are bigger than the designs called for. The dome in Michelangelo's final plans was ovoid, and was supposed to be taller than the hemispherical dome we see today. Somewhere along the way, the craftsmen who actually built the thing made some adjustments. The basilica was "built to last"-- we never seem to say "designed to last." 

Now, admittedly, looking at the world, there's also a selection bias at hand. We have thousand year old buildings standing and we look at them and think, "Wow, they must've built 'em really well back then." We think the same thing when we see a fifty-year-old classic car on the street. But all we truly know is they built _that one_ really well back then. For every eleventh century castle that still stands, there's probably a dozen that have had their component stones turned into a succession of other structures over the intervening decades.

Designing toward an intended service life is what seems to have changed most everyday objects and is what's leading us to say that they don't make 'em like they used to. We don't build houses out of 3x7" timbers, we use cheap 2x4s. We shave material off a design to make it cheaper to make (or ship!)  even though it might mean the end user will have to replace the part at some point. Engineering and design have given us the ability to design toward goals other than robustness.

Gadgetry, on the other hand, exists in large part because of that engineering and design. One simply can't hand-build a memory device with billions and billions of transistors that makes postage stamps look brobdingnagian by comparison. Design work towards adding features, increasing speed, and reducing power draw are all welcomed.  We don't have to worry so much about the robustness of a design, though, because it'll be obsolete before the year is out.

Software's wound up in an interesting space where we put so much effort into a design and a process, but our implementation winds up not necessarily being top-notch; it's rushed, and the product gets out the door riddled with bugs. It's not that there aren't excellent crafters of code out there; there are. But we've stepped so far away from valuing robustness that other concerns matter more, like being first to market. Perhaps part of it is that we feel we can fix the problems after we ship, as well.

Once upon a time, software was hand-crafted as well, and it was, legend has it, notably more robust. It seems that in fifty or so years, the software industry has matched up with five hundred years of the transition from craftsmanship to design in meatspace.

And now to the actual point of all this rambling: I wonder if there's ever going to be much point in going back? Certainly, there's no cramming millennia of  engineering advances back into the genie lamp, but is there ever a point where robustness becomes a more important design goal again? Is there a point to designing an object with what's effectively an "unlimited" service life?  Given our knowledge of things, could we even do so?  We now know enough about natural disasters that we build things to withstand the "hundred year earthquake" or the "fifty year flood"-- how would we design a structure to handle "any forseeable natural disaster"? Will we ever once again "build 'em the way we used to"?
With the rise of 3-D printing, I can certainly see a world where we no longer head to a local store to buy small objects, we instead buy a design for 'em and print one off at the house. Will that change the way we design things and bring back robustness as a design goal?

Review: Louis' Lunch

A bit over a month ago, I stretched a weekend and drove to Mashantucket, CT to meet up with a friend to play some poker. When I reminded my team at the office that I was going to be out that friday, one cow-orker mentioned, "Going to stop by Louis' Lunch?"

Honestly, I'd completely forgotten about it. I'd read about Louis' Lunch a few years before, and I had wanted to check it out, but I'd completely forgotten I'd be driving through the area this time. It looked like the timing for my passage through New Haven would be good; when I'm traveling solo, I don't mind a late lunch, so I figured, "Why not?"

Which, I suppose, gets to the other question: "Why?" There are a half dozen places in the United States that claim to have invented the hamburger, but Louis Lassen has one thing to back his claim that the others don't: The Library of Congress believes that he's the one who invented the hamburger sandwich, which is probably as official as anyone's going to get-- and thus, probably incorrect, as well. 

This wasn't the only reason I wanted to try the place, though. I'd also heard of their unique way of grilling hamburgers. The burger patties are held in baskets much like one would use to grill fish, and they go vertically into a device that resembles a sideways toaster more than it does a grill. From there, gas flames from the sides of the device cook the meat.

Louis' Lunch is not a large place.

When I arrived there, around 2PM on a Friday afternoon, the place was still packed. The line to order was only three people deep, so it wasn't quite "out the door", but the place is so small that it wouldn't take many people at all for that. I considered it a good sign that there were plenty of people stopping in for lunch even at that relatively late hour. 

