That’s not at all true these days, at least in the case of GM and Ford (Chrysler’s coming along, albeit a bit slowly). Warranties are better and longer because quality is now on par with the Japanese, and in some cases exceeds the Japanese. Warranty costs are down despite the longer lengths. Things-gone-wrong in all months-in-service categories are just about par. Workmanship is par. Big 3 cars (all of 'em) and the Japanese cars all have expected service lives of 150,000 miles – I don’t have any benchmarks for the Europeans, but I’d wager a guess that they’re the same (it’s an industry standard). The only thing that can distinguish Japanese and American cars these days is styling (and no, I don’t think the Avalanche, for example, looks very good ;)). Yeah, people say fuel economy, but even that’s mostly a myth.
Ya know attitudes like this kind of cheese me off. let’s compare the thrilling cars of yester-year with the a car of today.
For comparison purposes we will look at my dad’s 1958 Dodge to the 07 Volvo S 80 I am using in my new car features class.
1958 Dodge: Engine 230 Cubic inch flathead six cylinder. V8 were just starting to come into vogue in 1958. HP was very low, you could probably count the number of cars available with 300+ HP on the fingers of one hand. Power One hundred and thirty eight screaming horsepower. This was measured as SAE Gross. Much lower by today’s measurements. Service intervals Oil: 2500 miles, Spark Plugs 12,000 miles if you were lucky Engine management system Single barrel toilet bowl located on the intake Emissions Lots and lots, probably about 8% CO at idle and 1,000+ PPM HC transmission Three on the tree
Other factors Handling Yeah right. This barge might have pulled 0.4G if you were lucky. Brakes Drums all the way around. No power assist. Safety Safety, we don’t need no stinkin safety. Metal dash, no crumple zones, no seat belts, no airbags, no nuthin Climate control Came standard with 260 A/C roll down both windows and drive 60 MPH. Prepare to sweat. Heater? Yes, but marginal. Navigation Free mpas available at the local gas station. Seat Heating Standard in the summer Seat Cooling Standard in the winter Audio system Tube type AM radio
2007 Volvo S8/0
b]Engine** 4.4L V8 (268 cubic inches) Power 315 horsepower. Now a days you need a calculator to count all the 300+ HP cars available, 400+ will probably take both hands to count. Service intervals Oil 7500 miles, spark plugs 60,000 miles Engine management system Denso sequential electronic system. Able to control mixture to each cylinder individually. Emissions Very low meets ULEV II requirements. transmission Six speed automatic with manual shifting available.
Other factors Handling Somewhere over 0.8 G Available with computerized active chassis that recalibrates the shocks every seven milliseconds, driver adjustable for comfort, sport and and advanced sport. Also available is Dynamic stability control that ensures the car goes where the driver has headed it via the use of throttle, individual brakes and black magic. Brakes 4 wheel disc comes with ABS standard, emergency brake assist, electronic brake force distribution. Safety Seat belts with pre-tensioners, six air bags. Front bags are smart,a nd feature 3 stages. Bags de power if a small person is sitting there, and turn off if a child is in the front seat. Safety cage construction, crumple zones front and rear, roll over protection, side impact protection system. Climate control dual zone automatic climate system with Air quality sensor, and pollen filter Navigation DVD based satellite navigation system Seat Heating 3 levels temp is programmable Seat Cooling Audio system
Damit, how did that happen?
Anyway Seat Cooling 3 levels, fan speed programmable Audio system AM/FM 6 disc CD with Dolby pro logic. Able to play MP3 discs. iPod integration. Bluetooth hands free cell phone. Sirius satellite radio available.
After adding all of this content, the cars weigh about the same, and the Volvo is shorter and narrower.
Looking at these differences, what these auto engineers is pull a rabbit out of their hat. They have stuffed two pounds of shit into a one pound sack, and you are complaining that it requires specialized knowledge and tools to work on it. :rolleyes:
Cars are the single most technologically complex item that the average person is likely to come into close contact with.
They aren’t easy to fix. That as they say comes with the territory. Can the engineers do a better job? Sure, but the change will be incremental, not revolutionary.
You will never see a car that is as simple and easy to fix as those of the 1950s-early 1960s again. Deal with it.
