7 ms·

It’s funny how I extrapolate car design sessions in my head based on software design sessions. I sold my bmw after 15 years of multiple bmws because their desi

• potato3732842 10mo ago
  What you're describing is the stereotype for "rich west europe" engineering culture. Every now and then you see it leak out into some other environment, like Toyota and their pull-apart ball joints that "aren't an issue" because "the user will just service it on schedule" where it reliably causes problems in all sorts of dumb ways (because like anything else, designing stuff to within an inch of it's life takes practice). Now, don't get me wrong, this European approach creates a lot of cool highly performant products, but it's stuff that tends to fall on it's face real good if you violate any of the assumptions made when designing it and the approach is naturally suited to some products more than others.
  • giamma 10mo ago
    Here is an American example, Fox suspensions. Fox is one of the main producers of bicycle suspensions. Great products, but check their service intervals for a fork [0], 125 hours. Now if you practice mountainbike you may ride your bike 1 to 5 times a week. Let's say you only ride once a week for 4 hours: 125 / 4 = 31, you would need to service your fork every 31 weeks. Add some few more rides and you have to service the fork twice a year. Each service easily costs $150 if done by a bike shop. If you do it yourself (plenty of tutorials on youtube), you need expensive special tools, oil, special grease and spare o-rings and seals easily costs 30-40$ for every service. And you have to properly dispose the old oil. [0] https://tech.ridefox.com/bike/owners-manuals/2979/fork--2025-36mm-or-38mm#serviceintervals https://tech.ridefox.com/bike/owners-manuals/2979/fork--2025...
    • bradyd 10mo ago
      That service interval is pretty common across all bike suspension forks (and dropper posts are usually only around 50 hours). A SR Suntour fork has a 100 hour maintenance interval, for example. https://www.manualslib.com/manual/3730626/Sr-Suntour-Durolux38x-Boost.html?page=17#manual https://www.manualslib.com/manual/3730626/Sr-Suntour-Durolux...
      • deleted 10mo ago
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• eptcyka 10mo ago
  > 9 things have to happen in sequence This is literally how all software works. Except it is thousands of instructions. Further, it is very often that programs don’t handle anything besides the happy path.
  • deleted 10mo ago
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  • prepend 10mo ago
    I like to think I design my programs to handle many situations and to be able to function with many parts that still fail.
• jlarocco 10mo ago
  It's not just BMW, it's basically all car manufacturers. There are several car maintenance YouTubers who complain about it for many brands. For example "The Car Care Nut" complains about Toyotas being badly designed for maintenance, questionable material choices, etc.. The problem is that $2 here and there adds up, and at the level of the whole car it can add hundreds, or thousands of dollars of extra cost for reliability that the user can't experience directly. For some percentage of owners the plastic part works fine for the whole time they have the car. On the other hand sturdier parts add expense in the case of an accident or replacing parts during routine maintenance.
  • Analemma_ 10mo ago
    BMW has been the worst of the worst for a long time though. [0] is a representative example, but pretty much any "car brands ordered by upkeep cost" list will have BMW out on their own planet. Before Teslas really took over the "high income tech worker" market, in Seattle you used to be able to get a used BMW for quite cheap, because all the Microsoft and Amazon workers would lease them and then they'd go on the used market when the lease was up. I actually considered doing this, but multiple mechanics said very bluntly, "don't, this is a trap, the maintenance costs will eat you alive". [0]: https://www.crsautomotive.com/what-are-the-total-costs-of-vehicle-ownership-per-brand/ https://www.crsautomotive.com/what-are-the-total-costs-of-ve...
    • hinkley 10mo ago
      It was practically a stereotype that all of the young male H1Bs had a BMW desktop background on their work computer. I knew one guy who practically bankrupted himself by buying one the moment he thought he could afford it. The mandatory insurance got him. And then we found out he’s a terrible driver. Thing was in the shop all the time.
  • justin66 10mo ago
    I watch "The Car Care Nut" sometimes, as I've got a Toyota. Nothing I've ever seen there would lead me to put Toyota into the same maintenance cost/difficulty category as BMW or Mercedes. Consumer Reports puts them at almost opposite ends of the spectrum, as well. https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-maintenance/the-cost-of-car-ownership-a1854979198/ https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-maintenance/the-cos...
• constantcrying 10mo ago
  >I had cooling system problems that required hours of labor to get to just to replace a plastic part that cost $5 where an aluminum one would cost $7. If the car has 10 places where the manufacturer saves 2 dollars, that is 20 dollars a car. At around 2.5 Million cars shipped each year that is 50 Million Euros each year profit for BMW. The entire car industry is extremely cost sensitive, especially right now, with so much global competition and little consolidation. The issue also isn't that the part is cost optimized. The issue is that it fails.
  • formerly_proven 10mo ago
    A car (especially ICE but even EVs) consists of tens of thousands of components. People like to point at things in cars and say "why did they save five cents there? And 10 cents here?", and the simple reason is if you bump all these components up one "quality level", if you will, that's thousands of bucks just in material costs. The twenty dollars of per-car savings are not profit, they're unit cost savings, which will contribute to profit, but also price. And margins in the car industry are rather tight, buyers are cost sensitive, it's not an industry where you save 10$ on parts and are able to pocket that, I don't think.
