F Minus by Tony Carrillo for January 15, 2015

So, where’s the F- in this? The car going to no longer run without the part?

Those vestigial parts can smolder away and then burst when you least expect it.

Must be a Ford. (cough, cough, sensor)

I really did just do this. I’ve got the vestigial part sitting on a table, and the vehicle from which it was removed is better than ever.

I think some of you need to Google vestigial. Has to do with evolution kinda like how whales went from being land mammals to sea mammals and over millions of years their legs slowly disappeared.

Vestigial never made any sense to me – how does your progeny know whether you used a certain body part at all? I rarely “use” my fingernails – will they go away in future generations? Seems like they are anthropomorphizing body parts.

Air bags are vestigial. Nobody has seen one, knows where they are or how they work. When needed they don’t activate or the powder charge breaks the cartridge and kills the driver. If they activate, between the collision damage and airbag replacement costs, the car is totaled.

Most of the heat shields are “vestigial” in this sense. On my last car, every time I started getting a tinny rattle in the underside, the mechanic would just remove a loose heat shield and the problem went away, until the next one broke loose.

I just had to avoid parking on grass in the summer.

Extraneous is not vestigial.The battery box on a lift was too small for the battery available, but only because of a pair of threaded rods limiting the space to 10.5 inches. The battery frame was long gone, so the posts onto which it would be screwed down were no longer needed, making them vestigial, extant but serving no purpose at all.