9 ms·

speaking from experience as an engine mechanic, this type of disposable consumerism is absolutely rampant in luxury vehicles. im not sure if its designed to be

speaking from experience as an engine mechanic, this type of disposable consumerism is absolutely rampant in luxury vehicles. im not sure if its designed to be an expression of luxury, or if the designers just dont care, but it shows in the quality of the final product that most of these icons of performance and opulence are due for major service every few thousand miles. plastic oil filter modules: absolute garbage but Chrysler fell in love with them during the Daimler years and now they show up in basically everything built off the E series chassis. BMW also use them, and they hold up to thermal stress very poorly. can not be recycled in the US like metal filters and have to be shipped, if you want, to germany. plastic water pumps/plastic cooling systems: notoriously BMW, but also show up on Maserati so im told. they leak like a sieve and youll replace a major part of the system every 5k miles. cannot be recycled. cheap hydraulics: im talking about that paddle shift dual clutch weirdness that shows up in high-performance mercedes 6 liter v8 engines with the double turbos. You build an engine that costs 3/4 of the vehicle value and you cheap out at the last minute with pot-steel roller bearings? in an engine that delivers north of 500 horsepower? tapered rollers or even high nickel needle bearings would keep the hydraulics running for years, but the hydraulic actuation assembly for the paddle shift stuff is an absolute dumpster fire. you cant disassemble the actuator, or service the bearings. the whole thing gets thrown out and replaced. death by cad: this is more 'right to repair' but engines that were designed in a laboratory by a grad student from Malaysia who was told to 'make it work.' to service the turbo on some lexus F sports, you must disassembly the entire front of the car. headlights have to come off, the radiator and forward steering linkage too. its a $400 part, but thats $2300 in labor.

