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> death by cad

This is endemic (not just cars, but absolutely sodding everything), and utterly infuriating. So you end up with engines with perfectly reasonable reliability but need to be dropped out or a whole crate of ancillary parts removed just to change a water pump or clutch. Or the motorcycle oil seal that requires you to drop the engine and split the crankcases to change the £2.50 seal.

The old fashion of copper bronze or needle rollers everywhere and grease nipples seems quaint and excessive, but was at least considerate of maintenance and long life. Modern metallurgy and design shouldn't take the opportunity of throwing out every good idea of history.

> death by cad

How does this work in practice? I mean, what is it about CAD that gives this kind of result?

A system prototyped by hand rapidly finds the bolt or pump that can only be removed or fitted if you have an extra elbow and third arm. Or see round corners. Special tools were to be avoided or used for the rare exception. So plan B before lunch! The old approaches of an access panel over the timing chain or sprockets, or a removable plate fixing a bearing in place barely adds weight and complexity, nor does a grease point on a swing arm or steering joint, but needs a different understanding. Understanding that there's a life beyond a warranty that global manufacturers are trying to forget.

CAD is great for making stuff fit - once. In combination with the progression toward write once manufacturing, the only consideration is the cost and complexity of assembly. Can our factory robots and CNC do this? Can we reduce the component count? Can we use one-time moulded clips in place of those machine screws? Some is driven by cost saving, much by the purely mental visualisation capability of the new process.

Maintenance, even regular expected and necessary maintenance, increasingly takes a distant back seat. What once took 20 minutes to change now takes half a day. It now fits in a difficult corner or got combined with a dozen other systems making it now a £500 replacement.

It's visible top to the tiny fractions at the very bottom - saving fractions of a penny on self-tappers or clips self moulded into the single injection plastic where once (in ancient times like the 1990's) there'd be a small metal captive nut or bracket to bite into, or real machine screws and nuts.

Any and all of these can take years off expected lifespan mainly for the saving of pennies or a production step.

There are a lot of opinions about what could or could not be built better in cars.

The most interesting trend, obviously, is that people are just buying fewer of them, so it will soon be a moot point.

Doing maintenance never has mass-market appeal.

The best approach, in my opinion, is actually the opposite of what most mechanics (or MechE/EE people) will say: we should try to achieve as much as possible in software, with the absolute simplest hardware.

Consider that an electric car, the fastest growing product in the category, has a considerably simpler engine and drive train. The software rules the roost there. It's just a coil. The engine and batteries are not really maintainable (they're certainly recyclable).

There's a lot of knowledge tied up in what you're saying, which is a really interesting point of view. But optimizing ICE vehicles and their attendant maintenance is sort of a dead end.

Then again, I'm agreeing with the general idea: CAD is bad. But what should the right response be? Don't buy things that need CAD designs at all!

I believe it refers to assembling things digitally without thinking about how an actual human would work with the same things in the physical world.

One particular instance of this I pay attention to is the placement of oil filters on motorcycles. My brother bought a Honda CBR600RR, and he wanted to replace the oil filter; I watched him spend an inordinate amount of time removing the cowling, clip by clip, screw by screw, from the bike, in order to expose the filter (which you could not get a normal filter wrench onto, because of the awkward positioning).

After that I pay a lot of attention to whether the oil filter is visible and accessible from the outside of the bike without removing a cowling, Kawasaki seems to do a good job of this.

To be fair, the CBR600RR is a race replica bike, and it's designed for the track (despite having lights and a license plate). The full fairings are there for aerodynamics, the same sort you'll find tested and proven in Moto GP.

Honda didn't put them there just to look cool, and ease of maintenance certainly wasn't the primary design factor.

Yup. Previous incarnation of a VW Golf had an engine compartment that fit together, and you could replace the headlight bulb in about 20 minutes with common tools. Current one has an engine compartment that fits together, and you can't replace the very same bulb unless you take half of the damn thing apart, and then you hit a snag, because the very last screw is unaccessible unless you're a nanobot, has a special nut, and some sort of seal guarding it. I suppose it does make sense if you have the whole workshop at your disposal and can disassemble and reassemble entire vehicles at will.