Good on the Ford guy for being able to do it, but that style of tabloid journalism is something I’ve always found unfair and a cheap shot. I don’t care if the president of Ford can change the oil or not, so long as he’s good at running a multinational company. The sleazier journalists in Australia (and doubtless elsewhere) like to do this sort of thing. Usually on a slow news day, they’ll beat up a story along the lines of “The Prime Minister is Out of Touch with Ordinary Australians”, then a reporter will shove a microphone into the poor guy’s face as he’s getting out of a car, with “Mr Howard, can you tell me how much a loaf of bread costs? When was the last time you bought one?” The poor guy looks like a rabbit in the headlights, pauses for a second, then gets, “So you don’t know, do you?” Then they proceed to build a ten minute news item around this. Just like the Ford guy changing his oil, I don’t care if the Prime Minister doesn’t buy his own bread - in fact I’d prefer he didn’t. He’s supposed to be running the country. Although former Prime Minister Paul Keating got the better of one reporter:
Reporter: You don’t talk to ordinary people!
Keating: “Who says I don’t? Who says I don’t? I mean I see as many people as perhaps anyone in public life could…”
Reporter: How long is it since you’ve been to Fyshwick Markets?
Keating: “Not long, not long. In fact if you get down to woollies at Manuka on Saturday I’d probably run over you with a trolley as I did a journo recently.”
Lots of overtime made it difficult to find time to work on own car.
In design you don’t build components for every model. You fit in existing ones. Component design is done at various locations around the globe now. Lots of parts have been designed in the past to pass testing procedures. You would never start from scratch. You just fit in what they tell you to.
Up until Fyshwick Markets this exchange makes perfect sense.
I would like to request an English (or American if you prefer) translation of Mr. Keating’s response.
Keating: “Who says I don’t? Who says I don’t? I mean I see as many people as perhaps anyone in public life could…”
Reporter: How long is it since you’ve been to the food market at the Canberra suburb of Fyshwick?
Keating: “Not long, not long. In fact if you get down to the supermarket at Manuka on Saturday I’d probably run over you with a shopping cart as I did a journalist recently.”
But only because they don’t design them that way. After all, how many folks in the Fifties and Sixties rebuilt their own engines and transmissions? Probably not many. Cars could be much easier to work on (Heck, just switching the onboard computer system to one that you could connect to a home PC via USB cable so that the average Joe could know what’s wrong would be a big help.), but to do so would require a massive shift in the thinking of the auto execs and a helluvalot of money. There will always be parts that the owner shouldn’t mess with, like airbags and emissions controls come to mind, the rest of it, however, could be made fair game.
Of course, how many people are really going to want to do a lot of heavy repairs? Or live in a place where they can do them? I’m not allowed to do major car repairs where I live, so even if I had the tools and skills to pull an engine and rebuild it, my landlord would at the very least ding me for it, if not evict me. Still, it ought to be possible for someone to do simple repairs, like replace the alternator, water pump, and the like, without having to be a contortionist, or need specialized tools.
Lissa, what you’re talking about is one of the things that drove Ross Perot batty when he was at GM. The bosses were given new cars every three months (and rarely, if ever drove them) so they had no idea what was going wrong with their products.
What’s interesting, IMHO, is that one GM’s best selling vehicles, the Pontiac Solstice was basically engineered by one guy. Lutz had an idea that they needed something to compete with the Miata, so he hunted around GM until he found an engineer who’s hobby was converting Chevy Cavaliers to rear wheel drive and racing them. Lutz told him what he wanted, gave him a list of parts that he could use, and the guy built the prototype. Would that all cars were designed that way.
Automobiles are not only the most technologically complex item that the average person uses on a daily basis, but also one of the most highly engineered. If you put together all the engineering man-hours spent on automotive development over the last, say, sixty years, they’ll way exceed the efforts put into the Manhattan Project, the Apollo moon landing program, the B2 bomber, or any other technological marvel you care to mention. If you think getting access to your spark plugs is a problem 'cause the winshield fluid resevoir is in the way you should see what it takes to get the guidance wafer out of a Minuteman III, or how well the PK Transport/Erect System works (not well). And the analytical tools that have been developed specifically for and by the automotive industry (among others) are now finding their way back into high-end aerospace analysis. I’m constantly amazed at how much further ahead in the study of composite structures, weld technology, real-time embedded controls, materials science, et cetera the automotive is over the supposedly high-tech defense sector.
