Zen or the art of opening a hood
01/07/2011
In the new issue of Auto Motor und Sport, the heavy hood of the Ford Mondeo , which has to be raised with pure physical force without a gas pressure damper/lifter, is a disadvantage. In today's world of electric motors and electronics, it may even come as a surprise that there is no button on the remote control to raise the hood. But who opens their hood these days? If you take a survey at the petrol station and ask car owners when they last looked into their engine compartment, a not insignificant number will even say that they have never opened the hood. Modern cars check themselves, hardly need any oil and many things cannot be done by the owner anyway, but require a visit to the workshop. TVR and other manufacturers even went so far as to lock the hood with screws so that the driver really didn't try to do anything himself.
But that was quite different a few years ago !
Back in the sixties and seventies (and later), drivers were reminded in the owner's manual to check the engine oil, coolant and brake fluid levels every 500 km or even before every journey (e.g. Mercedes-Benz 190 SL: "before every cross-country journey"). And in times when cars did not yet boast great reliability, reaching under the hood was often indispensable anyway.
Access to the engine compartment used to be much more complicated. Unlocking from the passenger compartment was not always a matter of course, independently locking the open hood was a luxury attribute and, in general, opening the (usually two) engine compartment lids on pre-war vehicles required a great deal of manual skill and sensitivity, as the delicate lids - secured with leather straps and clips - had to be carefully unlocked and folded. In general , opening the hood of old cars has a certain solemnity about it, every movement brings you closer to the heart of the vehicle, step by step the mechanics unfold to reveal almost every detail at the end. How boring it is to look into a modern, plastic-covered, well-designed engine compartment.