hopler 8y ago
What does Malaysia have to so with this?
- mcormier 8y ago
  He’s just implying cheap subcontracted labour from a foreign country where labour rates are lower.
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    And as an Indian American[1] friend said the power relation means they do whatever stupid thing they are told to do by management rather throwing shit back. [1] My friend has complained that managers confuse him with the Indians on a H1B visas and get bent when he tells them their idea is stupid.
  - anticodon 8y ago
    There's also a different culture in Asia. In Europe if management tells you to do stupid /unoptimal thing employee can rejoinder. In Asia they'll just do what they're told to do without questioning. You'll notice this immediately if you work with Asian people. They never discuss decisions with the management.
- legitster 8y ago
  It doesn't have to be Malaysia. They are being designed by people who will never use the product.
kemiller 8y ago
Out of curiosity, are there any brands which don’t do this? I’m a little dismayed that even Lexus does this.
- galfarragem 8y ago
  Anecdata says that Japanese cars are the most reliable ones. (Old) Toyotas in Africa are a must. They endure and can be repaired in a local car workshop.
  - oldToyotas 8y ago
    So what happens to Africa when the old cars finally completely disappear, and nothing can be repaired in any reasonable sense of the word? Probably hard to know, but by now, we're already seeing that blu-ray players are rendered nearly useless by lost remote controls (because they (all blu-ray player manufacturers) no longer build adequate physical playback controls into the set top box, and 99% of blu-ray on-disc software requires a directional keys and an enter key to trigger playback of the main content, which can only be found on remote controls), leading to a necessity for bootleggers that can rip and recopy the main content of the movie to a version stripped of menus, that immediately plays automatically upon insertion.
    - pvorb 8y ago
      You can buy a new remote control if you want. It's a little annoying to set up but works flawlessly thereafter. I recently bought an all-in-one remote because my TV's remote broke apart and now I've got one remote for all the devices in my living room.
    - dTal 8y ago
      >blu-ray on-disc software It's shocking to me that this is even a thing. I looked it up and apparently Blu-ray players are required to execute Java off the disc! How far we've come since the Sony CD rootkit days... A cursory read over the spec on Wikipedia indicates (among other horrifying things) that it is possible and supported to release a Blu-ray that contains no media, but instead streams it over the internet from the studio's server. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD-J https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD-J
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
nutjob2 8y ago
This isn't by accident or incompetence, it's to maximise servicing revenue.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  I wonder how they compute the fine line between luxury and crap so that people don't feel their brand new "high end" car was not what was advertised..
  - thrownthrow 8y ago
    By consensus of the Joneses.
  - nradov 8y ago
    For the most part high end cars do work as advertised until the lease ends or they're traded in. At that point they become someone else's problem.
legitster 8y ago
I've stopped using "cheap" or "expensive" to describe mechanical things. I like the expression "designed to narrower tolerances", it conveys that something can be more expensive but also less durable. As someone who constantly buys the cheapest version of something possible, I am now rarely surprised when it turns out to be the "best" actual version of it.
- vlehto 8y ago
  As mechanically inclined person: "Designed to narrower tolerance" usually just means it's more expensive and accurate. For bearings it's great idea if you want longevity. Allowance on the other hand is completely different matter.
- brodsky 8y ago
  the practice of buying the cheapest version of something, in my experience, should not be applied to things like tools. there is a remarkable difference between a $20 no-name multitool and a nice Leatherman, or a nice pair of binoculars and a cheap Chinese knock-off. electronics, of course, is a totally different story. everything has nearly the same brains, with perhaps a UI quirk or two on the cheapest version.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    It should also not be applied to consumer electronics. When buying the cheapest no-name device available, you'll pay back what you "saved" in continuous frustration. These devices are as bad as possible; any worse and it'd be fraudulent to sell them.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  Tighter tolerances often lead to increased reliability.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    I think it is a matter of both domain for how things fail and how reliability is defined. In some circumstances looser tolerances can be a bit less efficient but more fault tolerant and thus 'reliable'. Although its lifetime might also be shorter than a tighter toleranced device if both were fed 'clean' inputs. Of course the fault tolerance (apologies for overloading the term tolerance) also isn't guaranteed in every domain. If a seal breaking would wreck the process it certainly wouldn't give /any/ reliability over a tight seal.
joevandyk 8y ago
What car do you recommend?
twblalock 8y ago
Luxury car buyers don't want to maintain their cars. They are ok with paying someone else to do it, and cars come with long warranties these days anyway. Many choose to lease rather than buy, because that way they will always be driving a relatively new car. These people are getting exactly what they want from the luxury cars that are currently available. If a manufacturer spent money on making its luxury cars more durable and easier to maintain, they would need to raise prices and would then lose sales to other brands. In other words, this situation is a result of consumer preferences, not a conspiracy by manufacturers to cut quality. And that applies to a lot of things, not just cars.
- Hamuko 8y ago
