I remember a while back Mitsubishi started selling the Galant (or Diamante, possibly) with a “fuzzy logic” automatic transmission which adapted itself to the driver’s style.
IIRC, Merc and BMW are selling similar adaptive shift systems now.
Wouldn’t breaking in gently “teach” these gearboxes the wrong patterns?
This all begs the question:
why don’t they break in the car before they sell it to you?
I would seem to me that it would be far more productive and convenient to have cars already broken in at the factory so that end-users dont have to go to the hassle.
Shalmanese: The break-in period for my new car was 4,000 miles. A) I wouldn’t want someone driving my car around for 4,000 miles before I got it. And 2) how much would it add to the price of a car to hire someone to drive each one 4,000 miles before it left the factory? At least $1,000.
You nitpicky bastard you! I hate being proven wrong! Especially when that’s a car that I was considering buying myself. Okay, here’s my official new sig:
The engine management system and trannys should be constantly updating whatever they have “learned” to account for differing conditions through time. Also consider that simply disconnecting the battery will cause the computers to “forget” whatever patterns they’ve “learned”, starting the learning process all over again. * I am not responsible for lost radio station presets*
If you follow the ride-it-hard philosophy (see http://www.mototuneusa.com/break_in_secrets.htm )
you must change your oil after about 20 miles. This is so that you flush out all the crap you accumulated from riding hard.
Oh yeah, the technique in the articla seems to apply only to bikes, but people seem to think it can also apply to cars. It’s plausible but i haven’t seen any other hard facts to back this technique up.
From a BMW service manager: unplugging the battery doesn’t ‘erase’ the tranny’s memory. After break-in, for customers who actually observe the ‘rules’ , it is common for customers to complain about the shift patterns of the tranny. Some complain because they know BMW will reset the tranny to re-learn all the drivers habits, and some complain because they just feel like it’s short-shifting versus their previous model.
WOW! A spectacular tire failure!
Sure glad I just drove 75 mph for the first 1200 miles on my brand new Lincoln… 
I wonder how they “break-in” new airplane tires before the first landing.
I’m envisioning a car suspended on some sort of dock thing with a “virtual road” and all completely automated. 4000 miles @ 80 miles an hour is only 50 hours.
According to that site –
You will note I used the word CAN not the word WILL. I sold tires for a short period of time back in the early 70’s. If someone had a total failure of a tire right after purchase (where the tire was shredded) it was inevitable that they had purchased the tire just before a long trip. (Like the morning of a trip to Vegas).
Also if you still doubt this the next time you buy tires, after 200-400 miles go back and have them checked for balance. I will guarentee you that every tire will require some rebalance. Watch the balancer operator, if he puts on new/different weight the tire was out of balance. Not by much maybe, but a measurable amount. This is caused by the internal parts of the tire moving around and getting settled.
As far as your crack about airplane tires, Are you serious? I don’t know about you, but the airplanes I ride in (about 75,000 miles each year) FLY to their destinations, they don’t drive. heat is what causes tire failure, heat is caused by driving at high speeds for long periods. While it is true a jet goes real fast during takeoff and landing, it only runs on the ground at high speed for a very short period of time. Taxi time is very low speed, and will not contribute to much heat buildup. Also I am guessing that 1 set of tires for a jet cost way more than your Lincoln did.
A vague recollection from my days in the car biz wants me to tell you that Porsche engines–and for some odd reason, I’m thinking Jeeps, too–actually do run their motors the equivalent of 500 miles before installing them in the vehicle, or at least did in the early 1990s.
Sorry, I’ve looked and cannot offer a single citation, and you shouldn’t take my word for it, either. I’m certain I’m wrong in some of the above details, because normally I remember thingss fairly well.
Regarding metal shavings, I do have an interesting side-note. Audis used to come with magnetic oil plugs specifically so that shavings are trapped and eventually removed during services. One time my Audi mechanic friend called me over to take a look at one fairly new Audi he was doing a “lemon test” on. The car had a lot of weird problems and Audi turned my pal loose on the car to find out what exactly was wrong with it. He showed me a magnetic oil plug that looked like a fooking porcupine with all the shavings sticking on it.
I never heard the final verdict, but the prognosis my friend sent to Audi was that either a misshapen cylinder or cylinder wall caused the compression chamber to wallow out, which in turn set off pollution control sensors among other things, which in turn freaked out the car’s rudimentary computer so badly that it would try all sorts of things to try to fix the problem, causing it to act like it was possessed by the devil.
It was one of the saddest, grouchiest cars I ever saw, condemned to an early death for problems under the hood. Today I suppose you’d call it mad cowl disease.
Thank you very much. I’ll be here until the end of time.
I think tire technology may have advanced a wee bit since then.
Oh come ON, man! There isn’t a damn thing in a tire ‘moving around’ when you drive, well except the tire doing a lot of spinning.
Goodyear has a ton of tire info, and offers this as advice:
** “Do my new tires require any special treatment?” **
Answer: * Your new tires will probably feel different from the tires that were replaced. Drive carefully as you become familiar with their performance and handling. Take special care when braking, accelerating, cornering, or when driving in the rain, because these are the times when the differences will be most noticeable. * -end
Nothing about a break-in period mentioned. I’m sure this would be the place to mention it if it was needed.
Well, I have to admit I first hit the rev limiter on my car with about 50 miles on the odometer. Now at 50K, everything’s great - good mileage, and a few friends are convinced I have a factory freak since the thing is running so strong.
On tires:
There have definately been advances, and I don’t feel any break-in period is warranted in general. Maybe on the older bias-ply tires. Radial tires were just becoming standard equipment in th US in the 70’s, although the rest of the world started much sooner. Michelin will scrap a tire if a human hand touches it while it’s on the assembly line.
One exception is race tires. Heat cycling is seen as an important factor in a tire’s performance, for both grip and wear rate. Some teams bake the tires in an oven, others take them out for a practice session to heat them up. The tires are pulled off the car and set aside for a couple days. Presumably the heat affects the structure of the rubber somehow, but these tires use different compounds and experience much different conditions than the typical passenger tire.
It used to be that you could break in a car with a coat hanger. Now you can’t. 