The fact that you can take an average modern car, drive it in environmental conditions ranging from subzero to 120F+, and expect it to survive 1000+ hours of operation without major service is actually pretty impressive. Compare this to the service interval on the pivot joint for the wings on the F-14 for instance (~50 hours flight time) and you realize that someone spent a lot of time to make a consumer product which is often exposed to extreme shock loads and environments last an impressive amount of time with high reliabiliy. (The AMC Gremlin excepted, of course.)
As for nostalgia regarding older vehicles, Rick has pretty much summed it up; modern cars provide much better safety, handling, performance, and especially reliability and efficiency than the cars of the Fifties and Sixties. There may be something to be said for the styling of some of the classics (tailfins notwithstanding) but I don’t think any stock Detroit model could hold a candle to many of the moderate-cost high performance cars available today. Heck, I drive a fairly unremarkable-looking Japanese-built sedan that can outperform an Eighties-era Porsche 911 Turbo, not to mention cars like the GTO or the Barricuda.
This is a meaningless argument. If you put together all the man-hours spent on clothing manufacture over the last, say, sixty years, they’ll way exceed the efforts put into the Manhattan Project, etc. as well.
But that includes the poor schmucks in the sweatshops sewing the same stitches over and over. It doesn’t even include clothing designers, but even there those designers are mostly just developing new styles (analogous to say, tailfins on cars - which didn’t require any new technology to install). You could only compare the clothing industry to the Manhattan Project in terms of new technology (lycra, velcro, nylon, etc) and even much of that was pioneered outside the clothing industry and just happened to find its way in. I reckon the human species has spent orders of magnitude more time and money in developing military hardware than developing t-shirts that don’t shrink in the wash.
The key phrase here is “engineering man-hours” (or “person-hours” for those so inclinded). Dynamic simulation of transient highly nonlinear materials, for instance, has been driven by tire modeling and deformable crash-protection systems. When you turn the key to your car and it starts up, there are quite literally the developments of a on the order of 100,000 man-years of engineering put into the systems (ignition, diagnostics, fuel system, emissions) that make it start smoothly and reliably.
That these systems are sometimes not easy to service is a combination of their technological complexity and the failure to smartly integrate them into the whole vehicle, which is, again, a cultural thing among different manufacturers.
I came across this question because I was searching to see if there is an answer to a question I’ve been pondering: how many engineers does it take to design an automobile?
I’m an engineer in the automotive industry, I’ve been working as an engineer for 15 years and all but 3 of those have been for automotive companies. I’ve had jobs at tier 1 suppliers and OEM’s. Currently I work on headliners.
I think the answer to the question in its simplest form is: yes, automotive engineers fix their own cars. I do, and I’m sure at least 1 other one does.
I very seriously believe though that the answer is much more regional. In the metropolitan Detroit area, any native born automotive engineer is more likely than not to have at some point worked on their own car. I’ve met a lot of engineers at locations outside of metro Detroit, possibly LA not withstanding, and I couldn’t say the same. I also couldn’t say the same for any of the ex-pats or foreign born engineers.
Larger automotive suppliers and all of the Detroit 3 tend to have annual employee car shows. A lot of the older engineers that have been at OEM’s for decades are so into the hobby, they have machine shops in their basement or garage.
The hobby and access to parts around here isn’t what it used to be, but it’s still better than other parts of the country in my experience. Used to be there were around 10 different auto parts store within a mile of home, all different chains or independent (although they probably got most of their parts from 3 or 4 different major warehouses).
A part of my motivation for career choice was the difficulty I had working on my own cars from the 80’s growing up relative to the ease of the cars from the '50’s I had.
A great deal of serviceability issues are regulation driven. Electronic fuel injection replaced carburetors due to fuel economy and emissions requirements for a simple example. In fact, on board diagnostics is driven by emissions requirements, as is the fact that fuel maps are hard coded (i.e. not user serviceable). In general, it’s meant to be harder to be user serviced to prevent it from being modified (catalytic converters welded in for example…)
I wonder if it would make sense for automobile engineers to “eat their own dogfood”.