CAD allows much more optimization. In general the more you optimize, the better defined and all-encompassing your metrics have to be. Otherwise you will end up optimizing away qualities you took for granted (in this case, serviceability. or more specifically being able to easily remove inexpensive wear parts).

An old colleague worked for a mechanical engineering consultancy that helped companies optimize things like engines, etc.

They built measuring equipment and software that allowed the companies to squeeze the biggest engine possible into the smallest compartment.

Costs have big impacts on manufacturing. Saving $0.50 on some little widget may allow for much bigger savings in the build process. There’s also a general goal to make minute cost changes just to eliminate inflation without retooling.

I wonder if something like this was at work when the 96 Eclipse was designed. My then-gf in college had one; I changed her timing belt and water pump. It was miserable:there was only 1/2"of clearance between the engine and bay everywhere. I joked that they must have used a giant Play-Doh pasta maker to install the engine by squishing it in to conform to the engine bay.

You can still find that in heavy equipment. My Kubota tractor is pretty easy to service and designed for 8-10k hours over a 30+ year lifespan.

The thing is designing for that costs a fair bit, just take a look at the step from riding lawn mower (~$2k) to garden tractor(~$15k) for similar horsepower. It's not a direct apples to apples comparison but does go to show how much more something overbuilt can run.

Some grease nipples on my Kubota are really hard to reach, but other than that most maintenance is pretty straigtforward. At any rate, I'm not expecting to see them last as long as my late grandfathers' Fiat 640, that still works. I'm glad that it is still possible to find spare parts online.

Even Kubota cheap out on parts, too. The hydraulic filters are laughably tiny, they are smaller than most motorcycle oil filters. Especially egregious considering ~90% of the small yard tractors are equipped with a loader. But they are far better than the cheap Chinese tractors from places like Northern hydraulic.

Eh, I just bought a new set of HST and hydraulic filters for our L4760 and they're anything but small.

I'm sure their tinier on the B/BX line but those also have a lower flow and capacity.

Luxury cars are very much an exercise in form over function. How easy they are to service is not a high priority like it is in every other mass market vehicle. It doesn't help they have large (often supercharged or turbocharged) displacement engines which is a challenge to package in themselves, let alone consider the ease of servicing.

Their high powered, boosted engines also puts the entire powertrain under relatively high stresses causing accelerated wear out and fatigue of components. Although some durability test takes place to pick up on issues, if a design issue occurs late into the development phase it won't be fixed, if the cost to implement a change is too high. It will just become another 'service' item which has to be changed every x,000 miles. Sometimes the required technology does not exist to allow a component to last the entire life of the car so just has to be replaced at a set interval.

Luxury cars are often used as the test bed for new technology. This new technology is often novel or experimental and has new unforeseen failure modes which the design engineer is unlikely to account for. The accelerated testing done during vehicle development picks up most issues but a few slip through and only present themselves during actual customer use. The quality of these any new components can also be highly variable especially if a new process or material is being used in their manufacture. If the supplier has poor process control this can lead to high failure rates.

Another consideration is that luxury cars (well luxury sports cars at least) aren't driven that much - most will never reach 100,000 miles - so are designed to a lower durability than most cars. There's no point in over-engineering a component but if a customer has an extreme usage profile, they may exceed the design limits of a component. Cars are not designed for the worst case customer but rather the median usage profile. If cars were designed for the most extreme customer I imagine the cars would weight significantly more or have to use expensive exotic materials.

It doesn't help they have large (often supercharged or turbocharged) displacement engines which is a challenge to package in themselves, let alone consider the ease of servicing.

Luxury cars now do not have significantly bigger engines than those of the past --- it's mostly the emissions control equipment and other auxillary components (including the not-so-useful plastic covers) that take up the bulk of the space and make servicing difficult. Look at the difference between a late 60s/early 70s Cadillac and one closer to today, for example:

http://www.eldorado-seville.com/resources/News-/-Home/BG-eng...

http://image.automotive.com/f/cadillac-xts-2013-road-test/52...

The latter is 3.6L V6. The former is a 7.7L V8. They both have over 300HP. The former is also FWD. But the difference in serviceability is enormous.

