As December ended, I was doing my best to manage the shop, my family and my life. I had been thinking about all the complex problems we solved in 2017 and was trying to pick one to write about.
As I sat contemplating what I was going to write about, a longtime customer walked through the door and asked me if I could take a look at his clutch pedal.
I have been cycling in the Los Altos area since 1975 and witnessed many changes – most of them better for cyclists.
Yes, there is friction between cyclists and motorists, but my belief is that there is less outright animosity. It’s been many years since I have had anything thrown at me, and the frequency of motorists deliberately swerving to scare me while passing has decreased.
My first job out of graduate school in 1969 was with Ford Motor Co. in Michigan as a product planner. One of the perks was that we often got to drive one of the new Fords home for the night, provided we wrote a critique of it the next morning.
If we were young and single again, just starting our professional careers in Silicon Valley, we would be driving the 2017 Subaru BRZ.
And as soon as we got it, we would enroll in a good track-driving program like hookedondriving.com to learn how to drive a high-performance car properly. The nice thing is that we could still drive it on an everyday basis, with solid coupe comfort, space for shopping bags or dry cleaning in the trunk and even the ability to squeeze in three other friends on a quick trip out to lunch.
I have experienced so many different automotive failures that you would think I have seen them all. However, what I saw last month made me feel like cars really are just out to get me sometimes.
On a recent Monday morning, a new customer dropped off his 2003 Volkswagen Passat sedan (manual transmission) for a 160,000-mile service and check-engine light. Whenever we are checking in a new customer and car, we have to get all relevant information. I walked out to the car with the customer to get the vehicle identification number, production date and mileage. Then I started the car to see if there were any warning lights on in the dash. That’s when I got a surprise.
The California Legislature will consider a bipartisan bill, AB 1103, in January that would allow bicyclists to treat stop signs as yields.