This sounds kinda silly, but I’m imagining an engineering manager saying “I’ve had it with these maintenance recalls and complaints”. So he drags some worn out vehicles into a bay by the engineering floor and makes the engineering staff take them apart and put em back together again.
You’d think you’d get all kinds of new ideas if you had to go through an exercise like that, if it wasn’t all just drawings.
The engineering design of an automobile isn’t “all just drawings”: in any development project there is a team of engineers whose role is to implement the design into a manufacturable product. This starts during prototyping phase (evaluation of the basic functionality of a proposed detail design) and goes through pre- and pilot production (implementation of the design in a manufacturing context). In some companies/indsutries the design team also becomes the pilot production/sustainment support, but the problem with this is that the skills and interests to do design/analysis work are different than those for sustainment engineering and engineering managers are rightfully concerned to lose a well-groomed design team to doing production support.
In large measure the difficulty with design for maintainability has much less to do with engineers not understanding the need for maintenance access and more about design constraints involved in economical assembly, packaging, and reuse of existing components. That is to say, it is easier to design some thing to go together once, in assembly line fashion in an elevated or convoluted position using fixtures and jigs than to design a car to be serviceable when sitting on its suspension, and engineers are often restricted in having to use existing components (or slight modifications thereof) in an envelope designated by an industrial design team (typically caring very little for the details of the mechanical assembly) which results in a product that is a cormpromise of appearance, manufacturing cost, user functionality, and serviceability.
Given the enormous complexity of the modern automobile, which contains literally thousands of individual mechanisms and electrical devices outside of the basic powertrain, it is really kind of a modern miracle of engineering that any part of the the system can be maintained or replaced by a non-specialist. That the more complex systems cannot be serviced by an amateur mechanic is largely an exercise in reliability engineering; that is, it is easier to design a unitary module for good reliabliltiy and easy service (by a trained technician with dedicated diagnostic equipment) rather than a subsystem that can be disassembled for individual component replacement by a layman. The lament for the day of the “shade tree mechanic” neglects the recollection of the obligation to service automobiles every few thousand miles rather than at thirty or sixty thousand mile intervals. That the average person can drive a car for years with little more than oil changes and tire replacement is an almost unacknowledged improvement over the days of monthly service intervals.
A friend of mine is a professional design engineer. He has told me that there are several phases in the design process as you move from conception to production. The first step is to design something that works. Once you’ve got that, then there’s a phase called “design for manufacturability,” in which the design is massaged into something that can actually be fabricated at an acceptable cost. After that, you perform “design for serviceability,” in which the design is further altered to allow it to be serviced in a reasonable manner. The problem is that often times these are competing objectives; if a mechanic somewhere is grumbling about “why they put the nuts on the side where you can’t get ‘em out,” chances are that it would have cost too much to make it easier to service, and the manufacturer opted to keep the selling price low instead.
Since I’m not a professional design engineer myself I’m sure that I am grossly oversimplifying that process, but the impression I get is that the design engineers don’t operate in a vacuum, spewing drawings/specs out of their office onto the plant floor for someone else to deal with. There’s a lot of back-and-forth with many people involved, numerous prototypes, performance testing on a track and in a test cell, durability/aging testing, and so on.
Recalls happen because:
A) designers shave their designs and manufacturing specs to the bare minimum of expense in order to maximize profitability, and
B) it’s difficult to anticipate how a part/assembly is going to perform over the very long term in the real world, especially when subjected to maintenance/operation by real people.
Manufacturers do test their products, but the testing is of limited quantity, and the accelerated aging tests aren’t perfect mimics of the real world. When you go from testing a few dozen units in a lab to selling a few hundred thousand units out in the real world, issues sometimes show up that didn’t manifest during that limited testing. If they’re not safety-related, you just have grumbly customers and mechanics who say “oh yeah, that part always fails after 3.79 years.” If they are safety-related, well, that’s when you end up with a recall.