A major driver of this "cheapness" is weight reduction, which has been drive by CAFE and similar laws. It's a trade off. Want a transmission with enough meat in the casing to take replaceable bearings, or even enough to machine in a bushing? Adds weight.

Make that decision hundreds, maybe thousands of times and it all adds up. However, I agree that there are some obvious decisions I disagree with choosing the weight reduction.

I don't understand why mass market cars (often by the same manufacturer) get better fuel economy and yet need to be serviced less frequently, then. A Toyota Corolla will do 300k miles fairly easily and yet gets better mileage than a Lexus.

The cynic in me says it's price segmentation. People who buy luxury cars have the disposable income to throw away several thousand a year in repair bills and pay more for gas to boot. In fact, if they buy the car to signal that they have disposable income to burn, it's actually better for their purposes if it has terrible reliability. It shows that they have the means to not care. So it's a win-win-win-win all around: the car manufacturer extracts more for the car, the dealers extract more for service, the luxury car buyer gets to show off their wealth, and the mass market buyer gets a car on razor-thin margins that are subsidized by the luxury buyer.

I think it's an artifact of luxury cars being designed to optimize a handful of metrics (horsepower, an exterior that "looks good") at any cost.

I see something similar with high-end phones (particularly iPhones). Every reasonable practical concern takes a backseat to making the thing as thin as possible. The result is a phone with mediocre battery life, antenna problems, and a body about as impact-resistant as an egg.

There's also the matter of tuning the design. There are features, design decisions, and engine loads you have to reject if you want high reliability. If those fall into faster acceleration, better ride, more convenience, then the luxury market will get them and the economy market won't.

I mean a Corolla has less power, weight and smaller wheels, and arguably better aerodynamics (looks count less, needs less cooling, smaller size).

Also, a Corolla will have more inherit more R&D, uses less of new tech, etc.

>they buy the car to signal that they have disposable income to burn

I agree with you there.

Luxury car buyers don't want to maintain their cars. They are ok with paying someone else to do it, and cars come with long warranties these days anyway. Many choose to lease rather than buy, because that way they will always be driving a relatively new car.

These people are getting exactly what they want from the luxury cars that are currently available. If a manufacturer spent money on making its luxury cars more durable and easier to maintain, they would need to raise prices and would then lose sales to other brands.

In other words, this situation is a result of consumer preferences, not a conspiracy by manufacturers to cut quality. And that applies to a lot of things, not just cars.

>cars come with long warranties these days anyway

Mercedes-Benz E-Class comes with a 4-year or 50,000 mile warranty in the United States, which actually has pretty high level consumer protection when it comes to cars. However, in my country, the E-Class has a 2-year warranty and I get the feeling that the situation might be the same in many of the other European countries. That's not that much of a warranty for a car starting at 48,071 euros (53,996 USD).

You have to wonder if the warranty in the US extends to second purchasers. Most US leases are 3 years and 8-12k miles, meaning that the typical off lease vehicle will not exceed 36,000 miles.

Most lease returns are cleaned up and sold as certified preowned cars. The CPO warranty is usually just as good (and sometimes even better) than the new car warranty.

Very true. I purchased my last BMW two years old. It came with a two-year warranty and a two-year maintenance package.

> Luxury car buyers don't want to maintain their cars

I think most people prefer to pay someone else, luxury marque or not. Not everyone has the skills, knowledge and tools to do maintenance beyond topping up the washer fluid.

> They are ok with paying someone else to do it

Yep, I'd rather pay someone that knows what they're doing - that doesn't mean I want to get ripped off though. BTW, a tip for car owners - always haggle on service costs. I've been a car owner for 20 years, and every time I've asked, the dealer has offered a discount, just because I asked.

> cars come with long warranties these days anyway

At least in the UK, the luxury car makers (e.g. BMW, Mercedes) come with a 3 year warranty, same as they have for a long time. This is short by comparison to Kia's 7 year warranty, and I seem to recall Hyundai offers a 5 year warranty.

Of course, if you need to actually claim on the warranty, that's when the fun and games might start... I've never actually had to claim on the BMW and Mercedes I've owned, but I've had a hell of a time getting pissed about by Nissan and just assumed other makers did the same.

