Recently I drove my one-year-old car to the dealer. It is a Honda Civic, my fourth in 30 years. Clearly, I’ve been very happy with Hondas.
This one, the nicest of the four, does have a problem however. Often when I pull into a parking space, the front of it scrapes against the parking curb. Tractor trailer manufacturers and bridge engineers have been able to establish a standard height for each that allows trucks to pass under bridges without interference; why hasn’t the same happened with automakers and the producers of parking curbs?
I explained the problem to the man at the service center, adding that I had brought the car in because now it’s often scraping when I go over speed bumps. He took a look underneath and told me a section was hanging down, having been loosened, apparently, by a year’s worth of parking curbs.
“I get a couple of these a day,” he said, back at his desk. I asked: “Then why do they build the cars so low?” “Aerodynamics,” he told me.
I asked if the cost of the repair would be covered by the warranty. “No,” he said. “It’s damage.”
“But it’s damage caused by the design of the car, not the fault of the driver.”
In the garage, the hanging section was replaced, and I wasn’t charged for the labor. The total came to $28. Not a lot of money, but if you times that by two and then 260 (weekdays in a year) and then the number of all the Honda dealers in America you get a pretty nice windfall. The unintended (or is it?) profitability of aerodynamics.
