Strange… this must be a “feature” of their midsize and above cars, my '02 Dodge Neon has a very logically located battery, top right of the engine bay, very easily accessed…
There are still a few Dodge Stratus’ left, as not all the Dodge teams have switched to the Chargers yet. Next year there will also be Toyota Camry’s.
I know the battery in a ~95 Chevrolet Monte Carlo is under a brace and also under the windshield washer fluid tank. Stupid stupid.
The Stratus was never in NASCAR. It was the Intrepid, and I can’t think of a single team running one this season, especially since last season was the first for the Charger.
Next year there will indeed be Camrys, but it’s not next year yet.
The water pump on my '78 Scirocco needed to be replaced one time. I got the part and was all ready to do it myself. Three screws were readily accessible, no problem. The fourth and final one was inaccessible…because it was located behind the engine mount that was machined to the frame of the car! The entire engine had to be unmounted and lifted out of the car. Thanks, VW!
The sebrings have improved greatly. I got the 2.7L V6, as opposed to anemic V4 engines. Some years back, they ditched the icky Mitsubishi engines.
The critics have never liked the Sebring, but the car seems fine to me. The battery simply dropped dead after some 106,000 miles of use. My complaint is the severely annoying lack of accessibility of the battery.
I understand the frustration. And no, I have no financial interest whatsoever in Chrysler products. But how often do people need to replace a battery? I have had to in the past for some cars, but that was back when I was buying cars with 80,000 rounds already on them.
Either the battery is covered by warranty, meaning the dealership has to do it, or you buy a used car and should check stuff like this out.
I understand your frustration, so don’t think I’m dumping on you in any way. But the battery placement isn’t a state secret. Hell, in addition to the shitty transmissions Ford installs in thier cars, I get to deal with an insane oil filer placement on the Sable when I change the oil. It’s so bad that I succumbed to just taking it in to Jiffy Lube to avoid the hassle.
I bought my wife an '05 Stratus last year. I’m looking at a Magnum or Charger now. Ford will never see another dime from me. Plus I’m Catholic. There is a laundry list of reasons I won’t ever buy a Ford.
BTW. The Ford Windstar from the late '80s and early '90s involved a partial dismantling of the entire freaking engine to change the oil.
It could have been worse.
Yes, it could have been worse, but the OP was about the fact that the battery is a routinely changed item, and should be easily changed, rather like the tires. One should not have to practically dismantle the front left corner of the vehicle in order to change a battery.
And there are times when one simply must get the job done quickly, and can’t involve a dealer or garage. Replacing a battery should not warrant a trip to an auto technician. Replacing/overhauling brakes, fine. Replacing an alternator or water pump, fine.
I can change a light set or tires within 15 minutes, as these things wear out. The same should be true of the battery.
I understand that, and I’m not looking to start a fight at all. But if you’re looking at a situation where the battery needs to be replaced, that’s different from getting a car started to get you to a repair shop.
Inconvenient? Yeah, I checked some sites about the battery replacement. And I have to agree with you. But I don’t think it’s an issue with most people. That’s all I was saying.
:::: Enters thread carrying lawnchair and cooler. Sets down cooler, unfolds lawnchair and plunks down in it. Flips open lid to cooler, rummages around in the ice, pulls out a nice, frosty Can of Worms[sup]TM[/sup], pops the top, guzzles half the can, belches loudly and scratches crotch.::::
About 10+ years ago a buddy of mine stopped by and wanted me to look at the Chrysler LHS he was test driving. He knows next to nothing about cars, and wanted me to look the thing over before he bought it (mind you, the car was brand new, not used). First thing I noticed when I looked under the hood was that there was no battery. “Where’s the battery?” I asked. “It’s in the wheel well, when you go to change it, you’re supposed to turn the wheel all the way to one side and then pull the battery out.” I told him not to buy the car for that reason (and I like Mopars). He seemed to think that it wasn’t a big deal, at first. Then I pointed out to him that when it comes to automotive breakdowns, Mr. Murphey always determines what’s going to happen. When the battery goes, it’ll be in the middle of BFE at some godforsaken time in the morning. Sure, it’s an easy swap, if you’ve access to a lift and pneumatic tools where you can get the car up in the air and have the tire off in a couple of seconds, but when you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, it’s pouring down rain, and dark, said repair becomes an incredible bitch.
[sarcasm] Now, at one point in time, there was a guy who had the idea that a car should be easy to service. I can’t remember his name, or whatever happened to his car idea, but it probably wouldn’t be relavent to any automotive designs today. [/sarcasm]
IMHO, the problem with cars today can be traced directly to three things:
[ul]
[li]Inertia[/li][li]Regulations[/li][li]Unions[/li][/ul]
At one point in time, a high school kid could show up at the offices/factory of one of the car makers, and get a job for the summer or part-time after school. If the kid showed potential, management would either route the kid through an internal training program, where they’d learn the ins and outs of the car business from seasoned employees, eventually working their way up to management, or the company would pick up the tab for their college education with the understanding that when the kid graduated college he’d come to work for the car company for a number of years. People like that knew what the hell they were doing, and knew that if they crammed a component in some inaccessable part of the vehicle it’d be an absolute motherfuck to fix when it came time to repair it, so they’d look for someplace else to stick it.
