How good are American roads?

> Interestingly, I expected cold places to have lower road quality in general due to things like freeze-thaw cycles and the impact of road salting, but there doesn’t seem to be much correlation. Plenty of cold places (North Dakota, Wyoming, Minnesota) have good-quality roads

Not sure about those states in particular, but I have anecdotally noticed that some of the places with the harshest winters do some of the least road salting -- because salt is mostly usable for light to moderate snowfall and the people who live in the harshest climates are often better equipped to drive on hard packed snow.

This is somewhat true where I’m at in Canada. In the city, half the people have proper winter tires, the other half “wing it” with whatever they can afford/put-up-with.

Regularly see accidents all winter long from goofs sliding straight across multiple lanes of traffic or going off into the ditch. Only some of us are prepared.

We don’t salt, only drop sand grit and gravel sparingly. Our roads become ice rinks or snow piles for a decent portion of the winter.

Your comment about us being “better equipped” made me chuckle as I spent this morning watching my neighbours play slip-and-slide in the cul-de-sac cause they opted to not put their winter tires on.

As someone who grew up in the mountains, their behaviour is downright dangerous in my opinion.

> opted to not put their winter tires on.

Heh. At least they have them, and/or know what they are. I have been met with "they make tires just for snow?" when talking about snow tires in the US before.

Hah! Yup! Heard that one before from Californians, Texans, New Yorkers, and Arizonans in my travels.

Ignorance can be the death of ya! Thank goodness most of them aren’t trying to drive up here!

CA, TX, AZ yeah, yeah, yeah but hang on.. New Yorkers!? I hope these are the ones who live in NYC without a car.. otherwise that’s completely insane. Upstate NY gets tons of snow. Buffalo famously so.

The average driver today knows shockingly little about their car. It's an appliance. They put gas in it, take it to the dealer for service when the message comes up saying service is due, and that's about it. Checking tire pressures, tread wear, brake wear, oil and other fluid levels, or opening the hood for any reason is not something they ever think about.

They make their payments and trade when the warranty expires. It's an appliance.

That's amusing to me. My spouse and I fix all our appliances, cars included.

Yeah that there, that's getting to be incredibly uncommon.

And it's not hard to see why.

I had a GE washing machine start misbehaving one day. It would fill the tub, do a few spins to try and balance the load, start to spin up for a few minutes, stop. Try and balance the load, spin for a few minutes, stop. Then eventually just give up, without even draining the tub before unlocking the door.

Me knowing appliances pretty well, I already had the knowledge the service manual is probably tucked away inside the shell. Strike one going against most normal people, they wouldn't know to do that. Open that up, see how to get into the diagnostic menu and translate the error codes and run some tests.

Ok, so now I know it's a speed sensing issue. The speed the motor is reporting and the speed the tub speed sensor isn't making sense for the fixed gear ratio so it thinks there's something unsafe going on. That's a decent safety issue, but looking at the tub as it spins it's probably just a sensor issue.

The tub hall effect sensor was like $20 shipped from the GE parts website. Quick and easy to swap out. No dice, still not wanting to spin up. More reading online, it's likely the main motor inverter board. Well, that's pretty deep in the machine, could also be the motor assembly itself which would be covered under warranty, let me call a GE service guy to come.

Service guy comes, he plugs some wireless adapter into a hidden USB port, fumbles with it for a few minutes with an iPad with a shattered screen, gives up diagnosing the issue. Writes up an invoice proposal for $900 worth of parts and labor for him to swap out a ton of things, or a referral code/discount coupon for me to buy a new unit.

I decline the order. Surely not all this shit is wrong with the thing. I find the inverter board online from a third party site for <$100, was available from the official parts site for not much more. Start unplugging it a bunch, and notice the motor hall sensor pin wasn't seated very well. I don't want to put it all together again just to find reseating/gluing the connection together didn't solve the problem, so I just put the new inverter board in. Put it all back together and it's just fine for <$100.

I imagine it was just a loose connection for that sensor. This is probably still a perfectly functional board on my shelf. I'll keep it and the other sensor in case some other issues happens in the future. But it could have been just a loose connection that sent this nearly $1000 unit to the scrapyard if it wasn't for me bothering to look. It could have been an exceptionally cheap part. And the final fix I accepted was just somewhat cheap part.

In the end people generally don't care to actually fix shit, and I imagine the majority of people would have just thrown up their hands before looking for the service manual, called the tech, he would have made it obvious a new unit would be a better deal, and they would have taken it.

I did something similar for a dryer. Even identified the part that failed.

I bought the part-number equivalent part and the prongs didn't fit in the slot. I spent 45 minutes carefully filing down/snipping the prongs to fit the enclosure. Been 5? years without an issue.

Did you get the part on Amazon? I've had really bad luck with third party parts from Amazon. I always pay a bit more for OE or OEM parts now.