  >cars come with long warranties these days anyway Mercedes-Benz E-Class comes with a 4-year or 50,000 mile warranty in the United States, which actually has pretty high level consumer protection when it comes to cars. However, in my country, the E-Class has a 2-year warranty and I get the feeling that the situation might be the same in many of the other European countries. That's not that much of a warranty for a car starting at 48,071 euros (53,996 USD).
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    You have to wonder if the warranty in the US extends to second purchasers. Most US leases are 3 years and 8-12k miles, meaning that the typical off lease vehicle will not exceed 36,000 miles.
    - city41 8y ago
      Most lease returns are cleaned up and sold as certified preowned cars. The CPO warranty is usually just as good (and sometimes even better) than the new car warranty.
      - Anardo 8y ago
        Very true. I purchased my last BMW two years old. It came with a two-year warranty and a two-year maintenance package.
jaredlightman 8y ago
Need to service the turbos on Land Rover LR3/4/First gen Range Rover Sport Diesels? Easier with the body off.
skookumchuck 8y ago
Mercedes has a consistent pattern, going back at least to the 1960s, of excellent design sabotaged by inferior parts here and there. (I've repaired many of them.) Fords, on the other hand, have a consistent quality. I'll never own a Mercedes.
- pnutjam 8y ago
  Ford? Look at the spark plugs on the triton v8... Awful
manomanowicz 8y ago
Luxury cars are very much an exercise in form over function. How easy they are to service is not a high priority like it is in every other mass market vehicle. It doesn't help they have large (often supercharged or turbocharged) displacement engines which is a challenge to package in themselves, let alone consider the ease of servicing. Their high powered, boosted engines also puts the entire powertrain under relatively high stresses causing accelerated wear out and fatigue of components. Although some durability test takes place to pick up on issues, if a design issue occurs late into the development phase it won't be fixed, if the cost to implement a change is too high. It will just become another 'service' item which has to be changed every x,000 miles. Sometimes the required technology does not exist to allow a component to last the entire life of the car so just has to be replaced at a set interval. Luxury cars are often used as the test bed for new technology. This new technology is often novel or experimental and has new unforeseen failure modes which the design engineer is unlikely to account for. The accelerated testing done during vehicle development picks up most issues but a few slip through and only present themselves during actual customer use. The quality of these any new components can also be highly variable especially if a new process or material is being used in their manufacture. If the supplier has poor process control this can lead to high failure rates. Another consideration is that luxury cars (well luxury sports cars at least) aren't driven that much - most will never reach 100,000 miles - so are designed to a lower durability than most cars. There's no point in over-engineering a component but if a customer has an extreme usage profile, they may exceed the design limits of a component. Cars are not designed for the worst case customer but rather the median usage profile. If cars were designed for the most extreme customer I imagine the cars would weight significantly more or have to use expensive exotic materials.
- userbinator 8y ago
  It doesn't help they have large (often supercharged or turbocharged) displacement engines which is a challenge to package in themselves, let alone consider the ease of servicing. Luxury cars now do not have significantly bigger engines than those of the past --- it's mostly the emissions control equipment and other auxillary components (including the not-so-useful plastic covers) that take up the bulk of the space and make servicing difficult. Look at the difference between a late 60s/early 70s Cadillac and one closer to today, for example: http://www.eldorado-seville.com/resources/News-/-Home/BG-enginebaysideHDR.jpg http://www.eldorado-seville.com/resources/News-/-Home/BG-eng... http://image.automotive.com/f/cadillac-xts-2013-road-test/52995606/2013-cadillac-xts-engine-bayjpg.jpg http://image.automotive.com/f/cadillac-xts-2013-road-test/52... The latter is 3.6L V6. The former is a 7.7L V8. They both have over 300HP. The former is also FWD. But the difference in serviceability is enormous.
blattimwind 8y ago
Ford EcoBoost engines that require a VERY specific oil and VERY regular oil changes (iirc something like "every 10k OR ever year, whichever is up first" or the timing belt disintegrates and you'll have immediate engine damage. Because of Ford's relatively unique construction of running a rubber timing belt in the engine oil. BMW handbrakes are notorious and have been for decades. Even when they're factory new they won't really bite.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  Compared to older oil and vehicles, 10,000 miles or 1 year is pretty long.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    10k kilometers. Most VW engines are on a schedule of 20-30k or 2 years, though those have other, less dramatic, issues (direct injection + AGR = dirty intake valves). And while engines don't like it when you change the oil late, they're not immediately scrap metal.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
> death by cad This is endemic (not just cars, but absolutely sodding everything), and utterly infuriating. So you end up with engines with perfectly reasonable reliability but need to be dropped out or a whole crate of ancillary parts removed just to change a water pump or clutch. Or the motorcycle oil seal that requires you to drop the engine and split the crankcases to change the £2.50 seal. The old fashion of copper bronze or needle rollers everywhere and grease nipples seems quaint and excessive, but was at least considerate of maintenance and long life. Modern metallurgy and design shouldn't take the opportunity of throwing out every good idea of history.
- omginternets 8y ago
  > death by cad How does this work in practice? I mean, what is it about CAD that gives this kind of result?
  - adyus 8y ago
    I believe it refers to assembling things digitally without thinking about how an actual human would work with the same things in the physical world.