Sadly, however, the unions didn’t like that (since an assembly line worker who moved up to management would no longer be a dues paying union member), and reglators didn’t like that since there was a chance that a kid could get managled or killed at a young age, so they pretty much put a stop to that. Now you’ve got people being engineers, management, etc., not because they’re good at it, but because they can earn a lot of money doing it. (Think about this for a moment: If you had to have a life saving surgery and you had to chose between the doc who’s got a lot of formal training, but has never performed the operation, and only became a doctor because he can make big bucks at it, or a doc who doesn’t have a degree from a prestige school, but has done the surgery a bunch of times and went into medicine because he wanted to help people and isn’t interested in the money side of it, which one would you choose? Me? I’m going for the experienced doc because if things go wrong on the table, he’s probably going to try everything he can for as long as he can to keep me alive. The other guy? Yeah, he might do it, but if he only works 90% as hard as the other doc, and if my life hinges on that extra 10%, well, I’m dead, and he still gets his money thanks to the insurance company.)
Since you’re dealing with that, you’ve got people who do things the way they’ve always done it, and/or the way they were taught. Problem is: That’s not how innovations come about. They come from tinkering with things, trying different ways of doing things, and the cross pollenation you get when you realize that something you learned in one area, also works in a seperate, totally unrelated area. You won’t always come up with a workable idea, but odds are, when you do come up with a workable idea, it’ll be a dramatic improvement over how things are currently done.
With many of the employees of car makers I’ve known over the years, they’ve never owned a car long enough to actually have to work on the thing. Lots of them would buy a brand new car (with their employee discount), keep it for a year, then turnaround and sell it (sometimes at a profit) and buy another brand new car. (At GM, the execs [including those who get chauffered limos] are given a brand new car every three months. Where the hell’s the logic in that? Three months is not nearly enough time to discover the kinks in a design, and if you never have to worry about the boss chewing your ass out because his car died on him on the way to work that morning, what’s your motivation for fixing the problems with the design? Yeah, a good, dedicated, intelligent employee will do that, and if companies were loaded up with employees like that, Scott Adams would still be working for the phone company.
All is not lost, however. There is at least one engineer out there who has a fucking clue! Even more surprising, whomever it is, works for GM. Take a look at GM’s prototype fuel cell car. Notice that there’s a modular “pallet” which serves as the base for the vehicle, designed in such a way that the various components of the vehicle are easily swapped modules. I know what you’re thinking: Yeah, but Tucker that’s a fuel cell car, totally different than a contemporary car. Quite right, but the principles behind the car’s design are what matters: Easily changed components, starting from a blank sheet, rather than building on what you already have. At it’s essentials, a fuel cell car is no different than a modern car. Both of them are means of taking stored fuel and converting it into motion so that passengers can go from one place to another.
The pallet concept can work for a conventional powered car, provided you’re willing to throw out everything and start from scratch. Yeah, it’d be expensive, it’d require people to actually fucking think for a goddamn change, but the payoff would be huge. Once you got production up and running, however, you’d be able to build your cars faster and cheaper than anybody else. You’d also have faster service and repair times (since, you know, people actually thought about where they were putting things on the car and how they were fastening them down [Ford, I’m looking in your direction!]) so customers wouldn’t have to wait so long to get their cars back when they brought them into be fixed, and the dealership could make more money since they’d be servicing more cars in shorter amounts of time. But hey, what the fuck do I know, right?
You misspelled “Management”
Nope, it’s spelled “unions”. Oh wait. That’s the alternate spelling of “evil”, not “management”. Sorry.
This is a complete and total laugh coming from the guy who bitches that he’s not allowed to take his legally allowed breaks in order to take his medication with food. Think that would happen with a union in your corner?
Sorry, people who demonize unions as responsible for the problems their company has and leave management out of the area of blame are just plain fools. Guess what? Someone had to sign the contract with the union…who do you think it was?
I don’t like stuff that isn’t easy to change anymore than the next guy.
But you get into a problem of everything has to be somewhere.
On many of these cars that don’t have batteries under the hood, when you look, the reason is there is no freekin room to put a battery there.
Also heat kills car batteries. putting a battery under the hood will cause it to die sooner. Putting it in a cool location will allow it to live longer. The inner fender is fairly cool.
One interesting point: batteries are killed by excessive heat-mounting them in places (other than the engine comp[artment) extends their life tremendously. I had a friend who had an AUDI (battery in trunk0, and the tyhing lasted 10 years.
So why would they move one forward, into the God Damn front bumper? That’s just insane and stupid.
cerberus, why don’t you post this at This is Broken. They’ll love it over there. You should have pictures, though.
He’d be collecting welfare because the union would have driven his employer out of business with it’s insane demands? His problem was with an employer ignoring the law. It wasn’t a union issue, the law is already in place.
You mean like they’ve driven Chrysler out of business? Or UPS? Or any of the hundreds of unionized companies in the US? You’re talking out your ass.
Employers ignore laws all the time and get away with it, because one person standing up to a company often gets crushed. With a union, if the company doesn’t comply with the law, the contract specifies remedies to be taken, and you can bet the union will publicize it and take the company to task, all while the employee keeps his job and keeps getting paid.
Not all unions make insane demands. And hey, management still has to sign off on them…the blame eventually comes full circle.
I get why people don’t like unions. I’m not in a union and I wouldn’t join one because they really aren’t my thing. But making them out to be the evil that is running this country’s businesses into the ground (with no reciprocal blame on management), and trying to stamp them out no matter where they appear, is just flat out ignorant, and that’s what we’re supposed to fight against here.
Cerberus, I really wasn’t picking on you…or trying to berate your car. Personally, I’m glad that Chrysler has improved their product quality. Some of their older models were not built as well as your Sebring was and I should not have projected their past issues on your car.
de nada
Chrysler Notes:
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Early models of the Sebring did indeed suck monkeys’ armpits.
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Latter models got better. The body work has improved, and the engines have been greatly upgraded. The early models only had a V4 power plant, and given the miderange frame of the car, were underpowered. The new engines are very perky, especially the V6 engines.
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Daimler has been working through the quality and design issues gradually, as there is much to do.
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I would love to see a trunk-mounted battery in mine, perhaps this will be in play later.