I take advantage to your comment to write this PSA (that probably you already know):
All transmissions require maintenance, and even manual ones. Those automatic tagged as 'maintenance free' from the brand aren't, and if you call the manufacturer of that transmission, Getrag, ZF, or whatever it is, they should say which ATF and filters it needs and in what interval.
If you do maintenance with an independent technician (not a dealership or a "Jiffy Lube") with some good reputation, they probably help with that
[insert rant here about BMW's "lifetime" fluid in the 4L30E that they used in E36s]
Checking that state of the fluid isn't difficult, as is bright red when it's new, and turns more and more brown when it's used, and it's mostly used normally between 50k and 100l AFAIK.
Buying the required fluid, and filter if needed, is as easy as looking it in the internet or going your local AutoZone, O'Reillys, AAP, or whatever you have near btw
That's why I was wondering how to contact GM about the 4L30E that they built and sold to BMW, as was suggested.
Yeah, but getting to the fluid to see it is hard. They stopped putting in dipsticks, so hopefully there's a check plug somewhere you can get to.
I just drain mines and refill to specified amount, I've never once cared for a check plug and just change it every ~50k miles on most of my cars, regardless of color. It's usually not an expensive fluid.
I mean: Automotive fluids tend to shrink over time, for a wide variety of reasons. (And sometimes, they get bigger, which is usually even worse.)
How do you know that it has the correct level?
1. The drain hole is below the fill hole - open drain hole and empty using good old fashioned gravity.
2. Close drain hole.
3. Open fill hole.
4. Fill till it starts leaking out the fill hole.
5. Close the fill hole.
Not especially complex most of the time! Transmission fluid does not really shrink much over time, its a sealed system and it doesn't burn off the way engine oil can. Just doing it at regular intervals like 50k miles is absolutely fine on a lot of cars. If you really do care about hitting some specific quantity of fluid - you know exactly how much you are pouring into the fill hole, you can even measure exactly what came out the drain hole, but this probably is not remotely necessary.
On the E36, which has no prescribed transmission service interval or dip stick, there are two transmission sumps -- and only one of them has a drain plug. Replacingh the fluid means pulling one sump off completely...and pre-filling it prior to reinstallation.
On the Honda, which has a regular interval for transmission fluids and a dip stick, the fill plug is on top of the transmission. It would be a bad thing to fill it to that level. (I just refill using the dip stick tube.)
Also, I'd like to add that I am envious of the fact that you have never experienced a leak in any automatic transmission.
Not all modern transmissions have a filter
No, it required a whole new headlight assembly, $800 plus labor.
Funnily enough, the car got totalled shortly after, before I had decided to go ahead with the repair. Someone hit my SO as she was in a roundabout, and the impact moved the car several meters. Cracked the carbon fiber chassis. Estimated repair cost was 1.5x price of a new car.
So, never got the pleasure of finding out how much labor would have been for replacing the headlight unit. I'm assuming it would have been a lot more than for replacing a light bulb...
Although im starting to suspect my mechanic is taking me for a ride
Also: It's a hard top convertible. The mechanicism stopped fully opening or closing. Bummer. Two repair shops gave ridiculous quotes to troubleshoot and repair.
Using a scanner (generic OBD II scanner with BMW's specific codes), we narrowed the search. The ultimate fix was just two $15 switches. Being noobs, it took us some effort to detach and reattach the hard top.
I don't mind the labor effort (costs). It is a BMW after all. But it's ridiculous that these cars can't report their failing electronic bits.
I have a 2018 Subaru Outback. I got in a fender bender that caused the right front headlight unit to snap near the top bolt where it attached to the car. I found out when my car failed inspection.
I called the dealership and they quoted me $500 just for the headlamp. I went on rock auto and bought one for $250 and installed it. I had to take the front bumper off the car to install the headlamp. Passed inspection after I installed it though so it was all good. Just can’t believe they were marking up parts like that.
what exactly were the rivian engineers thinking?
* You control when you sell and pay tax, sell in small amounts when not working to minimize tax, compounding gains are not taxed until sale, death allows tax free passing to children.
I wont even get into salary sacrifice!
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...
if you can find a good mechanic friend, and pay with beer and pizza, you'd be much more likely to be successful.
The engine block and rotating assembly might. But all the crap that is bolted on won't.
Several engines are known for having the turbocharger fail. Which is now integrated in the exhaust manifold.
Timing components are junkier and junkier these days. And somewhere in the 2000's, some of the manufacturers decided to make complicated systems where cylinders deactivate to allow for fuel savings, and those are all an unreliable mess.