    - microcolonel 8y ago
      One particular instance of this I pay attention to is the placement of oil filters on motorcycles. My brother bought a Honda CBR600RR, and he wanted to replace the oil filter; I watched him spend an inordinate amount of time removing the cowling, clip by clip, screw by screw, from the bike, in order to expose the filter (which you could not get a normal filter wrench onto, because of the awkward positioning). After that I pay a lot of attention to whether the oil filter is visible and accessible from the outside of the bike without removing a cowling, Kawasaki seems to do a good job of this.
      - soverance 8y ago
        To be fair, the CBR600RR is a race replica bike, and it's designed for the track (despite having lights and a license plate). The full fairings are there for aerodynamics, the same sort you'll find tested and proven in Moto GP. Honda didn't put them there just to look cool, and ease of maintenance certainly wasn't the primary design factor.
sizzle 8y ago
How do you see fully electric cars improving over this situation you describe with low quality ICE car internals failing? For example, oil filters are no longer an issue if you opt for a Tesla. How do you service electric cars compared to ICE cars? Will the move to electric cars fundamentally hurt the car repair industry and will you have to go back to school to learn about servicing electric engines? Thanks!
- village-idiot 8y ago
  As it currently stands, electric cars are going to hurt the car repair industry, excepting body work. The parts on an EV either last forever, or are relatively easy to replace. This is going to be a problem for most dealerships, as repair and service is a large chunk of their profit.
  - StudentStuff 8y ago
    I agree that the car repair industry will be hurting due to electric vehicles, but not for the same reasons. As Tesla has shown, locking out non-corporate repairs is easy, even body work is something you can choke out from 3rd party shops by refusing to provide parts (hence the incredible repair costs for Tesla vehicles). A profit driven electric car company can decide that any minor damage to the car will mean they push out a firmware update to brick the car. You don't own the software that makes the vehicle function, hence your at the mercy of the manufacturer letting you use their software.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > The parts on an EV either last forever For now. It's an iron law of the market economy that once this sector becomes competitive, costs will get optimized to the point that - like currently with ICE cars - the reliability will be lowest possible that they can get away with. There's no law of physics saying EVs are built reliably; there just isn't enough economic incentive to start building low-reliability parts. That will change as EVs gain popularity.
    - village-idiot 8y ago
rorykoehler 8y ago
>'make it work.' This is a major problem with capital taking over industries. Financiers don't care and also don't remotely understand what is happening in the details. Technologists running companies at least have the high level insights required to make nuanced decisions regarding whether to move fast or focus on quality. Finance just cares about the quarterly figures and we end up with a make it work rather than make it good approach to building tech. As long as we're making money who cares right. The Boeing scandal is a good example of this.
- andrekandre 8y ago
  that’s definitely a big factor for sure, at least in my experience... maybe our definitions of “technologist” is different, but i think even with technologists it’s important to understand that just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should (e.g alan kay’s “reverse vandalism”), and is still a danger with regard to entrepreneurship/business vs what is actually “good” for the world... i think there is a lot to re-examine about how and why we do things...
  - rorykoehler 8y ago
    Yes I definitely agree re your reverse vandalism point. It's another dimension of the same issue.
  - slfnflctd 8y ago
    I believe the phrase is "inverse vandalism". Terrific point regardless. When it's easier to create things that work 'good enough', not as much work will be put into making things as great as they can possibly be.
grosswait 8y ago
A major driver of this "cheapness" is weight reduction, which has been drive by CAFE and similar laws. It's a trade off. Want a transmission with enough meat in the casing to take replaceable bearings, or even enough to machine in a bushing? Adds weight. Make that decision hundreds, maybe thousands of times and it all adds up. However, I agree that there are some obvious decisions I disagree with choosing the weight reduction.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  I don't understand why mass market cars (often by the same manufacturer) get better fuel economy and yet need to be serviced less frequently, then. A Toyota Corolla will do 300k miles fairly easily and yet gets better mileage than a Lexus. The cynic in me says it's price segmentation. People who buy luxury cars have the disposable income to throw away several thousand a year in repair bills and pay more for gas to boot. In fact, if they buy the car to signal that they have disposable income to burn, it's actually better for their purposes if it has terrible reliability. It shows that they have the means to not care. So it's a win-win-win-win all around: the car manufacturer extracts more for the car, the dealers extract more for service, the luxury car buyer gets to show off their wealth, and the mass market buyer gets a car on razor-thin margins that are subsidized by the luxury buyer.
  - wallace_f 8y ago
    I mean a Corolla has less power, weight and smaller wheels, and arguably better aerodynamics (looks count less, needs less cooling, smaller size). Also, a Corolla will have more inherit more R&D, uses less of new tech, etc. >they buy the car to signal that they have disposable income to burn I agree with you there.
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    There's also the matter of tuning the design. There are features, design decisions, and engine loads you have to reject if you want high reliability. If those fall into faster acceleration, better ride, more convenience, then the luxury market will get them and the economy market won't.

