It’s not hard to design something serviceable if it’s part of the criteria. I could get to the the little air-vane motors on my Bird when Ford buried them on the same year Lincoln. it’s not like all cars are equally easy or hard to work on.
As for the engine compartment there’s really no reason to block off the wheel well with metal when access holes can be punched in the stamping process. The front wheel drive car went from a curiosity to the standard layout so it’s really just a matter of engineers catching up with the times. Again, some cars are much easier to work on than others. Sometimes it’s as simple as making the motor mount easy to remove to gain room to work on stuff.
You make everything sound like it’s necessary to make things hard to work on when it’s in the manufacturer’s interest not to do so.
I have changed my share of heater cores. I always take extra time sturying up on dissasembly if I have access to some good reading material or a video. Very important to do things in the right order so you don’t end up breaking a lot of clips and retainers. The job itself is not usually too bad but requires a lot of steps that you should be prepared to follow.
It’s just that with the smaller size of cars today coupled ever increasing regulatory demands and increased customer expectations means there is much more stuff crammed into the same or a smaller space.
In some areas we are approaching the 2lbs of feathers in a 1lb bag.
Bottom line is your list is a pipe dream that you will never see. You do realize not everything can be on top. Something has to be buried. Which brings us to some of the items like the wiper motor or starters. In over 40 years of fixing cars for a living two or three wiper motors and maybe a dozen starters. When you are changing one wiper motor every 10-15 years or so do you really want to increase the cost of the car to gain access to something most drivers will never need to have replaced?
Maybe my experience is atypical, but I doubt it.
to put a finer point on what Rick said, compare these two trucks. The first is a mid-80’s F-250 with the 6.9 diesel. There’s the engine front and center, and the heater core is in the blower box to the left on the firewall. when I had one of these trucks, I had to change the heater core and it took about an hour or so 'cos I could do it from underhood.
on more or less all modern vehicles, the heater core and A/C evaporator have migrated to the integrated HVAC manifold which is assembled into the instrument panel before the whole dash is put into the car. There’s literally nowhere else for this stuff to go. and for non-wear items (“life of the vehicle”) that’s usually fine unless you’re the poor schlub stuck with a defective part. Design For Serviceability is left for maintenance and wear items, not something that fails once in 50,000 vehicles.
Well yes you’re absolutely right about 2 lbs of feathers in a 1 lb bag. And jz78817’s observation is right in line with that.
Buuuuuuuut. Over the years I’ve come across designs from different cars that if combined in a single vehicle would make life a lot easier. I replaced a water pump on an 86 accord that was easy (as these things go). At the time I remember thinking “damn, nice bit of engineering”. The same year Escort was a MF and I did not have kind thoughts about it. I’ve seen cars with the wiper motor on the outside of the car with a plastic cover over it. I’ve seen alternators or pwr steering pumps stuck down low in the back of the engine but reasonably accessible from below. My example of the 88 bird with electronic air/heat controls that I could actually get to versus the Lincoln of the same year where they were buried to the point of absurdity.
Since they’re putting 2 lbs of feathers in a 1 lb sack I think it’s even more important to make them serviceable. I can’t be the only person on the planet who appreciates good designs. Consumers may not know serviceability but they understand an $800 labor charge to replace a $20 part.
Oh, and if I can’t have my fantasy bit of total engineering it’s sure not out of the question to put in a door for the heater core or at least a “cut here” impression in the case so it can be cut out and reinstalled with a cover plate. I did that years ago to keep from having to break the AC connection. Saved a lot of headache.
I changed a heater core once-it took me all of a saturday to do, and many skinned knuckles. The dashboard was never right afterwards-always a bit crooked. Has anyone ever bypassed the heater core to avoid this job?
It’s become clear to me over the years that you don’t have the faintest clue what “good design” or “good engineering” is. You just assume anything you like is “good engineering.”
a heater core may be a “$20 part” but the key is it is not a wear item and is not supposed to fail. Statistics says one or two will fail here and there, but compromising the entire design of the car for something which fails 1 in 50,000 times is BAD ENGINEERING.
A key item that’s not suppose to fail? HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa
They fail all the fucking time. Apparently you haven’t noticed the auto parts stores that sit on every other corner. While I was under-employed your 1 in 50,000 failure parts kept food on my table.
That you think ease of access isn’t part of engineering is asinine. Ease of assembly and ease of repair is part of the cost of doing business in manufacturing and warranty support.
You do realize that if the part makes past the end of the warranty the factory does not care one iota about ease of repair.