"Totaled" to an insurance company means they think the cost of repair at their contracted rates is more than the cost of paying out the "value" of the car. It is a business assessment, not an assessment of the vehicle.
In Illinois, you can only retain a totaled vehicle if it was hail damage or it's a "vintage (9+ yr old) car.
It's not your car anymore, so obviously you don't get to drive it.
The average age of a car is like 13 years old. Most people are definitely not buying new ones every 5 years.
The real blocker I dont mention is time. Your shop will need that car for a few days and shipping will take time too. At some point the wait isnt worth it anymore. The upside is, 2 used Toyotas are still cheaper than a new one new Toyota
I knew a kid changing turbos in Mk4 VWs on his lunch break. He had time to drive home, replace a turbo, and drive back to the shop.
Shop was still going to charge a few hours.
Labour last time I had front shocks and struts done? 3 hours not including the alignment.
Friend's brake job? 2.5 hours - they were 4 wheel disk, what was the mechanic doing for the other 2h?
The other thing that people don't talk about as much is the parts market got seriously messed up during COVID and still hasn't fully recovered. It's more common now for repair parts to either be unavailable or enormously marked up. Like a particular repair might only take a few hours and what should be a few hundred bucks in parts, but the car gets totaled because one of the parts is unavailable or inexplicably costs thousands and the shop doesn't want the liability of hacking together an alternative solution. Especially if the missing part is an ECM or sensor or something else that might make the car fail an inspection.
I don't think anybody is replacing my transmission for $500.
Did you mean the whole job for less than $5000?
There isn't an automation in the world that will take enough of the car apart for you. Or at least my mechanic friends haven't found it.
Will keep waiting for AI to grow itself some arms.
On most cars the transmission is probably the biggest failure liability- I pretty much only drive manuals for that reason, doing a clutch is a lot cheaper than replacing an automatic, and the better you are at driving it the less you need to do it.
What "automation" innovations have lowered the cost of unbolting a heavy transmission out the back of an engine and attaching a new one??
As best I can tell, the process has been unchanged in a workshop for nigh on 40 to 50 years at this point - it's humans with wrenches and a car lift. I want to see this shop that will swap me a trans for under 500 bucks too...
A transmission rebuild refreshes consumables like bronze bearings and seals, damaged pinions are replaced, and the rest are machined back to precision spec. This is cheaper than a used transmission. I paid less than a thousand for this service, when the quality used goes for $4k.
Boats and airplanes are just as reliable when old as new because they're maintained well- and cars are the same. If you maintain an old car well, it doesn't really ever wear out, and stays as reliable as a new car.
It's also massively cheaper to maintain an old car well then to buy new ones even if you pay someone else to do it. People complain when they get a $1000 repair bill every few years for an older car so they will say "it's getting unreliable" and then consider paying up to $1000 a month for a new one. There is a middle ground where you pay maybe $1000-2000 every year to stay on top of stuff, and it stays reliable indefinitely.
Moreover, an older high end car is just so much nicer than a new car in the same price range. You can buy a well maintained low mileage older but high end Porsche, Audi, etc. for well under $10k on Craigslist these days and you'd have to be a car nerd to know it's not a new model. Is it cheap to maintain well? Not exactly, but it will be 1/10th the cost of a car payment on a new low end economy car, and you're driving a high end car. Plus, when you buy a 20 year old high end car and maintain it well, it will appreciate rather than depreciate in value. My daily driver is an older Porsche, and in 3 years of driving it, it has probably appreciated in value enough to make all of the maintenance, insurance, etc. free- basically a free car if you don't count the space in my garage it uses to keep it nice.
I have an oldish (1997) exotic car as a toy. It cost less upfront than a new Toyota Camry. At a car meet, I overheard someone say to their friend "Man, if I had infinite money, this is what I'd get". I definitely do not own a money printing machine.
Maintenance is something else but I do the work myself so it's not bad. And the fun thing about old low volume exotics is that they are mostly parts bin cars. Tons of shared components are easily available.
It's funny the general reactions I get- young men try to race me at stoplights, and strangers on the street will often give me a defiant fist or middle finger, as if I represent the wealthy exploitative class, in what is likely the cheapest car that has driven by in half an hour.
I enjoy working on cars, so that helps make it cheap.
It was uncomfortable at first having people oogle over the car and make assumptions, but the number of conversations it has started with people genuinely interested in it definitely outweighs the awkwardness.
People just assume that anything sporty looking is ruinously expensive.
For really critical things like through hulls below the waterline on boats, plastic pipes like glass filled nylon (Marelon) are considered safer and more reliable than metal, because they never corrode, and are much physically stronger than a comparable weight metal part.