hopler 8y ago

What does Malaysia have to so with this?

mcormier 8y ago
He’s just implying cheap subcontracted labour from a foreign country where labour rates are lower.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  And as an Indian American[1] friend said the power relation means they do whatever stupid thing they are told to do by management rather throwing shit back. [1] My friend has complained that managers confuse him with the Indians on a H1B visas and get bent when he tells them their idea is stupid.
- anticodon 8y ago
  There's also a different culture in Asia. In Europe if management tells you to do stupid /unoptimal thing employee can rejoinder. In Asia they'll just do what they're told to do without questioning. You'll notice this immediately if you work with Asian people. They never discuss decisions with the management.
legitster 8y ago
It doesn't have to be Malaysia. They are being designed by people who will never use the product.

kemiller 8y ago

Out of curiosity, are there any brands which don’t do this? I’m a little dismayed that even Lexus does this.

galfarragem 8y ago
Anecdata says that Japanese cars are the most reliable ones. (Old) Toyotas in Africa are a must. They endure and can be repaired in a local car workshop.
- oldToyotas 8y ago
  So what happens to Africa when the old cars finally completely disappear, and nothing can be repaired in any reasonable sense of the word? Probably hard to know, but by now, we're already seeing that blu-ray players are rendered nearly useless by lost remote controls (because they (all blu-ray player manufacturers) no longer build adequate physical playback controls into the set top box, and 99% of blu-ray on-disc software requires a directional keys and an enter key to trigger playback of the main content, which can only be found on remote controls), leading to a necessity for bootleggers that can rip and recopy the main content of the movie to a version stripped of menus, that immediately plays automatically upon insertion.
  - pvorb 8y ago
    You can buy a new remote control if you want. It's a little annoying to set up but works flawlessly thereafter. I recently bought an all-in-one remote because my TV's remote broke apart and now I've got one remote for all the devices in my living room.
  - dTal 8y ago
    >blu-ray on-disc software It's shocking to me that this is even a thing. I looked it up and apparently Blu-ray players are required to execute Java off the disc! How far we've come since the Sony CD rootkit days... A cursory read over the spec on Wikipedia indicates (among other horrifying things) that it is possible and supported to release a Blu-ray that contains no media, but instead streams it over the internet from the studio's server. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD-J https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD-J

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

nutjob2 8y ago

This isn't by accident or incompetence, it's to maximise servicing revenue.

agumonkey 8y ago
I wonder how they compute the fine line between luxury and crap so that people don't feel their brand new "high end" car was not what was advertised..
- thrownthrow 8y ago
  By consensus of the Joneses.
- nradov 8y ago
  For the most part high end cars do work as advertised until the lease ends or they're traded in. At that point they become someone else's problem.

legitster 8y ago

I've stopped using "cheap" or "expensive" to describe mechanical things. I like the expression "designed to narrower tolerances", it conveys that something can be more expensive but also less durable. As someone who constantly buys the cheapest version of something possible, I am now rarely surprised when it turns out to be the "best" actual version of it.

