I hope this isn’t too obvious of a question, but I’ve always wondered if the engineers who design cars actually know how to fix their own cars (whether or not it’s the same brand/model they’ve designed). Is there a sufficient disjoint between what the engineers know of their own designs, and the methods that mechanics use (or came up with themselves) to fix said cars? How closely do the fields of automotive engineering and car repair intersect?
I have heard anecdotally that many engineers don’t even know how to change their own oil. That isn’t being condescending really. Designing something and repairing it are two different things. For one, automotive engineers likely only design some small part of the car individually or as part of a term so they will probably not be in that great of a position unless the system they designed failed.
Secondly, engineering and repair are not very related. The engineer knows the system as it is supposed to be theoretically and will probably not be aware that the given car model is prone to failure on a certain part unlike a mechanic who may have fixed the same thing many times before. Car repair also requires hands on experience with certain tools, techniques, and procedures. An engineer may not know the skills or the tips and tricks to getting it done.
OTOH, the car mechanic will most likely be much less able to talk about the precise metal composition of the engine block and why it was built that way.
Not an automotive engineer, but I’m a mechanical engineer and have in the past done some consulting (structural analysis and dynamic simulation) for the automotive industry. There are two types of engineer in the automotive world; the hardcore gearheads who had the gumption to go to engineering school rather than be mechanics–these are the guys who build jet turbine-powered cars in their garage–and engineers for whom automotive is just a job (the majority). We have a guy downstairs who worked three years on powertrains for one of the Big Three, and I swear the guy can’t change his oil. (He’s a materials guy, not a design engineer, but still.)
So, to answer your question; there’s nothing about engineering schooling that prepares you to work on cars. I didn’t have a single class about internal combusion engines or powertrains, and although I can tell you all about the thermodynamics, mechanism dynamics, structural design, various methods of automated manufacture, hydroforming, et cetera, we didn’t actually take apart a single engine component or replace a broken water pump. There are a few token labs where you get to turn a wrench, program a PLC, measure brake horsepower from an engine, whatever, but these are faint introduction to entire fields, totally insufficient to make you even marginally competent, much less pull the tranny out of your Olds 98.
Stranger
That’s really interesting. What actually prompted me to ask this question is that I’m currently taking an introductory automotive repair adult class at my local vo-tech. During one of the lectures, our instructor (an ASE-certified master technician) told us that “the engineers just design the cars. It’s up to us [meaning the mechanics] to figure out how to fix them. They don’t really give us any clues or assistance – once the car’s off the production line, it’s all up to us.” I wanted to see if this was really true. Looks like it is, and really quite fascinating, actually. 
Rick could speak to this more directly from the repair tech side, but generally the engineers design it (hopefully with some thought to ease of maintanence), car manufacturer master techs (with much help from tech writers and illustrators) write the service manual (with input from engineers regarding service intervals, range of oils and fluids that can be used, et ceterta) and train all of the factory-certified technicians.
The other thing you have to recognize is that no one engineer is responsible for the little details on any one system, much less the entire car. The coolant is one system, the fuel system is another, brakes, suspension, restraints, environmental control, transmission, engine, electrical, et cetera, and this is assuming that these systems are even designed in house–frequently, major components (sometimes the entire powertrain) are sourced externally. Hardly anyone builds actual axles, and suspension components are almosst always sourced from outside. So no engineer knows the entire car. On the other hand, while some techs might be more expert than others about particular systems, a mechanic generally has to be able to work on any part of the car, from the headlights to the tailpipe and everything in between.
Stranger
Based solely on the parenthetical remark, it would be my guess that no automotive engineer has so much as seen a wrench or screwdriver in the last 40 years.
My brother-in-law is an engineer for GM. He designed the drive chain on a new car that’s supposed to be coming out next year. (Some sort of hybrid. I don’t remember. Talki8ng about cars makes my eyes glaze over.)
He doesn’t need to do any maintenance. He doesn’t actually own a car. GM lets him drive cars from their fleet. He just picks out whichever one suits his needs and signs it out. I’d imagine most engineers have the same perks.
I seem to recall on Michael Moore’s short-lived TV series, he decided to call out the presidents of GM, Chrysler and Ford. His particular challenge was to have them change the oil in their personal cars.
