Is all the "fuel saving" tech really worth it in the long run?

[Plati]

I remember when it was routine maintenance <like tires & brakes> to replace the muffler and pipes. My 2003 has gone 16 years without any of that! I did have to replace a few bolts that held it together and the rear hanger (which I did with hose clamps costing me nothing). I guess they went to stainless steel and thats why they last longer. I was always curious how that happened. Was it customer demand, government mandate, or the presence of the <expensive> CATS that drove that? Worth it whatever it was.

I used to worry about the rockers rusting out then one day I just said F' it! They are gone and I just don't care. Its my BEATER. Pretty soon I'm gonna have an open spot from inside to outside at the door bottom though.

 

[carymccarr]

I just know that they are not always an accurate predictor of the chance of outcomes for every person or for one particular person - me or you. While statistics or percentages of failures etc are factually countable numbers, they are still too all encompassing to guarrantee you or I both with our possibly very different from the norm situation will experience with the exact same product.
Even being fact, they only give you relative likelihood.
I only double, triple, quadruple down on my opinion in response to other comments that seem to use past numbers or overall industry ones to be as exact of facts as gravity or time....heck, even those can possibly be relative or the effects not the same as the established norm or rule.
I'm sure I'll be called out on this too and told I'm "confusing" statistics or facts with some other term so someone can feel better.
I will just maintain that most everything is or can be relative.

Those are called outliers and they are part of the ‘all encompassing’ analysis...if they are complete anomalies or errors they would be eliminated from the data set. Additionally, the data set could simply point to a flat or tail heavy distribution.

FWIW, I bigly doubt anyone takes pleasure in watching your ‘confusion’ around statistics, facts & feelings.

Though I just gave you the title for a book. ‘My life...Confusion, facts & feelings’

You’re welcome.

 

[762mm]

I remember (don't know if anyone does this anymore) people standing on street corners preaching about God. Yelling all day long to anyone within ear shot about their religious beliefs. Usually holding a sign or wearing a placard.

This is all you are doing with your Climate Change denier "shouting".
Its just the 21st century version of the street corner preacher. Its your right, I guess.

...it's just weather! Ha.
That's taking it as far to the other extreme as the Green Nutcases.

"Climate Change denier"... lol, that's original!

Well, I guess there's a sucker born every minute. I strongly recommend you look into the science behind ice cores that they pull out of Antarctica to measure climate changes over millennia. What do they tell us about the weather in the long run? Also, check out the science of solar cycles and how they impact the Earh. The Sun is in full blast mode right now, by the way... sending much more heat energy our way than in recent past. The changing tilt of the Earth as it circles the Sun is also a fun fact to look at, as it shifts hot zones on the planet. It does this in a cyclical fashion every few thousand years, like clockwork. The magnetic poles shift is also another factor that influences "climate changes". Again, this is a cyclical and natural phenomenon. None of it has ANYTHING to do with humans, despite the money-grab socialist propaganda!

Do yourself a favor and look at these before you compare people like me to crazy kooks... because otherwise you are the ignorant "the end is coming" preacher at a street corner!


Have fun with your carbon taxes, they will surely "save the Earth" from your non-existing boogeyman. The Earth and the solar system do what the they have been doing for hundreds of millions of years, whether you accept it or not... Calling me a "denier" of your sect's climate gospel won't change the facts either.


(nice religious term, by the way! Who's the crazy religious kook, again?)

 

[carymccarr]

"Climate Change denier"... lol, that's original!

Well, I guess there's a sucker born every minute. I strongly recommend you look into the science behind ice cores that they pull out of Antarctica to measure climate changes over millennia. What do they tell us about the weather in the long run? Also, check out the science of solar cycles and how they impact the Earh. The Sun is in full blast mode right now, by the way. The changing tilt of the Earth as it circles the Sun is also a fun fact to look at, as it shifts hot zones on the planet. The magnetic poles shift is also another factor that "changes climate". None of it has ANYTHING to do with humans!

Do yourself a favor and look at these before you compare people like me to crazy kooks... because otherwise you are the ignorant "the end is coming" preacher at a street corner!


Have fun with your carbon taxes, they will surely "save the Earth" from your non-existing boogeyman.

I love when a dude on a car forum (who probably doesn’t even have a graduate degree let alone PhD in the sciences) think they know more than tens of thousands of actual scientists from reading a couple of fringe cherry picked ‘articles’.

Heck, our govt can’t even keep bridges from falling yet they’ve orchestrated a worldwide conspiracy involving trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of people...all keeping it a secret?

Mmmm k.

So great.

 

[762mm]

 

[carymccarr]

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[TobyU]

Those are called outliers and they are part of the ‘all encompassing’ analysis...if they are complete anomalies or errors they would be eliminated from the data set. Additionally, the data set could simply point to a flat or tail heavy distribution.

FWIW, I bigly doubt anyone takes pleasure in watching your ‘confusion’ around statistics, facts & feelings.

Though I just gave you the title for a book. ‘My life...Confusion, facts & feelings’

You’re welcome.