vlehto 8y ago
As mechanically inclined person: "Designed to narrower tolerance" usually just means it's more expensive and accurate. For bearings it's great idea if you want longevity. Allowance on the other hand is completely different matter.
brodsky 8y ago
the practice of buying the cheapest version of something, in my experience, should not be applied to things like tools. there is a remarkable difference between a $20 no-name multitool and a nice Leatherman, or a nice pair of binoculars and a cheap Chinese knock-off. electronics, of course, is a totally different story. everything has nearly the same brains, with perhaps a UI quirk or two on the cheapest version.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  It should also not be applied to consumer electronics. When buying the cheapest no-name device available, you'll pay back what you "saved" in continuous frustration. These devices are as bad as possible; any worse and it'd be fraudulent to sell them.
maxerickson 8y ago
Tighter tolerances often lead to increased reliability.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  I think it is a matter of both domain for how things fail and how reliability is defined. In some circumstances looser tolerances can be a bit less efficient but more fault tolerant and thus 'reliable'. Although its lifetime might also be shorter than a tighter toleranced device if both were fed 'clean' inputs. Of course the fault tolerance (apologies for overloading the term tolerance) also isn't guaranteed in every domain. If a seal breaking would wreck the process it certainly wouldn't give /any/ reliability over a tight seal.

joevandyk 8y ago

What car do you recommend?

twblalock 8y ago

Luxury car buyers don't want to maintain their cars. They are ok with paying someone else to do it, and cars come with long warranties these days anyway. Many choose to lease rather than buy, because that way they will always be driving a relatively new car. These people are getting exactly what they want from the luxury cars that are currently available. If a manufacturer spent money on making its luxury cars more durable and easier to maintain, they would need to raise prices and would then lose sales to other brands. In other words, this situation is a result of consumer preferences, not a conspiracy by manufacturers to cut quality. And that applies to a lot of things, not just cars.

Hamuko 8y ago
>cars come with long warranties these days anyway Mercedes-Benz E-Class comes with a 4-year or 50,000 mile warranty in the United States, which actually has pretty high level consumer protection when it comes to cars. However, in my country, the E-Class has a 2-year warranty and I get the feeling that the situation might be the same in many of the other European countries. That's not that much of a warranty for a car starting at 48,071 euros (53,996 USD).
- village-idiot 8y ago
  You have to wonder if the warranty in the US extends to second purchasers. Most US leases are 3 years and 8-12k miles, meaning that the typical off lease vehicle will not exceed 36,000 miles.
  - city41 8y ago
    Most lease returns are cleaned up and sold as certified preowned cars. The CPO warranty is usually just as good (and sometimes even better) than the new car warranty.
    - Anardo 8y ago
      Very true. I purchased my last BMW two years old. It came with a two-year warranty and a two-year maintenance package.

jaredlightman 8y ago

Need to service the turbos on Land Rover LR3/4/First gen Range Rover Sport Diesels? Easier with the body off.

skookumchuck 8y ago

Mercedes has a consistent pattern, going back at least to the 1960s, of excellent design sabotaged by inferior parts here and there. (I've repaired many of them.) Fords, on the other hand, have a consistent quality. I'll never own a Mercedes.

pnutjam 8y ago
Ford? Look at the spark plugs on the triton v8... Awful

manomanowicz 8y ago

Luxury cars are very much an exercise in form over function. How easy they are to service is not a high priority like it is in every other mass market vehicle. It doesn't help they have large (often supercharged or turbocharged) displacement engines which is a challenge to package in themselves, let alone consider the ease of servicing. Their high powered, boosted engines also puts the entire powertrain under relatively high stresses causing accelerated wear out and fatigue of components. Although some durability test takes place to pick up on issues, if a design issue occurs late into the development phase it won't be fixed, if the cost to implement a change is too high. It will just become another 'service' item which has to be changed every x,000 miles. Sometimes the required technology does not exist to allow a component to last the entire life of the car so just has to be replaced at a set interval. Luxury cars are often used as the test bed for new technology. This new technology is often novel or experimental and has new unforeseen failure modes which the design engineer is unlikely to account for. The accelerated testing done during vehicle development picks up most issues but a few slip through and only present themselves during actual customer use. The quality of these any new components can also be highly variable especially if a new process or material is being used in their manufacture. If the supplier has poor process control this can lead to high failure rates. Another consideration is that luxury cars (well luxury sports cars at least) aren't driven that much - most will never reach 100,000 miles - so are designed to a lower durability than most cars. There's no point in over-engineering a component but if a customer has an extreme usage profile, they may exceed the design limits of a component. Cars are not designed for the worst case customer but rather the median usage profile. If cars were designed for the most extreme customer I imagine the cars would weight significantly more or have to use expensive exotic materials.

