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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I've had several cars with electric windows. Most of them would fail, usually when it was raining and you needed to raise them.

None of my cars with hand cranked windows has never failed at getting the windows up :-)

I've had a car that had sensors for everything. Half of the failures requiring expensive repairs were sensor failures. Sigh.

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I just remembered a perfect example of over-engineering stupidity. A family member has an Audi A6 AWD and his routine service light came on. So being a man in his early 70s he went to check the oil and filters etc himself. He couldn't find the dipstick, so he googled it and found it to ... not exist. Instead of a dipstick there is an electronic sensor in the engine sump and a handy read-out on the built in display on the dash. Good luck fixing that when either the display fails, the sensor fails, the wiring fails... I mean, the dipstick worked for over a hundred years, but wasn't tech enough for an oil check in a 2015 model.

This is one of the reasons why my vehicles are 20 years old. Unfortunately they do have computers and are fuel injected (otherwise no way to pass emissions testing) but for the most part the mechanics are relatively simple.

I really do not need a subscription to my car.

I watched a pilot do a preflight on his airplane, and he used a dipstick to check the fuel level. Gauges lie, the dipstick tells the truth.

Same goes for the fuel tanks. It's considered good airmanship to do a quick visual check of the fuel level and compare it to what the gauges tell you. And to drain some fuel from the lowest part of the tank to check it for water or other impurities.

I've never had electric windows fail (and I've been driving for 30 years) but I have had a rental car where one of the hand cranked windows failed - it didn't fail to close, that worked fine but it did fail to stay closed. A gentle push downwards on the glass would make the window lower into the door with the handle spinning round.

Buy a Land Rover or Range Rover, your premium product will have you ripping out the door skins the day after the warranty ends. It's a 3-6 hour job at least and impossible to put the door back as factory because the waterproofing seals aren't available (use gaffer tape). The winding mechanism costs a bundle too.

I was going to say that if I did need a proper 4x4 (which I don't) I'd probably get something Japanese. Then I remembered that my wife had a Toyota SUV that had all manner of electrical problems eventually traced to a faulty sunroof...

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