Rustproofing rip-off: the truth about rust in modern cars

The latest new car rust-busting must-have is being promoted to a dealership near you. It’s true what they say: Leopards really don’t change their spots. Even the rusty ones.

Download the PODCAST of this report.

---

Recently I sensed a disturbance in The Force. Either that, or I got an e-mail from a dude named Ross Gould, 4000 kilometres over there in Western Australia:

Inspired by you I am working hard to make Australia Less Shit. So let’s discourage the sale of this and similar nonsense devices.

An OBD dongle that is claimed to prevent vehicle corrosion through cathodic protection.

Page 14 of GoAuto News  EDITION 1034 – AUG 12, 2020 promoted as a new after sales revenue stream for dealers.

If you’re not from around here, John Mellor’s GoAuto News is a fascinating attempt to cure insomnia by recycling press releases as a means of enticing car dealers to spend money with advertisers to make money for themselves. What a great pity nobody is ever conscious when they read it, statistically.

Here you can see a recycled press release headlining issue 1034 - which is one of my all-time favourite GoAutos, as you will soon see. Page 7 presents a grand opportunity for the right applicant to have his soul sucked out, leaving him a withered husk.

On page 23, this chap offers to put you in the driver’s seat of your very own dealership. And who doesn’t want that? Lord of the Ming Molls.

On page 13 the folks at Organise It have pretty much encapsulated how it feels to be a woman working in a modern car dealership today in Shitsville. (They really haven’t evolved all that much, sadly.) And, no, I would not touch those, either, it’s fair to say.

And on page 11, there’s the most retarded ad for a data management system (DMS) which takes about 100 words to tell you absolutely nothing about the product, yet has the title ‘From complexity to simplicity’.

Against this grand backdrop of narcolepsy-inducing automotive industry infotainment, we find the almighty AutoSaver System advertisement - a full-pager (pictured left). (Who takes out a full-page ad these days that isn’t a premium German car brand bankrolling a Car of the Year award?)

A new revenue stream for dealers.

Awesome!

The world’s first Plug ‘n Play wireless rust protection device.

Yes!

Even though you plug it in to the OBDII port, so technically it is kinda wired. I don’t understand how a device can be plug ‘n’ play and also wireless. I thought they were mutually exclusive propositions. Just saying. You don’t typically plug a wireless device in.

Also: ‘plug ‘n play’ - not a proper noun, dudes. Pro tip: ‘n’ has two apostrophes - both before and after the ‘n’, denoting the bilateral contraction of the word ‘and’. One for the removed ‘a’. One for the removed ‘d’. I thought everyone knew that. First impressions count, dudes.

Like, if you turn up for a first date with no pants, there’s really no coming back from that. It’s tantamount to impossible to make amends. You won’t be looking back fondly on your 10th anniversary and sharing a laugh about your trouser-free faux pas, all those years ago. We’ve all been there.

Works on all vehicles. Quote:

“Easy after sales sell with great returns.”

Quite. I can see a Ming Moll slicing and dicing a man’s resistance like a knife through butter over one of these babies.

But I remain confused - is this primarily about profit or actual corrosion protection?

I did go to their website, where a video helpfully ‘explained’ (if that’s the right word) that this is not just an alleged rust protection device but in fact it’s (quote)…

“the world’s first onboard diagnostic oxidation interface…or OBDOI.”

Did you know?

Peter Brock also marketed 24psi for tyre pressures on The Director in conjunction with the energy polarizer? He also said the polarizer meant an engine requiring premium leaded petrol could use low-octane unleaded; it’s true.

Love that jargon.

Frankly, at this point I was as onboard with AutoSaver as I remain to this day over the legendary (infamous?) Peter Brock Energy Polarizer. Remember those? I held one in my hand once. It was better than viagra.

---

Meanwhile, back on Earth

Modern cars do not rust, dudes. They don’t rust because they are galvanised. Rust went away a few decades back in cars because the industry transitioned from painted steel bodies to painted GALVANISED steel bodies.

You know - galvanising. That proven coating of steel in zinc, which cathodically protects the steel by forming a sacrificial anode. Thus the steel cannot corrode, even if you scratch the panel and expose the bare steel to the elements. Galvanising is an actual electrochemical mechanism that works because it is based on real science. And validated by decades of implementation.

If you’re one of those science denying dipshits who thinks your opinion is all that matters, I should explain that science is the meme of accumulated information forming a map of how reality works, which facilitates technology and stops us all from living in caves and dying, often painfully, in our 20s. Science rocks, in the way that your opinion doesn’t.