userbinator 8y ago
It doesn't help they have large (often supercharged or turbocharged) displacement engines which is a challenge to package in themselves, let alone consider the ease of servicing. Luxury cars now do not have significantly bigger engines than those of the past --- it's mostly the emissions control equipment and other auxillary components (including the not-so-useful plastic covers) that take up the bulk of the space and make servicing difficult. Look at the difference between a late 60s/early 70s Cadillac and one closer to today, for example: http://www.eldorado-seville.com/resources/News-/-Home/BG-enginebaysideHDR.jpg http://www.eldorado-seville.com/resources/News-/-Home/BG-eng... http://image.automotive.com/f/cadillac-xts-2013-road-test/52995606/2013-cadillac-xts-engine-bayjpg.jpg http://image.automotive.com/f/cadillac-xts-2013-road-test/52... The latter is 3.6L V6. The former is a 7.7L V8. They both have over 300HP. The former is also FWD. But the difference in serviceability is enormous.

blattimwind 8y ago

Ford EcoBoost engines that require a VERY specific oil and VERY regular oil changes (iirc something like "every 10k OR ever year, whichever is up first" or the timing belt disintegrates and you'll have immediate engine damage. Because of Ford's relatively unique construction of running a rubber timing belt in the engine oil. BMW handbrakes are notorious and have been for decades. Even when they're factory new they won't really bite.

maxerickson 8y ago
Compared to older oil and vehicles, 10,000 miles or 1 year is pretty long.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  10k kilometers. Most VW engines are on a schedule of 20-30k or 2 years, though those have other, less dramatic, issues (direct injection + AGR = dirty intake valves). And while engines don't like it when you change the oil late, they're not immediately scrap metal.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

> death by cad This is endemic (not just cars, but absolutely sodding everything), and utterly infuriating. So you end up with engines with perfectly reasonable reliability but need to be dropped out or a whole crate of ancillary parts removed just to change a water pump or clutch. Or the motorcycle oil seal that requires you to drop the engine and split the crankcases to change the £2.50 seal. The old fashion of copper bronze or needle rollers everywhere and grease nipples seems quaint and excessive, but was at least considerate of maintenance and long life. Modern metallurgy and design shouldn't take the opportunity of throwing out every good idea of history.

omginternets 8y ago
> death by cad How does this work in practice? I mean, what is it about CAD that gives this kind of result?
- adyus 8y ago
  I believe it refers to assembling things digitally without thinking about how an actual human would work with the same things in the physical world.
  - microcolonel 8y ago
    One particular instance of this I pay attention to is the placement of oil filters on motorcycles. My brother bought a Honda CBR600RR, and he wanted to replace the oil filter; I watched him spend an inordinate amount of time removing the cowling, clip by clip, screw by screw, from the bike, in order to expose the filter (which you could not get a normal filter wrench onto, because of the awkward positioning). After that I pay a lot of attention to whether the oil filter is visible and accessible from the outside of the bike without removing a cowling, Kawasaki seems to do a good job of this.
    - soverance 8y ago
      To be fair, the CBR600RR is a race replica bike, and it's designed for the track (despite having lights and a license plate). The full fairings are there for aerodynamics, the same sort you'll find tested and proven in Moto GP. Honda didn't put them there just to look cool, and ease of maintenance certainly wasn't the primary design factor.

