And who are the people that are the reason for this having to be in the manual. Its the people that were born 50+ years ago...

This implies it was the previous generation that drank the content of the battery

And who put lead in the gas? Cars aren't that simple anymore anyways.

Which generation can't let go of power?

Nah. I call bullshit.

Last I checked, my generation didn't put Reagan into office.

50ish years ago, back when people actually read Popular Science, they told people to dispose of their old motor oil by digging a small hole in your backyard, filling it with gravel, and pouring the motor oil into it.

Oh and don't forget all the advertisements for your Doctor's favorite cigarette.

Also, there are two main actual reasons why far fewer car manuals nowadays include instructions on valve adjustments:

1. A whole lot more modern cars use hydro-compensators, which greatly reduces the need to manually adjust the valves.

2. Car companies really, really want you to go to a dealership or officially certified maintenance shop so they can overcharge you on maintenance.

Are we boomer posting today?

Proper fucking boring boomer banter that.

Taking away the instructions on how to service and repair a car was a result of capitalists wanting to make more money by forcing you to get your car repaired by them.

Adding instructions not to drink battery acid is likely for companies to avoid getting sued because people will always argue that there was no warning about drinking battery acid so the company owes you compensation.

This is a false comparison.

If you want to play relative knowledge, 50 years ago they used asbestos as bathroom waterproofing

To paraphrase an answer I once read: yes, we tend to introduce warnings against bad behaviours we detect and deprecate obsolete information.

In this case: I don't need to tinker a valve in an engine nowadays. The fuel injection is done through an incredibly precise system, controlled by a computer. Even mechanics require specialized tools and equipments to fiddle with that part of an engine.

Car batteries have been built more and more to be maintenance-less; you buy it, run, when it dies you replace it and that is it. Battery acid is a thing and it is dangerous, hence the attempt to divert people from messing with it.

But because less and less people are prone to go into mechanics, the need to advise against tinkering with your battery really needs to be reinforced.

Warning labels are often first written in blood before taking form of paper and ink.

This isn’t the flex you think it is. The reason why they warn you not to drink the battery is that someone did it.

Old cars could actually have their stuff adjusted, though. You'd have to tinker with the carburator if the weather was significantly colder/hotter, etc. to get it to run properly.

Even cars in the 90s started getting too complex - electronic fuel injection, variable valve timing, and more. There's no need to adjust the valves because the computer does it, and better than you could.

Who's job is it to teach common sense? If you find the future generation lacking, that's probably your fault.

When I was a teenager, my dad gave me shit for not knowing how to change brake pads, and my response was "Who was supposed to teach me?". Like, it's not like I could afford a car working weekends, and he was always too busy to have me around whenever something went wrong. So next time he changed the brakes, he actuality taught me.

::sigh:: Old cars had instructions on adjusting valves because you needed to. Improvements in manufacturing processes means that valves and valve seats simply don't wear the way that they use to. You may still need to change valve shims if your clearance is out of tolerance, but on most cars that's going to be well over 100,000 miles before service is needed. It's also a really tedious, long job, and takes tools that most people aren't going to have. (I have done it multiple times on a motorcycle; that's a 10,000 miles service interval b/c the engines on the bikes I ride redlines at 18,000rpm, which means significantly more wear on engines, and higher chances of thing like valve flutter.) Cars are vastly more complicated than they used to be, because they're also far, far more efficient, and last far longer; it used to be a big deal if a car made it to 100,000 miles, and now a car that dies at 100k is considered an unreliable lemon.

Sometime, you grab the manual of some old piece of junk, there's all the electronic schematics, parts list, all adjustable things that should never face end user, etc. described in it.

Now, it's just "push button. if led not go vroom vroom, call support".

PSSSHT

BACK IN MAY DAEEEYY

And i still miss those old manuals... Just let me fix my car mate

I'd make a "print a pdf" joke, but honestly, that's already an unnecessary "skill".

Sadly, technology has moved towards single finger usability and thrown out features in the process. Printing a PDF is now easy, because there's a big button (that sells you a cloud subscription for some reason), but it's also the only thing the app does.

Yeah and the last generation keeps sending money to the prince of Nigeria.

Our generation has warning labels because their generation actually did it. Buncha lead addled boomers acting like we're fools for learning from their stupidity.

Is this the terrible facebook memes community now?

Ah yes, when basically the only electronics in a car were the head and tail lights. I can assemble and disassemble a Willy jeep or VW Beatle by just looking at it and going with the flow, I have no fucking clue how to disassemble a modern car's door panel without breaking anything.

But if we're comparing us to boomers, let's see who's better at building a simple web scraping tool in python which runs on a raspi without any knowledge of python, Linux, AI and how to setup a raspberry pi. It took me a day to figure out.

Stupid people always existed. The difference is now they have TikTok and twitter, so we can see their stupidity more.

Well guess why we have those warnings, they came from somewhere.

many engines do not require this procedure. It depends on whether the engine is equipped with hydro-compensators: these are devices designed for automatic adjustment of the thermal gap. They work at the expense of the oil entering them from the engine (that is why, actually, and are called “hydro-compensators”) and completely exclude the necessity of periodic manual adjustment of valves.

https://www.bradkimberley.com/valve-adjustment-what-is-it-why-is-it-needed-and-what-happens-if-you-dont-do-it/

Isn’t this more of making sure to cover all bases in case someone gets an idea of doing something dumb so they can sue? Especially in the US because it’s the most litigious country in the world.

Any time my father brings up stuff like this, I remind him that he and his brothers drove their car onto a frozen lake and almost broke through the ice, and more than once they bought tennis balls, soaked them in gasoline, and threw them at each other with welding gloves.

I know for a fact that he and his brothers did tons of dumb shit, and I won't let him forget it even if he finds it convenient when comparing generations.

Back in my day we drank from the hose if we got thirsty and lined up in the street to get sprayed with DDT and painted our homes with lead. Those were the days!

Arrogantly calling out the intelligence claims of others works better if you know when and how to use punctuation.

Older vehicles easier to work on, go out of spec more often.

The problem are the shitty modern cars that are partly hard to repair so you have to pay for parts and service, partly because they want to sell you bs "features", while they also break constantly, because they are made to be as cheap as possible. Brought to you by the generation that now makes fun about people stuck in the system they helped to create

I don't think any generation is "smarter" than the last at any given age.

I think each generation is less "ignorant" because they are more "informed" by the learnings and failures of the generations before.

I also think people stop adapting as they age, and intellect declines medically, leading to the impression that the younger are "smarter".

My dad would print this meme out and mail it to me if he knew how to rightclick

Generation war is nonsense.

So electric cars don't have valves. Oh, you didn't even think that far ahead with your boomer brain? Try to figure out why they put the warning in the manual. With all that leaded gasoline fogging up the brains, it's fair to assume grandpa drank from a battery on a dare.