You see it all around you. Galvnising. Galvanised roofs, power poles, those massive towers that hold 132kV powerlines aloft, trailers, water tanks, bridges, cables, and pretty much every pole that holds up every stop sign and give way sign across suburban Shitsville. All the traffic lights. 

All galvanised. All not rusting. All exposed to the elements, not painted. All impervious to corrosion for, like 30 years. The body of your car is protected just like that. Under the paint, which is just cosmetic.

So, to me, strike one for the mighty AutoSaver System is that it purports to solve a problem that does not exist, and which has not existed for decades. Well done, dudes.

Strike two is: Well, I don’t see how it could possibly work. I just don’t. See, corrosion is a huge problem in industry. All that steel. So damn inconvenient if it all falls down unexpectedly one day.

We did spend more than a few minutes discussing corrosion at university, I note, even back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and we had carrier pigeons for the e-mail.

AutoSaver … pffft … let’s call it ‘explains’.

“The device is designed to enrich the metal with electrons provided by the power of the vehicle’s battery.

The amount of current used is equivalent to what is used by an electronic clock that is installed in most new vehicles today. Utilising this small amount of energy is done in the circuit design of the unit’s OBDOI module.

This module comprises a power generating and regulating circuit that impresses 24 milliamps of current through the grounded vehicle body by utilising the vehicle’s existing electrical circuitry.”

So, just to see that I’ve got this straight: Ohm’s law: V = IR. 12 volts. 24 milliamps. Therefore the product and its (quote) ‘power generating and regulating circuit’ is an elegantly translucent blue plastic box with a 500-ohm resistor inside and (presumably) an LED to inform you that it’s ‘working’.

I don’t see how it can actually generate power, as it claims. Because it seems to use the vehicle’s battery for power. Perhaps I’m still a moron, disappointingly.

And if the car’s clock is already drawing 24 milliamps, by AutoSaver’s - let’s call it ‘logic’ - is the clock therefore not doing exactly what the AutoSaver unit purports to do, electrically, in terms of current draw from the battery to earth, and therefore already (let’s say) ‘protecting’ the car from corroding? 

I think, if you got a hundred engineers and scientists together and polled them independently on this, they would conclude overwhelmingly that these pseudo-scientific claims really don’t add up. But perhaps I’m wrong.

If in fact that mechanism miraculously worked. Please let me know where I’ve gone wrong understanding this technology. Because I’m just not seeing it.

It is generally accepted by corrosion scientists that 10 milliamps of current is sufficient to inhibit the corrosion process.

Is it really? I’d like a face-to-face with them, and perhaps they could explain why we bother buying tonnes of expensive zinc and consuming all that energy to melt it, just to galvanise car bodies and all those other quite expensive steel things I mentioned earlier, when we could just hook up a tiny battery and a 500-ohm resistor instead.

I wonder why cars do not come with this kind of device fitted standard, out of the factory? Because it seems like an economic no-brainer, a real win. If it worked.

Perhaps it’s because they do not work. I mean, it’s a possibility, right?

---

History repeating

In fact, on October 28, 2015, Consumer Protection WA stopped the sale of, and secured refunds for, consumers who bought a computerised electronic corrosion inhibitor distributed by a company called MotorOne. 

After independent testing and advice, the WA Government found the corrosion protection claims to be bullshit >> - they put it differently of course, but there you go. (Here’s the court-enforced undertaking report >> )

In fact, GoAuto and John Mellor himself even reported on this scam, back in December 2015 with his article titled ‘Dealers doge bullet’.

At about the same time, NSW Fair Trading Commissioner Rod Stowe warned consumers over here:

“...not to waste their money buying computerised electronic corrosion inhibitors for motor vehicles after investigations revealed the devices don’t work.”

The NRMA reported on the NSW version of events too.

Frankly, unless there’s been some miracle development in corrosion science in the past five years, and I really doubt that, you’d best be saving the big bucks here, if you were you on the showroom floor, buying a new car, no matter how many top buttons the resident Ming Moll sacrifices to the cause.

It is fascinating watching them perform, however. So compelling.

---

Painting a picture

To GoAuto, I say - sincerely - thank you very much for the ongoing autotainment.

Edition 1034 was a real winner. I nodded off almost immediately. And I eagerly await your long-term review of the AutoSaver product. 

Perhaps you could interview one of those alleged ‘consensus’-type corrosion engineers to explain - even if it does work - how the unit is not a bit too ‘belt and braces’ on a modern galvanised car.

Do keep up the excellent work at GoAuto, making Australia less shit by ensuring your 2-3 readers get the regulation eight hours of sleep during these stressful times.

As your next Pry Mincer, I salute you, and your unwavering commitment to this great nation. Well done, dudes. Thanks once again for publishing such a fine edition.

Have your say