I earned my Ph.D. studying internal combustion engines. In the lab where I worked, the students were divided into two large groups: computational and experimental. The computational guys worked exclusively on supercomputers and high-powered desktop workstations, on which they ran computer simulations to study combustion properties. This is highly complicated stuff, involving a detailed understanding of fluid mechanics, heat transfer, chemistry, multi-phase flow, and numerical methods, all to analyze phenomena that are highly transient in nature. These guys were smart as hell in their field, and I know that their work has done a lot to improve diesel engine performance in the past couple of decades. But as you might expect, many of them didn’t have high mechanical aptitude. One of them once asked the lab manager for a screwdriver. “which kind?” asked the lab manager. The student paused for a second and then said, “I need the kind that looks like this,” and then crossed his index fingers to indicate a Phillips-head screwdriver. :smack:
OTOH, the experimental guys (of which I was one) worked in actual test cells on real engines. Since we were students, we didn’t have mechanics/technicians working with us; we were the mechanics, as well as the brains. We knew the theory, but we also knew reality. We got our hands dirty setting up actual hardware, up to and including spending time in a machine shop to fabricate various bits and pieces. Many years later, my job these days is similar, i.e. performance-testing real engines and occasionally wrenching on them.
So yes, in reference to the OP, many of us have the aptitude (and inclination) to do maintenance work on our own vehicles, but we’re basically standing in the same spot as any other shadetree mechanic. Whereas a dealer mechanic may have training (and tooling) specific to the model of car that he’s working on that streamlines the repair/maintenance process for that particular car, the shadetree mechanic (and the automotive engineer) relies on general troubleshooting/wrenching skills and also on the service manual for the particular vehicle he’s working on. In the end, I don’t think mechanical aptitude matters much for a design engineer, because again, he’s not working solo; he’s part of a (large) team that includes people who do work on vehicles and can provide appropriate feedback regarding serviceability.
I can assure you engineers have to work on/disassemble/reassemble test/prototype vehicles themselves, and listen to the design garage mechanics feedback from when they have to service or repair test/prototype cars.
It’s simple, and Machine Elf has pretty much explained it. Design For Manufacturability (DFM) and Design For Assembly (DFA) take priority. These things are built on a moving assembly line, and the longer it takes to assemble each one, the more each car costs to build.
Design for Serviceability is a higher priority for regular wear/maintenance items like oil filters and so on. For stuff that shouldn’t fail within the life of the car, it’s not a high priority.
so when you sit there and bitch about a bolt or something being hard to access, it’s not because “engineers are stupid.” it’s because it would have been impractical or costly to change it. here’s an example from the '80s. The GM 3800 V6 was originally installed longitudinally in rear-wheel drive cars. The oil pump was a gerotor design on the crank snout, and built into the engine’s front cover. the oil filter mounted on the bottom of the front cover, right under the crankshaft pulley. So for a RWD car, this was fine because the filter was readily accessible.
so when that engine was adapted for transverse (FWD) use, the oil filter became hard to access because now it was stuck up in the suspension and engine cradle. But moving it would have necessitated spending millions of dollars to substantially re-design the engine block.
I understand that the need to save weight imposes accessibility issues. But what I do not understand is the design of parts that will fail, combined with having to disassemble the entire dash to get at them. Like the audi A4-replacing the ater pump requires removing the front bumper and radiator…or the recent BMWs with electric water pumps-they fail, and replacing them is a huge job. And forget replacing a heater core-on many cars, it involves removing the whole dashboard.
Most likely those water pumps and heater cores were engineered to last the life of the car, so nobody decided the should be easy to service. Or, at the very least they were engineered to last past the warranty expiration.
However, Machine Elf pointed out, designing and testing a prototype part for a certain expected life time may not actually give you the intended real-world results. There may have been a manufacturing defect with a certain batch of parts, such that most cars with the bad part will have a premature failure, but the rest survive just fine. Or it might be a design defect, where the part is subjected to some unanticipated real-world wear and tear that causes it to fail sooner than intended. There, again, are the tradeoffs between design a part for reliability, and finding suppliers that can provide a low-cost while still meeting the specifications.
Unless you’re willing to drive a big, inefficient, un-aerodynamic land yacht, your car has to have a fair number of parts that are hard to access. And for any car model approaching or past the end of its life, a fair number of inaccessible parts are gonna fail.
If you put together all the man-hours spent on clothing manufacture over the last, say, sixty years, they’ll way exceed the efforts put into the Manhattan Project, etc. as well.