As expected, he got run out of GM and Chrysler. As not expected, the head guy at Ford (I forget who it was) came out, shook Moore’s hand and changed his own oil and filter in about 15 minutes.
This raises the issue of what the engineer/designer’s responsibility is for the engine.
On one side, they have the bosses/marketing people/salespeople telling them that the engine has to have X horsepower and Y torque and Z all the other numbers that look good in the sales brochures, has to fit into a space of A x B x C inches, use the same auxiliary parts that five other models under three marquees use, squeeze in a huge battery, twenty-four sensors, and a gigantic windshield washer fluid container, and weigh twelve pounds less than last year’s model.
On the other, they have the franchisees who tell them that they’re losing money because their mechanics need to spend so much extra time trying to get at all of these parts.
Who do they listen to the most? What is their responsibility? How do they balance all of these demands? These are serious questions.
That depends on what manufacturer you’re talking about. GM is (in particular) notably bad about making things accessible for maintanence. I never had much luck with British cars (and sadly, they required a lot of work). The Germans, with a few notable exceptions (anybody change the oil on an Audi 4000?) tend to make their vehicles more accessible to work on, and the Japanese, for the most part, make maintainability a priority. The old 1.6/1.8 litre Subarus, for instance, were a dream to work on (once you pull the spare tire off the engine, and even the large 2.2/2.5 litre engines are quite accessible. I’ve had similar experiences with Toyota and Nissan, though not quite as recently. I can climb under my Subaru Legacy and change the oil in about ten minutes without even putting it up on stands, and a full service takes less than 45 minutes. ('Course, I figure I spend about 5% as much time and money maintaining a Subaru as the typical Eighties-era GM car, so the easier maintanence is just a bonus on top of not having to regularly fix and replace things to begin with.)
Honestly, this is all program management stuff, above the detail level engineering. If the program leads are doing their job, they have the engine lead and the suspension lead talk to the industrial designer who shapes the body so that you don’t have big bulbous protrusions bulging out of the hood (witness the first model year Ford Probe) and have the person responsible for the electrical harness talking to the guy responsible for the fuel injection system so that you don’t have to splice on extra pony harnesses (several Chrysler products in the Eighties), et cetera. In the end, you either hang together, or you hang seperately. And when your project is run and directed by a marketing person…Og help you, no technical objection will be heard. There’s a reason Porsche has been selling an evolution of the same model for over forty years; because they’ve always made engineering a priority.
Stranger
Stranger, the Pony Cars of the late 60s/early 70s were worse, with things like needing to pull the engine to reach the last spark plugs (Mustangs w/429s, obviously a special case). With my 77 Nova, OTOH, you only needed a special effing wrench to do it, but it had a 305 V8 like roughly two thirds of the Novas of that body style, so I think the answer to the OP is, “Apparently, no.”
OTOH, my '84 Colt could be dismantled almost entirely with a 12mm socket wrench and a Philips screwdriver.
To support Shagnasty, my own claim to automotive-ish fame is a wheel lug for a tractor. NOBODY designs everything anymore.
Um, not that my Nova was a pony car, though it could smoke a somewhat earlier Camaro with a 350 by virtue of both the same BHP and several hundred pounds less mass.
The challenges that the car engineer and the guy that write the technical manuals face is in a word, daunting. The engineers work on one part of the car. They design their widget and all the other engineers design their widgets and off it goes to the packaging department. These are the guys anyone who works on cars hate. They decide what goes where. You know that bolt that in order to remove required you to dismount 3 other things? Cuss the packaging department.
Once the car gets out of packaging the methods workshop gets a hold of some prototypes to write the repair procedures. They talk to the design engineers who for the most part don’t work on cars (for sure not for a living, many do for a hobby) then using prototype cars they write service procedures. sometimes cars change from prototype to production. Add to that the methods guys are not journeyman technicians. For the most part they are technical writers. This means that many times they did not write the procedure in the easiest / fastest / most efficient manner.* Add to that the instructions have to translated into 21 other languages you have a recipe for disaster. [Funny Story] I met some trainers from Russia once at a meeting. We got to talking. They mentioned that in their parts catalog a washer (for a bolt) translated as a “Washing machine” in Russian[/fs]
The bottom line is that a good portion of the time, there is a faster easier way to do the job. The difference between a hack and a master technician is the ability to tell which is which.
