German marques are notorious for this shit. heaven help you when the timing chain tensioner fails on your Audi with a V6 or V8. The timing chainset is on the back of the engine, meaning you pretty much need to yank the motor to fix it.
German Engineering: “Why use one moving part when six will do?”
Most people who work as engineers like fixing things, and tend to. Up to a point, that is.
I worked for Ford, in their Scientific Research Lab in their R&D center in Dearborn MI, for my first job out of school, 1978-1983. Most engineers tended to work on their own cars. Only about half of the scientists did, maybe less. But that was back when you could open the hood and find all the parts without a dental mirror.
I used to do my own maintenance, but the first time I tried to change the plugs on my Ford Aerostar minivan (say, 1989) I couldn’t even get at all the plugs without special tools (and a dental mirror to find them.) I quit: screw this, it’s cheaper to get a mechanic to do it than the cost of my time, by a long shot!
These days, a car hardly needs maintenance, other than changing oil & filter, tire pressure, etc. That’s pretty cheap to have done.
BTW, it seemed like a majority of the engineers at Ford were basically “room mothers” for one part or a small set of parts, and would answer the phone all day about questions about that part, without knowing a hell of a lot about the engine as a system. (A lot of them didn’t have engineering degrees, and weren’t what most “real engineers” would think of as engineers.)
I worked in the Control Systems group. The guys there ranged from serious math-head control systems guys who lived in “state space” but knew little about cars, to guys who knew anything imaginable about how engines worked. And computer guys like me, doing what we’re told to do. The real brainiac of the group was the guy who modeled the thickness of the fuel layer in the intake manifold and transformed it into a set of differential equations that could be implemented as table lookups in the underpowered processors of the day, making “central fuel injection” possible. There was also the guy who invented the “sonic EGR valve”, which made it possible to control flow through an orifice despite rapid changes in exhaust pressure, by getting the flow faster than the speed of sound so that the pressure waves wouldn’t propagate (similar to jet engines). He was in a different group, though. I don’t think either of those guys changed his own oil, but who cares?
Besides which, it lasts a lot longer than it used to. So your spark plugs are hard to get at, for instance? They last 100K miles or more now, so you don’t *have *to get at them. Your transmission is hard to pull for a rebuild? You should never have to do it. You might need to rebuild a clutch occasionally, but why do you even have a manual, now that automatics have equal or better mileage and can shift better than you can anyway? The list goes on - there is simply no need to open an engine or any other drive train component anymore, unless something is so badly wrong it’s the manufacturer’s fault anyway. The shade-tree mechanic hobby is out of fashion largely because there’s no need for it anymore.
There are also many, many who do know how to do this stuff, but just don’t want to. I gave up changing my own oil, for instance, when I finally realized it really doesn’t cost any more or take any longer to have the shop do it, and I don’t have a mess to clean up afterward either.
I went to school with a girl in the computer science department who was a stellar programmer and got straight As, but who was woefully clueless when dealing with her own PC. I mean, could barely run GUI apps, and had a hard time actually fixing anything remotely problematic. Which was a problem, because this was in the DOS/Windows 3.11 days, and that stuff broke all the time for no good reason, and usually required tweaking config files and stuff like that to get things to quit breaking.
So I can totally believe that an automotive engineer (I’m assuming mechanical engineer) wouldn’t necessarily know how to fix his car. I mean, a guy whose work for the past 15 years has centered around rejiggering existing brake systems to new vehicles isn’t going to know squat about how to fix a problem with the fuel injection system.
And there are so many engineers, and amongst those types of engineers, a lot of us do as Learjeff indicated: they’re only responsible for a single part.
I’m a manufacturing engineer, but I specialize in body in white, and further specialize in joining, further specializing in resistance spot welding, with a specialization in sheet steel. I only know enough about the specific body in white design factors that allow me to have an intelligent conversation with the product design engineers that make feasibility requests. The product engineers generally only know specific details about the particular part of the vehicle that they’re responsible for (engine box has different requirements than a rear door, for example).
A lot of us are car guys, especially the Michiganders. But a lot of us simply aren’t car guys (especially here in China where most of our local employees didn’t grow up with a car culture). Car guys tend to know a little bit about everything, and non-car guys tend to know very little about the rest of the car except where their system integrates into another system.
And of course we employ a lot of women, whom I include among the “guys” above.
When I was younger economic concerns caused me to do a lot of work on my own cars. Now, it’s simply less messy and quicker to let the garage take care of the issue. And as mentioned elsewhere, there’s not a whole lot left to do to a car these days.