Ease of assembly/cost of the vehicle is where it is at for the car maker.
The way to make a million dollars in the car business is to save a buck a car and build a million of them.
So let’s say reworking the heater box only costs $2 and they sell 500,000 cars. Your idea has cost the car company a cool million. Now the labor on the units failing under warranty will result in a saving of. $100,000.
You are still 900K upside down.
Like the man said poor engineering.
And you do realize that people who get fucked over by a $900 repair over something stupid aren’t repeat buyers?
It’s not a function of “reworking” anything. It’s building it right in the first place. I replaced a number of parts on my Honda. I was very pleased with how it was engineered. There was a lot of obvious detail in how it was laid out. It doesn’t cost money to do it right in the first place and it was a great car to work on. Is Honda loosing it’s ass on engineering? No.
Don’t pretend all cars are equal in design. They’re not. And it’s not an accident.
the design life of a car is (industry wide) considered to be 10 years, 150-175,000 miles. the validation testing of non-wear parts (like heater cores) is meant to simulate that. if the part passes that validation testing then they know the vast majority of those parts produced will last at least that long. Unless they do a test-to-failure investigation, there’s no telling if the part will fail at 175,001 miles or 1,000,000 miles.
cite: my 20 years as an automotive engineer, both in the supply base and for two automakers.
If the design life of a car is 150,000 miles; then buying a used car with such mileage is a bad decision. Such a car is ready to experience multiple failure, and the repair costs would be high. This makes me skeptical of people claiming >200,000 miles on their cars-yes, you can do this, but at what costs> Still, if a vehicle is driven mostly on highways, it is possible.
Yes except you seem to ignore the fact that many cars fail well before that mark. And people get cranky when there’s a shit-ton of labor to fix something. I’ll go back to the 86 Honda as an example. It actually had more failures early on than later cars I purchased. But it was so much easier to fix that my tolerance for it was very high. There was clearly some thought put into it’s design for serviceability. If it had been a stick shift I’d probably still have it as a parts chaser spare car today.
But the point I’m making is that Honda obviously had an engineering philosophy that included ease of assembly/repair. Bolts were easy to get to. They put caps on bleeder valves so they didn’t corrode in place. Access ports so you could get to stuff.
Now maybe they’ve abandoned this philosophy in the last couple of years but I’d be surprised because I see it on just about everything they make including small engines for mowers and generators.
I simply don’t buy into your implication that all manufacturers build to the same standards and philosophies of construction or that it’s some engineering accident that some are easier to work on than others.
I understand if you’re trying to say that we’re stuck with certain changes in manufacturing such as electrical devices versus mechanical ones. It’s a cost saving thing and I get it. We’ve had that discussion before on this board. It doesn’t mean serviceability is automatically trashed in the process. Again, that’s a design philosophy.
I’ve never understood that. I’m already paying $25,000+ for a car, make me the better part that costs $2 dollars more and make the car $25,010, I won’t even notice, but I’ll be happy that I don’t have to pay $500 to repair it in a few years and you’ll have 8 million dollars and a repeat customer.
While I don’t disagree with you in principle, there’s a problem with that: You’re just talking about one single part.
So, you redesign the heater core so it’s easier to replace. That increases the cost by $2, you increase the price of the car, etc. But then what about the radiator? The ABS controller? The PAS pump? Etc? Where do you stop? You have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise you’ll end up with a car that’s nice and easy to work on but now costs $3000 more than the competition.
I remember a few years ago, there was some revolutionary new racing yacht that had an embarrassing failure a couple of days after launch. I think the mast broke. They repaired it by putting stronger bolts in the base. When asked why they hadn’t put the stronger bolts in to start with, the engineer replied ‘well, the bigger bolts were a few grams heavier than the ones we used. it doesn’t sound like much, but if we’d applied that philosophy across the entire yacht, it would have ended up weighing half a ton more than it does now.’.
The last time I bought a clothes dryer I had just fixed my mom’s. What failed was a bearing. It was in my opinion undersized for it’s purpose. At the store I had picked out a well known brand that was highly rated when a regional rep for Maytag asked me why I was buying it. He then went on to show me a cutaway of their dryer and there it was. The same bearing only it was double the size. The price difference was minimal. That was over twenty years ago. it’s still faithfully doing it’s job at my house.
Good engineering doesn’t necessarily require a lot of extra cost. That bearing couldn’t have cost more than a quarter for the extra metal. The cost was minimal.