sizzle 8y ago

How do you see fully electric cars improving over this situation you describe with low quality ICE car internals failing? For example, oil filters are no longer an issue if you opt for a Tesla. How do you service electric cars compared to ICE cars? Will the move to electric cars fundamentally hurt the car repair industry and will you have to go back to school to learn about servicing electric engines? Thanks!

village-idiot 8y ago
As it currently stands, electric cars are going to hurt the car repair industry, excepting body work. The parts on an EV either last forever, or are relatively easy to replace. This is going to be a problem for most dealerships, as repair and service is a large chunk of their profit.
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  I agree that the car repair industry will be hurting due to electric vehicles, but not for the same reasons. As Tesla has shown, locking out non-corporate repairs is easy, even body work is something you can choke out from 3rd party shops by refusing to provide parts (hence the incredible repair costs for Tesla vehicles). A profit driven electric car company can decide that any minor damage to the car will mean they push out a firmware update to brick the car. You don't own the software that makes the vehicle function, hence your at the mercy of the manufacturer letting you use their software.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > The parts on an EV either last forever For now. It's an iron law of the market economy that once this sector becomes competitive, costs will get optimized to the point that - like currently with ICE cars - the reliability will be lowest possible that they can get away with. There's no law of physics saying EVs are built reliably; there just isn't enough economic incentive to start building low-reliability parts. That will change as EVs gain popularity.
  - village-idiot 8y ago

rorykoehler 8y ago

>'make it work.' This is a major problem with capital taking over industries. Financiers don't care and also don't remotely understand what is happening in the details. Technologists running companies at least have the high level insights required to make nuanced decisions regarding whether to move fast or focus on quality. Finance just cares about the quarterly figures and we end up with a make it work rather than make it good approach to building tech. As long as we're making money who cares right. The Boeing scandal is a good example of this.

andrekandre 8y ago
that’s definitely a big factor for sure, at least in my experience... maybe our definitions of “technologist” is different, but i think even with technologists it’s important to understand that just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should (e.g alan kay’s “reverse vandalism”), and is still a danger with regard to entrepreneurship/business vs what is actually “good” for the world... i think there is a lot to re-examine about how and why we do things...
- rorykoehler 8y ago
  Yes I definitely agree re your reverse vandalism point. It's another dimension of the same issue.
- slfnflctd 8y ago
  I believe the phrase is "inverse vandalism". Terrific point regardless. When it's easier to create things that work 'good enough', not as much work will be put into making things as great as they can possibly be.

grosswait 8y ago

A major driver of this "cheapness" is weight reduction, which has been drive by CAFE and similar laws. It's a trade off. Want a transmission with enough meat in the casing to take replaceable bearings, or even enough to machine in a bushing? Adds weight. Make that decision hundreds, maybe thousands of times and it all adds up. However, I agree that there are some obvious decisions I disagree with choosing the weight reduction.

nostrademons 8y ago
I don't understand why mass market cars (often by the same manufacturer) get better fuel economy and yet need to be serviced less frequently, then. A Toyota Corolla will do 300k miles fairly easily and yet gets better mileage than a Lexus. The cynic in me says it's price segmentation. People who buy luxury cars have the disposable income to throw away several thousand a year in repair bills and pay more for gas to boot. In fact, if they buy the car to signal that they have disposable income to burn, it's actually better for their purposes if it has terrible reliability. It shows that they have the means to not care. So it's a win-win-win-win all around: the car manufacturer extracts more for the car, the dealers extract more for service, the luxury car buyer gets to show off their wealth, and the mass market buyer gets a car on razor-thin margins that are subsidized by the luxury buyer.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  I mean a Corolla has less power, weight and smaller wheels, and arguably better aerodynamics (looks count less, needs less cooling, smaller size). Also, a Corolla will have more inherit more R&D, uses less of new tech, etc. >they buy the car to signal that they have disposable income to burn I agree with you there.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  There's also the matter of tuning the design. There are features, design decisions, and engine loads you have to reject if you want high reliability. If those fall into faster acceleration, better ride, more convenience, then the luxury market will get them and the economy market won't.