You have to look at it from the company’s perspective, and they focus on service life. Basically, if the part will last a) 100k miles or (cynically) b) the manufacturers warranty period, they don’t worry how difficult it is to replace - especially since their chief concern is the original purchaser of the car and their research tells them that person won’t have the car by the time it’s an issue.
For example, BMWs new cars are 85% leased, so they worry about making the first two years trouble free and the second two years (their dealer’s "certified pre-owned buyers) reasonably trouble free. The water-pump with the brittle plastic impeller is the 3rd owner’s problem. and since he’ll likely never spring for a new Bimmer, what do they care?
Service longevity seems to only be an industry concern for service or fleet vehicles - trucks, vans, cabs and cop cars - where they know the customers will depend on the vehicle, keep them a while (or for many miles) and hold them responsible for issues by changing makes when it’s time to renew the fleet. Probably why my Dodge truck is ticking along fine with 200k+ miles.
I would take issue with this to some extent. Sure, the major effort is on getting it to look good, run cheaply and be safe and quiet. You can easily tell that from the style of the adverts. Longevity, though, has a big impact on lease costs, because it affects the resale value.
When I ran a largely leased fleet it was surprising how prices varied and did not follow purchase price. Some small, cheap cars were more expensive to lease than larger more expensive one. Sometimes the sporty version with alloy wheels was cheaper than it’s mundane entry-level cousin. This was almost entirely due to the final value at the end of the lease.
Not under BMW’s lease model. The bulk of their cars (80+%) are leased for two years and they offer free maintenance for four. This means every two years, their certified pre-owned stock gets a fresh influx of low-mileage BMWs that only they took care of, which they detail and sell off at a premium. The CPO car buyers can add have a 100k-mile warranty/maintenance deal for a couple of grand, almost pure profit because they know the cars can make that pretty much trouble-free, and when the car hits that old, the 2nd owner is likely looking for his next CPO Bimmer. And surprisingly, a 100k Bimmer with potential issues will still sell for decent cash, compared to other 100k cars that even have decent reps for reliability at that point (like Honda and Toyota).
That’s talking 3 and 5 series, though. Resale on the 7-series is disastrous from the jump - but lessees seem willing to bear the brunt of it for the cachet.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the warranty coverage is driven by reliability statistics rather than the other way around.
It seems like more of a gamble for manufacturers to say “We want to sell a car that’ll last X years/Y thousand miles” and engineer to that, rather than engineer it to a certain price point, and then test it thoroughly and either set the warranties accordingly (if it’s reasonably reliable), or re-engineer certain parts until it is. I’d think engineers would typically overbuild in your example to ensure that the car will hit or exceed the spec, but in the second, they might build a car that makes 88k miles consistently costing less than the price point they’re shooting for, and then 40% of the time, the alternator craps out. So they’d redesign the alternator to be more reliable, and when they meet that 100k spec, they’re done, without too many overbuilt parts or anything like that.
dO THE 7-SERIES v-8 ENGINE STILL HAVE THAT COOLANT TUBE THAT LEAKS? (AND COSTS $9000 to fix?
Actually, it’s usually driven by marketing. Of course engineering does have a responsibility to feedback feasibility of the requirement to marketing, but it’s all marketing.
We have to meet both cost and performance targets at the same time, and the performance targets exceed warranty length by a very large factor. Although the warranty is specified by marketing, performance targets are specified based on customer satisfaction requirements and government requirements. At least, at my company.
We don’t really build too many cars before they’re ready to sell, and when we do start with early builds, the components are usually identical to what will ship in production-ready vehicles, with running changes as needed for unexpected problems. In the case of alternators, for example, we’ll use an off the shelf alternator from a trusted supplier that’s already used in millions of vehicles; we already know the alternator won’t fail. Certainly, though, we also introduce new systems, such as a new transmission. When they’re ready for field testing, they’re generally tested in other existing vehicle models first, in order to ensure that they’re ready for integration in a new model.
These days most warranty claims are against manufacturing defects, and not engineering defects, or more precisely, manufacturing engineering issues and not product engineering issues. It’s product engineering issues, though, that attract the most attention, and that manufacturers tend to resist the most when it comes to warranty or recall coverage, and every once in a while a bad design makes it into the field (GM’s key switch, for example).
And 9 years later, you need not go to that much trouble. All that’s required is pushing a button on your key and it starts remotely.
It’s sort of ironic. In 2006 when this thread first ran we thought those cars were the epidemic of technology. So many changes in the 9 years since then.
Technologically the car with a fob in your pocket is far more complex that a key in the ignitions was 9 years ago. I deal with issues on those daily. Trust me it’s a miracle.
Bolding mine.
In the overall context of the thread that’s a truly beautiful typo. 