Like Kenny Rodgers once said, You got to know when to hold em, and know when to fold em…
*They also many times use pieces of a car that is not complete such as an engine on a stand. I once wrote a critique of a procedure that required, I shit you not, 7 hands to complete. This was because they wrote the procedure for an engine on a stand, and this was a procedure that was done with the engine inside the car. The guys at the factory also sometimes have a bad case of NFH. Not From Here. When I sent in my critique with the note that we were going to have to start cross breeding technicians with octopi in order to do this procedure, I got a scathing letter back inviting me to STFU.
Being the smart ass that I am I offered to fly to Sweden on my own dime to watch the writer of the letter do the procedure exactly written. If he could do it I would apologize, if not he had to re-write the damn thing. I am still waiting for a reply.
I used to own a Daihatsu Feroza (I think that translates as a Daihatsu Rocky in American). Having worked on various things prior (including a (*&#%!& Mark II Jag) my jaw used to drop when I would discover neat little holes specifically drilled in nearby components in precisely the right places to allow easy access for screwdrivers etc It was a revelation that something could be so thoroughly designed.
It appears to me that either the designers of automobiles know exactly what they are doing in designing cars that are difficult and expensive to service or they are klutzes.
With a background of doing your own mechanical work, why would they design cars to be nearly impossible to service without a fortune in specialized tools, equipment, and training for each model/brand?
The guy in the middle.
He is apparently missing in the car industry and elswhere.
The difference between a good product and a great product is starting with an overall sense of unity of purpose and a knowledge of how things are done by all parties to production. Without a unity of purpose the ‘engine room’ “grows like Topsy.”
Other depts. also want their piece of the action.
Sales wants sale’s appeal and low cost to consumer.
Accounting: max. profit.
Management: bottom line.
Production: ease of manufacture.
Etc. etc. etc.
Most component or subassembly design engineers design, I think, for ease of manufacturability. Disassembly and repair are not give much, if any, consideration.
Not really, depending on the exact job. The fact is, most engineers don’t get that perk at all. During certain phases of a new model launch, though, one often has the opportunity to drive pre-production vehicles for a few days, though. It’s kind of fun when it’s a completely new model and people haven’t every seen them on the road before.
Because dealer service departments have everything they need. There’s not much call for driveway tinkering these days on modern cars. I mean, are you going to change your own transmission?
No, it’s not the car he is designing that he gets to drive. GM maintains a fleet of vehicles that employees can use. As an example, he checked out a Hummer because the family was going camping during the summer, and when he came to visit us last time, he had selected a sedan because it had On Star. Every time I see him, he has a different car which he chose based on what he needed at the time.
Sometimes, not even the former.
There’s a whole culture at any given manufacturer as to how much emphasis they’re going to place on any one area of concern, e.g. servicability, reliability, safety, ergonomics, et cetera. All of this costs time-money and requires engineering talent (rather than a bunch of people sitting around a conference table bullshitting and arguing about formalities). In the Detroit automakers, the attitude has long been that cars should only last a moderate lifetime (60-80k miles) and that service should be performed by the dealer with all of the specialized tools and shop manuals available. The Japanese have (for the most part) had the opposite tack; cars should be simple, reliable, easy to maintain, and intuitive to work on. It is also perhaps noteworthy that most of the Japanese manufacturers seem to focus on reusing and evolving powertrain designs (and thus retain lessons learned from previous mistakes), so there is often considerable similarity from model year to model year and even across lines, a concept other automakers took years to figure out for themselves.
The Big Three just aren’t all that focused on what happens to the product after it gets out the door. As long as it looks good (if you think cladding on dozens of pounds of plastic is “good looking”) and runs okay for the first 10k miles, then they’ve done their job. If knobs start faling off the dashboard at 30k miles, you have to replace the alternator at increments of 45k, and the electrical harness starts corroding or being stained apart six months after the car drives of the lot, that’s the owner’s problem. They’ve gotten somewhat better about that, but not as good as they should or could be.
Stranger