I have spent the last week swathed in swaddling clothes, diapers, prams, 8 year old super hotty bomb outfits, and questions along the lines of "Do you like my hair?" and "Daddy, how does this dress look?" My daughters (all three of them) are lovely and sweet and not boys. It is wonderful, but, I do have the occasional urge to cover myself in automotive grease and cleanse with gojo.

Anyway, about two weeks ago my Audi started yelling at me about brakes. No big deal, until the ABS light came on and the brake light started flashing maniacally. Oddly it was flashing to the tempo of the Pink Floyd song Money. Yes, everything is expensive to fix on this car. Anyway I started wondering what the problem could be as the ABS light is a totally useless symbol. All it does is tell me to go to the dealership and automatically give them $1000. I hooked up my OBDII reader to see what was going on. Totally useless message of course (rough road). So I scratched my head and tested the brakes. They seemed to be working just fine.

In comes the internet. By reading a number of the Audi forums I get the gist that this is pretty common, involves usually a deffective ABS module and it will run me about $1200 to $1500 to replace. However, someone suggests pulling it myself and sending it to a company for a rebuild. The company offers instructions to pull the module and they ship it in three days. I decide that I would rather replace with a rebuilt module and ship the core back to the rebuild company. $225 and two hours later my car no longer yells at me. NICE!

This experience made me think that as the systems get more complex, it is extremely likely that all the dealerships are doing is replacing the parts on these cars. There is little or no diagnostics (Pull the OBDII code and replace the part) and rather it is much more a replacement culture than a fix culture. Interesting. As long as you have the tools, probably much of the work can be done by the individual again. If you don't have the time or the willingness, you can pay for it. Sounds like another model I know quite well.