I grew up with 1970s European cars where every plastic or rubber part would fail eventually, but by the 90s the materials got much better.
If safety is important, someone with cheap new economy car money can instead get into a high end vehicle well known for its safety and quality, still for a lot less money.
Sure, if you are going to compare something over 30+ years old, and from a manufacturer not known for safety or quality in the first place, it will be a lot more dangerous.
Still, even with old stuff it varies. Late 80s Mercedes and Volvos, even base models, for example had most of the modern safety tech that other cars didn't see for a very long time.
Weight is also a huge factor- a big old truck with no regard for safety in its design is still a lot safer than a light economy car in a collision. Probably the safest cars on the market are still the over-engineered 20 year old full sized luxury SUVs that weigh as much as a 3/4 ton truck and have tons of heavy offroad gadgets they don't put on SUVs anymore.
Once in a while I see repair videos on cars from mechanics in Florida, Texas, Arizona, or Southern California. The car will be 15 years old and everything underneath will look entirely brand-new (minus some dust and scratches) compared to a brand-new car here that has seen only a winter or two.
Are you sure every car? Some of the higher end European cars have a hot dipped galvanized frame. Volvo advertised pretty heavily that the 1980s 740s were galvanized… I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some that ended up out here on the west coast from the midwest and you can’t undo a suspension bolt, but the chassis was fine.
You could always buy a used car out of state and drive it back.
The only cars with aluminum frames are luxury/sports cars, and the Honda Insight from like 20 years ago. Some newer cars have aluminum bodies (F-150?) but not aluminum frames which makes no sense to me. Steel car bodies last a _very_ long time these days, compared to the frames.
...and then they implement some new laws which state that cars older than year X are no longer allowed within zone Y because of emissions (think 'ULEZ' in London or variations on the 'Milieuzone' in several Dutch cities). A few years later they update X to (X + a few years) and expand Y to (Y + the rest of where you want to go). They'll also write into law that you can not adapt your car to abide by the required emissions standards, no no, buy a newer car you shall.
This is common practice in many European countries, if there is no US equivalent yet there will be one soon enough.
It's really important to have some "pride of ownership" in an older car, and fix anything that isn't perfect immediately- so they don't build up over time and make you feel like the whole vehicle isn't nice to use or own anymore.
I think a lot of waste goes into maintaining cars cosmetically.
Can you give some examples? The only safety innovation I can think of recently the side airbags. The backup camera, which is a huge improvement to backing up accidents was probably over 15 years ago.
Regardless of tech like changes in crumple zone design, you also can't negate the safety benefits of substantially better brakes, handling, driver comfort, and road visibility from a better designed car made with higher end parts and materials.
I keep seeing manufacturers spam in my engineering newsletters that point towards batteries that last 500,000 to maybe a million miles. And I know that electric motors can go that far. Potentially talking about cars that last 40-50 years.
You can imagine that makes the investor class unhappy, cause maybe the number of cars sold will drop.
But a frame. Can't really replace a frame. You can _sometimes_ repair it. You can buy some time by paying for an oil-based undercoating every year, but finding someone who will do it affordably _and_ do a good job is hard. (It's a messy, annoying job.)
I sort of want congress to mandate stainless steel or aluminum frames in all cars sold in the US, and I don't even care if it makes the cars cost more. It won't happen via state laws because the auto manufacturers are big campaign donors around here.
I’ve started buying high mileage cars that are roughly 2 years old. Essentially off lease vehicles, but more likely some sort of corporate vehicle.
Rust is by far my biggest enemy. I’ve never had an engine or transmission go. Really haven’t even had any major components go either.
But rust, rust just kills everything under the car.
Paint alone will chip due to gravel and start rusting away.
Are you saying the "rust belt" region of the US, named for its history of steel manufacturing, is an area where cars rust more? Cars rust more where salt is used to deice roads. Salted roads overlap with the rust belt, but they are not related.
The big problem here is survivorship bias - the cars that did last will likely keep lasting. You see this with notoriously terrible cars like 1980s Jaguars. The owners have persisted through various catastrophic failures that would make ordinary people abandon the vehicle, so you end up with a subset of Jags that run nicely and have all the engineering problems sorted out by the after market.
Speaking as a master diesel mechanic, this is a deleterious line of thinking for anyone with less than a few million dollars. Every car has 20 years of parts, and most Japanese cars have closer into 50 years of parts. Any engine built after 2010 will likely last half a million miles or more as a feature of quality control and automation alone.
Maintaining a well running vehicle long term with a local mechanic is always cheaper than buying a new car every 5 years, and just because insurance says its "totaled" doesn't mean it isnt fixable and safe to drive.