Mobile phones replacing the car mechanic

How times have changed. In the old days you took a car mechanic with you when you raced your car. Or you had a driver ("chauffeur") that was more a mechanic than an artist at the steering wheel. And this for good reasons. The reliability was not satisfactory and if your car broke down there was no alternative to fixing it yourself or with the help of the "on board" mechanic most of the time.
Over the years cars got much more reliable. But even if you still own a very old car you won't need to take an engineer with you. What do you do, if things go wrong? Yes, you pull out your mobile phone and call either some services firms, road angels or a specialist you may know.
As a matter of fact, the mobile phone has replaced the engineer sitting with you in your old car. You don't even need to think about taking a spare wheel or enough gasoline with you. Just call the right number and you will get what you need. And it's quite probable that it will go even further in
the future. Your mobile phone will be able to diagnose the problem with your car, be it by analyzing the funny noise the car does or by plugging into the electronics of the car and running the right application making sense of the data. And if you can't find the cause of the problem, the phone will know who to call and do it automatically, maybe even before you noticed that you might have a problem. Brave new world!
In all honesty, I always feel much better when I know I have a mobile phone with me when I take an old car for a run. And it happens that I used the phone to get advise from my specialists more than one time, being not a gifted mechanic myself.

Breaking down with the Tuscan - a positive experience?

It's always special to take an old car for a ride and have the old machinery warm up, sound and smell.
Sometimes, of course, things don't work out as planned. Old cars are certainly less reliable than modern cars. They were less reliable when they were new and of course after 40+ years this probably hasn't got better, despite better materials here and there and components that last longer. So, today, I took my dear TVR Tuscan (1969) for a blast and it let me down, after 30 kms it just rolled out and didn't start again. No power at the ignition. Nothing big, but enough to not reach the target on time and to get the fingers dirty. The good thing about old cars is that many of these problems can be solved on the spot or at least a work around can be found and the drive can continue. With modern cars it's often the opposite: first you need the infrastructure (mostly a computer) to actually find out what's wrong and then most of the time you need a spare part to actually solve the problem. And of course these things are not with you when you drive through the country. So, the TVR broke down, but we were able to fix it and this fact makes the car actually rather more interesting than the other way around, doesn't it?