You ever stop to think about just how many wires are in your average automobile? Your stereo’s got a whole bunch. Steering wheel buttons, all those have to have some wires or something. Airbags, you better believe there’s wires. So on and so forth. I’d hazard a guess that any given car out there has a good twenty bucks worth of copper running through its veins.
Me, I know all about wiring harnesses. I’m there once your car has passed through the digestive system of North American roads, made soft through constant applications of corrosive road salt, suffering a major mechanical failure, and then - at last - laid to rest in a field, destined for fertilizer. After a few years out in a field like that, mice have usually eaten as much of the wiring and insulation as they can, the greedy little bastards. I tried eating it myself, once, to better understand my enemy. The taste is hardly deserving of a Michelin star, although frying it in garlic butter does mask the worst of the petrochemicals.
A lot of people enter into a major rewiring project with optimism. Run the engine harnesses first, then figure out the rest later. Good strategy, if you have more discipline than me. Usually you make that decision and then it’s suddenly seven years later, and you’re opening your car door like some kind of ape in order to get McDonalds because the power window motors still aren’t hooked up. And if you don’t have power windows at all? Well, then you’ve already learned this lesson, haven’t you?
Make no mistake, when the authorities finally do a so-called “wellness check” on my home after I’ve failed to report in to my parole officer, they’ll learn all about my wiring habits. Finding my bloated corpse above a stack of dog-eared Sumitomo connector catalogues? We should all be so lucky to go out like this.
