Pelican Parts Forums

This is an editorial I wrote for one of my magazines. I thought Pelicans might enjoy it. I took the magazine-specific stuff off so it ends abruptly and I took some factual license so don't take the details too seriously.

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I used to be pretty much in tune with any engine-powered vehicle that I operated. I could tell if a tire was low by the feel of the steering. I could tell if a spark plug was going bad or the points were closing up by the way the engine sounded. If the engine was down on power, I would listen at the exhaust pipe for the sound of a valve that’s burned or sticking. I’ll bet it’s the same with most of you who read this magazine. You could say our engines and vehicles speak to us.
I got a new car the other day. It speaks to me, too—in French. If it’s like the car it is replacing, it’s telling me a door is open or a tire is low or service is due, but I’m not sure because I don’t understand French. My last car spoke to me in English. It told me every time a tire lost a little air pressure or the fuel got low, which I found insulting. It was as if the people who made the car assumed anyone who would buy it wouldn’t have the sense to operate the thing. I like to operate my car all on my own, thank you. I have faith in my competence, even if the people who designed my car don’t.
I could change its language to English (or German or Japanese) I suppose, if I got out the 2-inch-thick owner’s manual and looked up the instructions on how to do it. But the car was speaking French to me when I got it, and I kind of like it. I like the soothing voice of the woman who lives in the dashboard cooing to me in French when I leave the driver’s door open. You might ask how I would know the driver’s door is open if I can’t understand the language of the woman who is speaking to me. (Well, you might not ask this because as a reader of this magazine you probably have some sense, but the people this car was built for would be totally baffled). The secret is I do it the old-fashioned way; I pay attention to the cold draft and the sound of air rushing past the weather stripping.
Cars, trucks, and tractors speak to us if we listen and know the language. I remember as a kid watching an old master mechanic stand next to my dad’s John Deere 50 and listen to it tell him what it needed. Sometimes if the message wasn’t clear, he would plug a vacuum gauge into the manifold and interpret the nervous bouncing of the needle like a voodoo priest examining chicken entrails to discern what sickness it had and even predict its future. (“Gonna burn a valve if we don’t get that carbon out of there.”) Machines spoke to him in their exotic, nuanced language in which two sounds that seem the same to the uninitiated could be the difference between a loose wristpin and a bad rod bearing. I was fortunate enough to live in a time when the old language was still spoken fluently, and I picked up a little myself—not much, but enough to get by.
We are losing touch with the language of our vehicles. When I take my car to a shop these days, the mechanic plugs in a scanner, and the car sits silently while a computer decides exactly which part to replace.
New cars actually speak the old language, and you can hear it if you aren’t distracted by voices from the dashboard. I don’t find the French lady any more of a distraction than any other passenger, so I let her croon away while I pay attention to the car. When the fuel gauge gets low and she speaks, I imagine she is telling me how handsome I am or what a great job of driving I’m doing, and I make my own mental note of the gas situation.