    • constantcrying 10mo ago
      >it's not an industry where you save 10$ on parts and are able to pocket that Why not? If you pay the suppliers 20 dollars less for those parts for each car, that is pure profit. Keep in mind that cars are priced and developed for specific market segments. Cars aren't developed and then a price is decided based on what the components cost. Also keep in mind that some of the most exclusive and luxurious cars in the world (Lamborghini and Bugatti) share parts with some of the most mundane mass produced cars from VW.
• harrall 10mo ago
  Ask a car guy and they’ll tell you that German car makers have been known to be be maintenance money sinks for 40 years. But German car makers are really quick to add new technology. They were quick to add ABS, fuel injection, complex suspensions, etc. But have you ever tried to make something you built to easy to maintain? You have to reroute everything, redesign your layout, add access ports, switch fittings… my god it can take almost as much time as building the thing to begin with. As an engineering requirement, it’s a high impact one. (OK most people probably don’t build physical things they design much, but I’m sure some of you play Minecraft. Especially for those contraptions, do you add access corridors, extra access entrances, plan access into the construction? No, most people just make some tiny hole somewhere to get in. You’re just happy it works.) And at the pace some car makers add new technology, I don’t think they budget the time to go back and do that. I think with the quick pace of EV technology as well, previously more maintenance friendly car makers are in the same boat.
  • ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
    BMWs at least up to the mid-2000s are really cheap and easy to maintain. Parts are pennies, service documentation is readily available, and they're reliable enough that they last a long time with basic maintenance. Compared to stuff like Toyotas or Hondas, they practically cost nothing to keep on the road.
    • corwinxpro 10mo ago
      > Compared to stuff like Toyotas or Hondas Don't get this. I had a CR-V from 1996 (over 300k), sold it a few years ago, and can still see it cruising around the town. My previous Toyota Yaris was pretty much unkillable, just like a RAV 4 or a 1998 TLC.
      • ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
        You must live somewhere absolutely bone dry where it never gets cold enough to salt the road. We were putting Toyota Hiluxes back to the leasing company at three years and they were going straight in the crusher.
• Gravityloss 10mo ago
  Porsche had a research program about a very reliable car in the 70s. It has some odd technical choices from today's perspective. https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/when-porsche-asked-if-a-car-could-live-forever/ https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/when-porsch... One would assume taxi companies etc would be willing to pay for cars that have high uptime and reliability. But I think they drive mostly the same stuff as regular people. At least one would assume they could get beefier suspension and transmission and high displacement downtuned engines. In general new cars are still vastly better than old ones. 90:s cars rusted from everywhere after ~8 years while most cars nowadays have zinc coating and more plastic and are still mostly fine after 15 years.
  • BobaFloutist 10mo ago
    I don't think it's a coincidence that an enormous number of rideshare/delivery drivers drive priuses though. Reliable, not too expensive, low maintenance, and high mpg is kind of exactly what you'd expect them to look for.
    • BigGreenJorts 10mo ago
      Not to mention still roomy!
    • notjonheyman 10mo ago
      The only slight pain in those priuses is removing the windshield wiper assembly to get to the spark plugs closest to the firewall. It's not like they didn't have enough room in the engine bay to the left to better engineer this. But it's something that you rarely have to do. Maybe 2-3 times for the life of the car if it reaches 300k+ miles.
      • hinkley 10mo ago
        Engineers hate mechanics. How can they feel your wrath unless you specifically design a giant “fuck you” into every vehicle shipped?
      • 10mo ago
• PeterStuer 10mo ago
  My last 4 cars were BMW. I love the way they drive, but ... I think they are optimized for the EU leasing market. 4 years, 120.000km. If you buy one for long ownership and want more out of them (they can most certainly do 400=500k km reliably), you have to take care of them from day 1. You change the maitainance schedule (which by default is set to lowering fleet lease costs and who cares beyond that), learn about and do preventive maintainance (such as replacing the entire cooling around 120k km), stricktly use BMW oil (for the additives) unless you are realy knowledgeable about it, and invest in a decent fault scanner (to lnow what is going on and not just run up expensive maintainance bills at the BMW shop). If you think that's all too much hassle, just lease them short term or buy something else.
  • buserror 10mo ago
    Thats why they've been increasing the service interval to silly numbers. 3 years ago, 10k miles, now... 18k miles for the same model of car for the first service! Absolutely insane.
    • PeterStuer 10mo ago
      Yep, and remember, "lifetime" in BMW speak is 120k.km/4y, not "forever".
  • seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
    I never considered buying a BMW before they put out an EV (the i4, not the i3). One of the reasons is maintenance, the EV still needs some, but much less than an ICE.
    • watersb 10mo ago
      I'm about to change the transmission fluid in my i3. It's at 100k miles and there's no user-facing documentation for the procedure, as the oil lasts "for the lifetime of the vehicle". Turns out, this particular procedure is simple. (Other common wear items, like the suspension damper boots, or the engine mount, or the AC compressor, or a set of tires every 12000 miles ... it adds up. The i3 was a cheap acquisition. Doesn't drive like a BMW, but apparently it wears like one.)
• idiotsecant 10mo ago
  Management only cares about analyzing and completing the 'happy path' because customers only buy 'happy path'. Customers don't (with rare exceptions) buy 'unhappy path', even though statistically it is a near certainty that where they will find themselves at some point. I guarantee no engineer wanted an expensive, difficult to replace pyro fuse. Unfortunately, it doesn't particularly matter what individual engineers want, it's what the system wants, and the system wants to make money.