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Opinion: are backyard mechanics a dying breed?

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Opinion: are backyard mechanics a dying breed? | Top Gear

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Does the dawn of the electric era spell the end for the driveway tinkerer?

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Opinion: are backyard mechanics a dying breed?

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Does the dawn of the electric era spell the end for the driveway tinkerer?

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Does the dawn of the electric era spell the end for the driveway tinkerer?

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Opinion: are backyard mechanics a dying breed?

# data.attributes.metatag[].attributes.content
Opinion: are backyard mechanics a dying breed?

# data.attributes.metatag[].attributes.content
Opinion: are backyard mechanics a dying breed?

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Does the dawn of the electric era spell the end for the driveway tinkerer?

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For much of my childhood, my dad was just a pair of legs. To clarify, he had a torso, and arms, and a head – still does, for that matter – but for much of the Eighties and Nineties, they were hidden beneath a Ford Sierra or Orion, or a beige Volvo estate. A pair of oil-stained jeans, surrounded by a scatter of tools and half-drunk mugs of tea.

My dad wasn’t a mechanic. He had a day job, but when he wasn’t doing his day job, he was mending cars. Not a hobby as such, more penny pinching. He suffered a morbid aversion to paying someone else to do something he could do himself, even if doing it himself involved a fortnight of research into the intricacies of Citroen wiring looms, the purchase of some specialist equipment from a shady chap with a Latvian phone number, and, thereafter, a series of increasingly violent electrocutions accompanied by increasingly violent swearwords.

Man, the shocks. My dad treated electrocutions not as a hazard, but as a thumbs-up from physics, proof that he was really getting to the nub of the problem. He also had an uncanny ability to electrocute himself when carrying out a task that didn’t obviously involve electricity in any way. He’d often wander in from, say, performing a simple oil change, sporting a wild-eyed look and smelling of burnt chips, muttering, “Now that was a lively one.”

His sole concession to safety was a pair of rusty ramps that would periodically buckle under the weight of the car, leaving him pinned beneath, somehow unscathed, whistling patiently until a family member might arrive with a trolley jack. But somehow he always got the thing going: after a couple of days of banging and swearing, there would eventually emerge a triumphant “aha!”, followed by the phut-phut-phrrrr of an engine firing to life, then the faint zap of a small, celebratory electrocution.

He wasn’t alone. Most men of my dad’s age spent most of their weekends beneath cars: fiddling, fixing, getting electrocuted. It’s not something you see so much anymore, the enthusiastic amateur, wedged under a car, having a good rummage. Partly this is because my feckless generation prefers avocado toast and chia smoothies to proper oily manual labour. But mostly, of course, it’s because new cars are becoming ever more complex, requiring ever more sophisticated diagnostic kit and ever tinier fingers to tackle.

Electric cars? Worse still. From a powertrain perspective at least, they’re pretty much a closed, sealed shop to even the most gung-ho home mechanic. No, everything wasn’t better in the good old days when you could fix a car with nothing more than brute force and a sharpened flint, but let’s face it: the dawn of the electric era probably spells the end for the enthusiastic driveway tinkerer.

This feels a shame. Not because it represents a fraying of the once-intimate symbiosis between driver and machine, blah blah, but because EVs surely offer the amateur mechanic the chance for some immense and satisfying electric shocks?

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For much of my childhood, my dad was just a pair of legs. To clarify, he had a torso, and arms, and a head – still does, for that matter – but for much of the Eighties and Nineties, they were hidden beneath a Ford Sierra or Orion, or a beige Volvo estate. A pair of oil-stained jeans, surrounded by a scatter of tools and half-drunk mugs of tea.

My dad wasn’t a mechanic. He had a day job, but when he wasn’t doing his day job, he was mending cars. Not a hobby as such, more penny pinching. He suffered a morbid aversion to paying someone else to do something he could do himself, even if doing it himself involved a fortnight of research into the intricacies of Citroen wiring looms, the purchase of some specialist equipment from a shady chap with a Latvian phone number, and, thereafter, a series of increasingly violent electrocutions accompanied by increasingly violent swearwords.

Man, the shocks. My dad treated electrocutions not as a hazard, but as a thumbs-up from physics, proof that he was really getting to the nub of the problem. He also had an uncanny ability to electrocute himself when carrying out a task that didn’t obviously involve electricity in any way. He’d often wander in from, say, performing a simple oil change, sporting a wild-eyed look and smelling of burnt chips, muttering, “Now that was a lively one.”

His sole concession to safety was a pair of rusty ramps that would periodically buckle under the weight of the car, leaving him pinned beneath, somehow unscathed, whistling patiently until a family member might arrive with a trolley jack. But somehow he always got the thing going: after a couple of days of banging and swearing, there would eventually emerge a triumphant “aha!”, followed by the phut-phut-phrrrr of an engine firing to life, then the faint zap of a small, celebratory electrocution.

He wasn’t alone. Most men of my dad’s age spent most of their weekends beneath cars: fiddling, fixing, getting electrocuted. It’s not something you see so much anymore, the enthusiastic amateur, wedged under a car, having a good rummage. Partly this is because my feckless generation prefers avocado toast and chia smoothies to proper oily manual labour. But mostly, of course, it’s because new cars are becoming ever more complex, requiring ever more sophisticated diagnostic kit and ever tinier fingers to tackle.

Electric cars? Worse still. From a powertrain perspective at least, they’re pretty much a closed, sealed shop to even the most gung-ho home mechanic. No, everything wasn’t better in the good old days when you could fix a car with nothing more than brute force and a sharpened flint, but let’s face it: the dawn of the electric era probably spells the end for the enthusiastic driveway tinkerer.

This feels a shame. Not because it represents a fraying of the once-intimate symbiosis between driver and machine, blah blah, but because EVs surely offer the amateur mechanic the chance for some immense and satisfying electric shocks?

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Does the dawn of the electric era spell the end for the driveway tinkerer?

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Backyard mechanic opinion column Top Gear 2024