The manuals for the Lada were epic. In a quick search for an original one I came upon this [1] which is an English version one, which is even better than what I was looking for! It describes the entire car's operation and mechanism in extensive detail along with descriptions of how to replace parts, what might go wrong, and more.
I'm not sure that 'just send it to the repair shop' was an overall improvement in society in so many ways. In modern times those shops are infamous for exploiting people's ignorance and ripping them off to an absurd degree, and it primarily affects the lower socioeconomic groups within society, since the upper groups tend to cycle through relatively newer cars more regularly, in part to avoid having to deal with long term maintenance issues.
My dad would always buy a "Hanyes" manual for our second hand cars in the UK, as inevitably there would be something to fix. These were comprehensive 3rd party manuals.
I have also gotten them for newer early 2000s cars. Never had to use one for my 06 Vauxhall though. Apart from some standard things that really need a repair shop (replacing the exhaust for example) I've never had an issue or breakdown.
The cars I see on the side of the motorway are always new, feels like there was a period before electronics really took over that most cars were pretty bulletproof.
You’re looking at a repair manual, which would be expected to describe operation and function in detail. These are available for all cars if you know who to ask.
I recall looking through owner’s manual for a domestic VAZ 2101. It was standard stuff, but certainly didn’t go into detail about knolling your car.
Not everyone can learn even the basics of car maintenance. There are a lot of drivers on the roads today who wouldn't be able to do even something as simple as top up the oil or change the tires. And actual repairs, even on older simpler cars, even with an exhaustive technical manual and modern learning aids like video tutorials or AR overlays? Fat fucking chance.
There are ways around that. You can keep the cars simple to repair and also expensive and unavailable, so that only the people with tech know-how and/or willingness to learn it get them. Make cars as tools for professionals and tech enthusiasts, like PCs were in the 80s or construction equipment is now. Or you can make the cars cheap and disposable enough that if one fails, you can just send it to a scrapyard and get a new one.
I don't like either of those workarounds, so repair shops are the least bad option.
A lot of users have an extreme level of resistance to learning tech. Which applies even to the most simple of instruction-following operations.
They aren't clinically retarded. They could learn those things if someone forced them to. But you, as a product developer, can't force them. It's utterly impractical to overcome that resistance for a mass market product.
It's easier to make a car that doesn't require oil changes than it is to make every car owner learn to perform oil changes.
>It's easier to make a car that doesn't require oil changes than it is to make every car owner learn to perform oil changes.
No, it's not. There's fairly low level physics and chemistry reasons you can't make a car that doesn't need oil changes. Oil changes could be about as difficult as swapping out toner cartridges if they cared to make it that way though.
EVs are on the roads right now, and most of them don't require oil changes at all. The oil in sealed in the gearbox, with no combustion to foul it, and is rated for the lifetime of the entire car.
And, have you ever seen a user? Like, an actual user, in person? 1 user in 5 is capable of swapping out toner cartridges. Kicking the can to the tech support dept (for oil changes: to the service shops) is how it's done in real life.
>EVs are on the roads right now, and most of them don't require oil changes at all. The oil in sealed in the gearbox, with no combustion to foul it, and is rated for the lifetime of the entire car.
You're being misleading. Nobody is changing the comparable oils in their ICE car with any serious regularity either. When people talk about oil changes they're talking about motor oil.
>And, have you ever seen a user? Like, an actual user, in person? 1 user in 5 is capable of swapping out toner cartridges.
99/10 can probably read the instructions and do it themselves if they care to try.
>Kicking the can to the tech support dept (for oil changes: to the service shops) is how it's done in real life.
Yes, that's how it's done in the office where you have people who's job it is to do those things. Are you incapable of emptying your trash can because the janitor does it? Even the most useless people living within the highest touch HOAs are changing their own printer ink and cleaning out the garbage collector in their dishwasher and the filter in their HVAC. There's no reason the basic stuff on a car couldn't be on that level of complexity.
You need to have that "if" reviewed by a regulatory body - with how much load you make it bear.
The issue isn't that 99 users out of 100 are actually retarded and incapable of doing a thing. The issue is that they don't want to. And wouldn't want to. And you would need multiple generational leaps in mind control technology to change that at scale.
I visited Rumania around the year 2000. I remember being surprised by the sight of a whole bunch of similar Dacias at the end of a (muddy) street, in various state of disrepair. The person we visited explained that people were repairing their cars by taking parts from other cars, as there were no spares, or they were very expensive (the average Rumanian was pretty poor at that time). And since nearly everyone drove a Dacia 1300 (tried to guess the model; they looked like a Renault 12), there were plenty of donor cars around, and people learned how to fix their cars from their neighbours.
That can't last forever, of course, but it shows there are other ways.
I'm not sure that 'just send it to the repair shop' was an overall improvement in society in so many ways. In modern times those shops are infamous for exploiting people's ignorance and ripping them off to an absurd degree, and it primarily affects the lower socioeconomic groups within society, since the upper groups tend to cycle through relatively newer cars more regularly, in part to avoid having to deal with long term maintenance issues.
[1] - https://archive.org/details/manualzilla-id-6025672/mode/2up