6 ms·
All of this is true, but in my experience, it's the rare engine that meets its end due to piston/cam friction. Usually, the engine is abandoned due to the cost
by hcurtiss 9y ago
All of this is true, but in my experience, it's the rare engine that meets its end due to piston/cam friction. Usually, the engine is abandoned due to the cost of maintaining all the things attached to it (e.g., water pump, alternator, master cylinder, etc.). If you're willing to suffer the nickel and dime expenses, the actual pistons/valves/camshafts usually last many hundreds of thousands of miles.
- gwbas1c 9y agoEVs don't have as many things attached to the engine. I wonder if some "new" EVs will just be refurbished older EVs with a new battery and cosmetic changes.
- Kadin 9y agoPeople want new bodywork, seats, electronics, etc. It might be possible to make all that replaceable, so that a car can be fully refurbished, and certainly that is done to commercial vehicles all the time (passenger buses, etc.), but not sure about the economics of doing it to light-duty cars and trucks. The body itself is probably not that expensive. Certainly seems like it ought to be possible to pull the motors out of an old car and drop them into a new one. But then again people do that with gasoline engines all the time, too. If you blow a head gasket in a lot of cars, the "fix" is often to replace the engine with a remanufactured engine that comes out of a crate. It's cheaper to do that than to pay for the labor to actually replace the gasket in a shop, at least in a high-cost area (NE US, especially at dealers).
- cr0sh 9y agoGM had their "skateboard" concept with the idea of swapping bodies on a general platform (it was also completely drive-by-wire).