A Futile Lament

Once upon a time, most bits of an automobile were mounted with varying degrees of convenience and security using fasteners that were at least reusable, generally good-quality metal, typically threaded, and only occasionally designed to self-destruct when examined. That era ended not too long ago, and now we are in the era of fasteners that can neither be removed without shredding them nor obtained at trivial cost as replacements, and others which ensure that they must not be re-used by the nature of the way they’re installed, and still more that have been purposely designed to obscure how they work and how they can be undone. Plastic clips of myriad bewildering antistandardized designs are used in places where they are asked to provide structural strength, some seem only to work correctly when installed by the robot that assembled the vehicle, and still more just refuse to relinquish their grip despite being subjected to the factory-endorsed removal techniques. One dare not even approach repair of many such vehicles without a very large suitcase full of esoteric bits of molded polyunidentium, and the incantations required in order to deploy certain types must have been written by the Old Ones to ensure that madness must overtake the unprepared who brave the traps under the hood now. And even the fasteners which the vehicle owner is implicitly expected to remove and reinstall at need are now often equipped with their own form of boobytrap in the form of a thin metal shell that deforms and renders them the wrong shape and size for the very wrench that is supposed to be employed with them. (Yes, even lug nuts have been subjected to being MisFeatured.)

It did not have to be thus.