The menu is pretty simple: They sell hamburgers and cheeseburgers. Either can be served with onions, tomatoes, or both. Onions get cooked in with the burger patty, which made for a tasty effect. The burger is served on toasted white bread. 

After ordering, I threaded my way to a wooden lunch counter that'd seen more than a few knives carving into it over the years and awaited my meal. The dining room of the small brick building is almost entirely made from custom built-in wooden furniture, the sort of wood work you simply don't see in a modern place. It really gave a feel of stepping back in time (as did the "we don't take anything but cash" policy), to an earlier era of things being crafted locally rather than built in a far away factory.

Louis' Lunch oddball grills

I went with a cheeseburger, all the way. The burger was sufficiently juicy that the lack of condiments (or perhaps simply my lack of noticing where they were) wasn't a problem at all. I enjoyed it, and would recommend it if you're ever in the neighborhood.

The side dish menu is also quite spartan. Your options are a bag of chips or their homemade potato salad. The potato salad is interesting; it's served warm and the texture reminds me as much of chunky mashed potatoes as it does potato salad-- but the flavor is more what you would expect from potato salad. While the potato salad is very tasty, my modern burger-eating tastes find they still want a good french fry. As small as the kitchen is, though, fries would be almost impossible.

Drinks were Pepsi products and local Foxon Park sodas; Foxon Park's birch beer is excellent. 

If you're in the neighborhood, I'd recommend it. It's not far off of I-95 in downtown New Haven. I have no idea if there's free parking nearby, though; I wound up in a deck a few blocks away.


[EDITOR'S NOTE: Yeah, I said "barbecue" in the blog title. I also considered "breakfast", and in this case, "burgers." I wound up picking one to cover everything, because I didn't have another good "B" option to carry me through to "F" for "Food", besides, I had to stop somewhere. Fair warning: I'll probably talk about a pizza sometime, too. You get what you pay for.]

The Last Real [insert marque here]

There's a common lamentation amongst car guys: Cars have gotten simply too technological. The up-and-coming generation, we complain, cares little about how a car drives, all they care is whether or not the car will interface with their smartphone and has Facebook integration. The modern driver cares more about how the stereo sounds than how the exhaust sounds.

We complain about all number of things. We hate when a car uses an electronic sensor to let us know about the engine oil level rather than having a dipstick. We hate run-flat tires. Heck, there are even car guys running around who long for the days of carbureted motors. And sometimes we even complain about turbochargers, even though deep down, we still all want fifty more horsepower.

Some of us are shade tree mechanics, and we take it a step further. All of these things didn't just contribute to the soul of motoring, they also were things we could maintain ourselves. We'd need thousands of dollars of computer-based testing tools to be able to handle a hybrid car in our own garage, where it used to be all we needed was a set of socket wrenches and a spark gapping tool. 

There may be nothing that gets our ire up like modern transmissions. Car and Driver magazine has a Save the Manuals! campaign. Jeremy Clarkson complains once an episode about flappy-paddle gearboxes. We take pride in our abilities to drive a manual transmission. A Real Gearhead wants three pedals on the floor and a shifter to the right of his knee. A Real Petrolhead wants three pedals on the floor and a shifter to the left of his knee. It is simply The Way Of Things. 

As technology marches on, these things all change, and we get vehement about it. We declare that the modern version of a car isn't the true experience. The last REAL Charger had only two doors. The last REAL Miata had retractible headlights. The last REAL BMW had a naturally-aspirated inline-six. The last REAL Porsche was air-cooled.

We couch these arguments in terms of the "soul" of driving, as if the fundamental nature of driving has changed since the advent of front-wheel-drive or paddle-shifted transmissions or factory-installed subwoofers.

We talk in terms of driving passion, about the true nature of driving, sure, but we're mostly just being luddites. Why is it that we fear a remote sensor for oil level, but we're not all harkening back to the days when we used a dipstick to check our fuel levels?  Nobody seems to think that turning a crank on the front of the car is part of a pure driving experience, what makes an electric starter OK? What makes a disc brake (with power assistance!) or a tubeless tire just fine? Why is it that a manual choke adjustment isn't considered de rigueur for a  true driving experience? 

Really, we're mostly full of crap. The best cars, in our minds, were the ones from when we were in high school, or perhaps a bit before, the ones we loved in our formative years as a gearhead. These modern cars simply aren't those cars.