But if those outliers or anomalies are not eliminated because they are what you have had as your own personal experiences with a certain product then you really don't care what the published statistics show as quality for that product.
Do you chalk it up to just being lucky? Or do you think that possibly you use a product, maintain it, in a way different than most people so as to have a better, or poorer result from the publushed factual typical results.
The key word is typical. If you find that your personal experiences are the same as typical results and everything else then you would assume there is a great likelihood that situation will be the same for another new product or another brand you might try. But if you have a large amount of personal experience and data that goes contrary to the typical results for the entire pool across the entire country or even world, do you think it's smart to throw out and disregard your personal experience because the people in the know with all the numbers say otherwise?
I do not.
It's not confusion. It's just being willing to look at a small specific picture and not the overall one. As I've said before things are relative to each particular environment or situation.
If over a period of years you owned 15 different expeditions and you had exact numbers and length of part life and replacement and repairs Etc and your numbers differed greatly one way or the other in comparison to the establish published facts.... would yours be more correct or the published facts be more correct??
Does either have to be incorrect?

I assume there are people out there who buy a stick shift car and wear out the clutch in 25k because they don't know how to drive it and make the decision that stick shifts are delicate and never buy another one. They would be inaccurate in their assessment but for their particular situation it might be a fact that a clutch only lasts 30,000 miles so they might not want to buy any more.

I've already got the title for my book. I've been planning on writing one on how the world works.

Anyone with a large amount of personal experience who doesn't use the results of these experiences to form opinions or as indicators of future performance and only goes to official sources and looks up statistics or some so-called fact is certainly not using everything at their disposal to make the most accurate prediction or decision.

Maybe it's more thinking out of the box. Maybe it's seeing the big picture by sometimes focusing on the small picture.

 

[carymccarr]

Maybe it's more thinking out of the box. Maybe it's seeing the big picture by sometimes focusing on the small picture.

No. It’s called indulging ones personal and cognitive biases instead of recognizing them and not placing too much weight in them.

It makes facing each day less mentally taxing though to think ‘oh that’s just a statistic, it won’t happen to me because XYZ [read: I’m much more special-er than others in those statistics].

It’s human nature and I’m not denying that we all do it. At the end of the day everyone makes decisions emotionally and then rationalize them.

 

[Plati]

"Climate Change denier"... lol, that's original! blah blah blah blah ….

So … since the earths climate has not remained static for the past 6 billion years … there is no way humans could have any impact on it? Does that apply to the ozone layer also?

Not everyone is an extremist unrelenting angry propagandist with no ability to consider any opinion that differs from their own. But that may be difficult for you to understand.

 

[TobyU]

No. It’s called indulging ones personal and cognitive biases instead of recognizing them and not placing too much weight in them.

It makes facing each day less mentally taxing though to think ‘oh that’s just a statistic, it won’t happen to me because XYZ [read: I’m much more special-er than others in those statistics].

It’s human nature and I’m not denying that we all do it. At the end of the day everyone makes decisions emotionally and then rationalize them.

That is very true and I have seen lots of people rationalize their own behaviors for years. This is not specifically what I'm speaking of though and maybe that's for the miscommunication occurred or maybe you just don't believe it can happen differently.
It is human nature to rationalize one's own behavior to a point.
I am not saying knowing statistics because you think you're special and you just don't think it will happen to you. Tons of people do that every day when they throw caution to the wind about safety even things like not wearing a seatbelt for a quick trip only a mile or two from home.
I mean when you have empirical evidence even though it is only a much smaller subset of the group that others have empirical evidence on and almost the entirety.
If you have evidence that your personal numbers don't match the numbers that are of the whole group then without further research there's little way you can determine why this is.

I could give a fairly decent example with brake lines rusting out. There were some post about this recently but it's not a specific to this form as is one of my other forms which is more Town Car specific. Our trucks don't use stainless but the Town Cars started using stainless in 1998.

We could probably find out the overall lifespan of brake lines for a certain model or model period of vehicles.
This whole group has to take into consideration cars in warm climates that never see salt and also the worst Rust Belt states.

People are often told to stay away from 1990 to 1997 Town Cars because you will end up replacing brake lines. This is touted as fact.
The fact is the brake lines on those years is much shorter lived than the newer cars but for someone not to consider their own specific conditions could be doing them a disservice. They might not by a great 1995 or 97 at a great price for fear of having the added expense later of replacing all the brake lines which gets quite expensive if you're paying a shop to do it.
Someone who lives and many of the good States and keeps theirs in a garage will almost certainly get double the lifespan of the typical published factual results.

This is not hoping it won't happen because you're special. This is knowing that your conditions are different than other peoples. This is knowing if you've had a large amount of experience with the same types of engines and you haven't had the issues that other people do obviously you are doing something differently.

I think these can be two different things. It's not always cognitive bias. Sometimes it's just cognitive observation.
This is what I have meant from the beginning.

Maybe someone has found the super duper bypass toilet paper roll oil filter and uses Anlmsoils one thousand percent pure golden sapphire oil and they figured it all out. Maybe they never change their oil and get 300,000 miles of every engine they've had and they're on their 34th engine doing this.
I highly doubt this could ever occur but this person has no reason to believe that their 35th engine won't have similar results despite what any other statistics show.
I don't think it's cognitive or personal bias when you have a good deal of previous results to base it on.

I think I realize that what you're basing your comments on is that few people have enough experience or a sampled group to be able to form valid opinions that aren't simply cognitive bias. So they would be better served to listen to the published statistics.
For the majority of the population, you would be correct.
I'm just pointing out that there are people out there that have run fleets of vehicles that have had results that differ sometimes greatly from the norm.