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.
How does this work in practice? I mean, what is it about CAD that gives this kind of result?
CAD is great for making stuff fit - once. In combination with the progression toward write once manufacturing, the only consideration is the cost and complexity of assembly. Can our factory robots and CNC do this? Can we reduce the component count? Can we use one-time moulded clips in place of those machine screws? Some is driven by cost saving, much by the purely mental visualisation capability of the new process.
Maintenance, even regular expected and necessary maintenance, increasingly takes a distant back seat. What once took 20 minutes to change now takes half a day. It now fits in a difficult corner or got combined with a dozen other systems making it now a £500 replacement.
It's visible top to the tiny fractions at the very bottom - saving fractions of a penny on self-tappers or clips self moulded into the single injection plastic where once (in ancient times like the 1990's) there'd be a small metal captive nut or bracket to bite into, or real machine screws and nuts.
Any and all of these can take years off expected lifespan mainly for the saving of pennies or a production step.
The most interesting trend, obviously, is that people are just buying fewer of them, so it will soon be a moot point.
Doing maintenance never has mass-market appeal.
The best approach, in my opinion, is actually the opposite of what most mechanics (or MechE/EE people) will say: we should try to achieve as much as possible in software, with the absolute simplest hardware.
Consider that an electric car, the fastest growing product in the category, has a considerably simpler engine and drive train. The software rules the roost there. It's just a coil. The engine and batteries are not really maintainable (they're certainly recyclable).
There's a lot of knowledge tied up in what you're saying, which is a really interesting point of view. But optimizing ICE vehicles and their attendant maintenance is sort of a dead end.
Then again, I'm agreeing with the general idea: CAD is bad. But what should the right response be? Don't buy things that need CAD designs at all!
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.
Honda didn't put them there just to look cool, and ease of maintenance certainly wasn't the primary design factor.
They built measuring equipment and software that allowed the companies to squeeze the biggest engine possible into the smallest compartment.
Costs have big impacts on manufacturing. Saving $0.50 on some little widget may allow for much bigger savings in the build process. There’s also a general goal to make minute cost changes just to eliminate inflation without retooling.
The thing is designing for that costs a fair bit, just take a look at the step from riding lawn mower (~$2k) to garden tractor(~$15k) for similar horsepower. It's not a direct apples to apples comparison but does go to show how much more something overbuilt can run.
I'm sure their tinier on the B/BX line but those also have a lower flow and capacity.
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.
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-eng...
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.
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.
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.
I see something similar with high-end phones (particularly iPhones). Every reasonable practical concern takes a backseat to making the thing as thin as possible. The result is a phone with mediocre battery life, antenna problems, and a body about as impact-resistant as an egg.
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.
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.
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).
I think most people prefer to pay someone else, luxury marque or not. Not everyone has the skills, knowledge and tools to do maintenance beyond topping up the washer fluid.
> They are ok with paying someone else to do it
Yep, I'd rather pay someone that knows what they're doing - that doesn't mean I want to get ripped off though. BTW, a tip for car owners - always haggle on service costs. I've been a car owner for 20 years, and every time I've asked, the dealer has offered a discount, just because I asked.
> cars come with long warranties these days anyway
At least in the UK, the luxury car makers (e.g. BMW, Mercedes) come with a 3 year warranty, same as they have for a long time. This is short by comparison to Kia's 7 year warranty, and I seem to recall Hyundai offers a 5 year warranty.
Of course, if you need to actually claim on the warranty, that's when the fun and games might start... I've never actually had to claim on the BMW and Mercedes I've owned, but I've had a hell of a time getting pissed about by Nissan and just assumed other makers did the same.
When I was working as a mechanic, we had a few customers with land rovers (most of our business was trucks & SUVs). The land rover owners had to pay roughly 2x for everything, simply because the cars are so much more time consuming to work on. And from family members who have owned them, BMW & Mercedes are just as bad, albeit slightly more reliable. If it is time consu3and a PITA, the customer will be charged more.
Consider that the cost of man years of engineering is essentially irrelevant to the cost of a vehicle.
(of course the total engineering costs are going to be significant, I'm talking about incremental costs of spending time thinking about how to make vehicles a bit nicer here or there)
They are also backed up by great guarantees (5 years without mileage limit in case of Hyundai, and 7 years from Kia).
African markets used to love Peugeot 504 and Mercedes E 200. Extremely reliable in harsh conditions.
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.
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/Blu-ray#Java_software_interfac...
The latest 2019 Land Cruiser (not the US luxury version) is nearly identical to the version sold 30 years ago.
As for the Toyotas, they can become the Ship of Theseus, they can live forever, as long as there is demand.
- 3D printing + open/royalty free
- Modular car, speaking to a car designer, they said it'll cost a lot, there's safety issues and laws (ie cage)
I had the impression 6k miles is the standardized recommended interval for most brands (e.g. my current Subaru) but I guess that isn’t true for Lexus?
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.
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...
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.
"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.
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.
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!
This is going to be a problem for most dealerships, as repair and service is a large chunk of their profit.
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.
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.
Fords, on the other hand, have a consistent quality.
I'll never own a Mercedes.
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.
[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.
BMW handbrakes are notorious and have been for decades. Even when they're factory new they won't really bite.
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.