The air bag: Why don’t they make cars like they used to?

I know it’s lost on some motorists in these parts, but it’s a simple fact that to drive safely after sundown, you need functioning headlamps. So when I was about to set off for Abu Dhabi from my home in Dubai, it was a major inconvenience that both headlamps on my trusty Volkswagen Scirocco had given up the ghost. Weird that they would both fail together, but there was no time to investigate, because I needed to be at Yas Mall in 90 minutes’ time to interview the Formula One driver Nico Rosberg. Time was of the essence, to say the least.

What to do? Take a cab? It could be the best part of 90 minutes before I managed to flag one down at that time of day. For me, as I slammed shut the driver’s door in disgust and caught sight of my other car, there really was only one option: my TR6 – and I made it with plenty of time to spare.

A few days later, I took the Scirocco to the specialist I use for maintaining it, and their engineers discovered that there was nothing wrong with the lamps themselves. Rather, the holders the elements sit within had begun to melt, and the result is an intermittent connection fault. Yes, the necessary parts could be replaced, but I’d need to wait at least two weeks before they arrive from Germany. Marvellous.

The bad news kept coming. I don’t drive my own car very often, but I have noticed a tendency for the DSG gearbox to be recalcitrant when it comes to selecting reverse, sometimes necessitating a “reboot” by switching off the engine and restarting it, which does the trick. Again, an intermittent fault, and one that I reasoned was no cause for sleepless nights.

Apparently I was wrong, and this is indicative of a serious transmission fault in the making – a fix, according to the engineer that I spoke with, that will cost me about Dh20,000 to put right. “Sell it now,” he advised.

So my car is beginning to deteriorate at a faster pace than I dared imagine – something I wasted no time in having a moan about. Just why, I asked friends, should we expect any “new” car (mine is six years old now, but that’s hardly enough to class it as a historic artefact in my book) to not last many, many years, particularly the fundamentals such as transmissions?

Melting lamp sockets I can take on the chin because the headlamps are always on whenever the car is in use, but a gearbox should last the life of the car, shouldn’t it?

Apparently my expectations are wholly unrealistic. The climate we live and drive in takes its toll, I’m told, and, yes, I concur: it’s extreme at times. But my car is serviced when it should be, using genuine parts. And after all, when new cars are tested and developed before production begins, they’re supposedly done so to destruction in countries such as ours so that they will go the distance.

So why, when I speak to manufacturers here, do they all say the same thing? Cars are viewed, by and large, as disposable items that you should replace every three years.

They really don’t make them like they used to, do they? To borrow from one of Volkswagen’s classic advertising campaigns in the 1980s, if only everything in life was as reliable as a British classic car.

motoring@thenational.ae

The air bag: Why don’t they make cars like they used to?

When I was about to set off for Abu Dhabi from my home in Dubai, it was a major inconvenience that both headlamps on my trusty Volkswagen Scirocco had given up the ghost.