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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. It's a neat story, but it has that smell of an urban legend. What engineer would come back for four nights in a row rather than just figuring out why the car didn't start the first time?
An engineer who is using logic, reason, and observation to find the root of the problem instead of just patch it once?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed! From the article: > In 2010, the Pontiac Division of General Motors received... > This was a cool act by General Motors especially in this world of Internet when news can go viral in matter of seconds From Snopes: > This legend surfaced in print in 1978, but an anecdotal sighting places it even earlier than that, in 1971.
Yes. It's a neat story, but it has that smell of an urban legend. What engineer would come back for four nights in a row rather than just figuring out why the car didn't start the first time?
Not the point of the story, but I wonder if engineers would reach the solution faster than non-engineers due to their practice debugging. As soon as I read the guy was driving to the store to pick it up I knew it had to be timing due to store layout.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/
Not the point of the story, but I wonder if engineers would reach the solution faster than non-engineers due to their practice debugging. As soon as I read the guy was driving to the store to pick it up I knew it had to be timing due to store layout.
Even the "store layout" part is nonsense. Really, only vanilla is quick to pick up, and even for chocolate and strawberry (or whatever the next most popular flavors are) you have to take the slow path? Nobody would organize their store like that.
(Also, are dedicated "ice cream stores" a thing in the US? As in, not ice cream parlors that also sell stuff to go, but something you would really call a "store", that is dedicated to ice cream specifically?)
Why do sites use this crappy scrolling override. I's infuriating and makes navigating the article a pain.
I had a similar problem on my previous car. It would start again without issue after stopping if the pause was shorter than 15min or longer than half an hour but there was a spot in between where the car had cooled down too much and not enough at the same time to start. It's nice to see it was not just a fancy from an old car and to know the reason.
Not the point of the story, but I wonder if engineers would reach the solution faster than non-engineers due to their practice debugging. As soon as I read the guy was driving to the store to pick it up I knew it had to be timing due to store layout.
> I knew it had to be timing due to store layout. Even the "store layout" part is nonsense. Really, only vanilla is quick to pick up, and even for chocolate and strawberry (or whatever the next most popular flavors are) you have to take the slow path? Nobody would organize their store like that. (Also, are dedicated "ice cream stores" a thing in the US? As in, not ice cream parlors that also sell stuff to go, but som…
And as for the layout - I have definitely seen freezers with a pile of easy-to-access vanilla ice cream in one section then a "miscellaneous" section where chocolate/pecan/whatever are either mixed in a pile or grouped (both require a couple of seconds to pause and search).
The story does seem too perfect, but this part does definitely check out
Not the point of the story, but I wonder if engineers would reach the solution faster than non-engineers due to their practice debugging. As soon as I read the guy was driving to the store to pick it up I knew it had to be timing due to store layout.
My guess is yes. Especially if you're doing debugging, your whole day is hypothesis testing. You have a model of how a program works and from there you come up with potential explanations, you try to reproduce the problem under various conditions, you collect data, and so on.
Had the guy just asked anyone who's used to driving old beater cars from the late carb/early EFI they probably would have guessed vapor lock or heat soaked ignition components right off the bat (probably with a little skepticism because new cars very rarely do that) and then tried to confirm/rule it out.
Vapor lock is a basically solved problem (and has been for 30+yr, the OEMs test for those kinds of things before they scale up production) the engineer will likely weight it lower as a possibility than the more oddly specific things. It's kind of like how a 2nd line IT person may miss rebooting a device as a potential solution because none of the problems they chase down have easy solutions like that.