The problem is, those concerns still apply even if the owner is hiring the service done.

When I was working as a mechanic, we had a few customers with land rovers (most of our business was trucks & SUVs). The land rover owners had to pay roughly 2x for everything, simply because the cars are so much more time consuming to work on. And from family members who have owned them, BMW & Mercedes are just as bad, albeit slightly more reliable. If it is time consu3and a PITA, the customer will be charged more.

There are not fixed, linear relationships between quality, ease of maintenance and cost.

Consider that the cost of man years of engineering is essentially irrelevant to the cost of a vehicle.

(of course the total engineering costs are going to be significant, I'm talking about incremental costs of spending time thinking about how to make vehicles a bit nicer here or there)

Candy bars and sneakers seem to be in this category where manufacturers would rather reduce the quality of the product than raise the price.

Reduce quantity too.

Out of curiosity, are there any brands which don’t do this? I’m a little dismayed that even Lexus does this.

Anecdata says that Japanese cars are the most reliable ones. (Old) Toyotas in Africa are a must. They endure and can be repaired in a local car workshop.

Small Korean cars (Hyundai and Kia) have excellent reliability metrics in EU. They are, in some ways, equivalent to old Toyotas.

They are also backed up by great guarantees (5 years without mileage limit in case of Hyundai, and 7 years from Kia).

African markets used to love Peugeot 504 and Mercedes E 200. Extremely reliable in harsh conditions.

Lexus usually tops the reliability ratings even above Toyota. That’s why I was surprised.

So what happens to Africa when the old cars finally completely disappear, and nothing can be repaired in any reasonable sense of the word?

Probably hard to know, but by now, we're already seeing that blu-ray players are rendered nearly useless by lost remote controls (because they (all blu-ray player manufacturers) no longer build adequate physical playback controls into the set top box, and 99% of blu-ray on-disc software requires a directional keys and an enter key to trigger playback of the main content, which can only be found on remote controls), leading to a necessity for bootleggers that can rip and recopy the main content of the movie to a version stripped of menus, that immediately plays automatically upon insertion.

You can buy a new remote control if you want. It's a little annoying to set up but works flawlessly thereafter. I recently bought an all-in-one remote because my TV's remote broke apart and now I've got one remote for all the devices in my living room.

>blu-ray on-disc software

It's shocking to me that this is even a thing. I looked it up and apparently Blu-ray players are required to execute Java off the disc! How far we've come since the Sony CD rootkit days...

A cursory read over the spec on Wikipedia indicates (among other horrifying things) that it is possible and supported to release a Blu-ray that contains no media, but instead streams it over the internet from the studio's server.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD-J

> Where can I find more about how it works? Is there a VM of some sort?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#Java_software_interfac...

Ah, sorry, I looked it up myself and edited my comment. Bad habit of mine. Thanks anyway.

> So what happens to Africa when the old cars finally completely disappear?

The latest 2019 Land Cruiser (not the US luxury version) is nearly identical to the version sold 30 years ago.

VLC still works...

As for the Toyotas, they can become the Ship of Theseus, they can live forever, as long as there is demand.

Someone needs to design a future-proof upgradable car. Get the design right the first time and then technology upgrades as science advances, but no planned obsolescence.

There's two ways:

- 3D printing + open/royalty free

- Modular car, speaking to a car designer, they said it'll cost a lot, there's safety issues and laws (ie cage)

Wait, is this a thing now? I’ve long cut the cord but back in the day universal remotes could work with every major brand of tv, DVD player, etc

Toyota Land Cruiser is supposedly designed for a 25 year life span. If you want reliability, this would be your best bet. It's not cheap, but has good resale value.

Honda Civic that I had would have automated service recommendations based on some sort of diagnostics or heuristics, and tended to recommend service (oil change and tire rotation with some inspection and sometimes air filter replacement) every 9k miles for me.

I had the impression 6k miles is the standardized recommended interval for most brands (e.g. my current Subaru) but I guess that isn’t true for Lexus?

As I understand it, Buick seems to be doing fairly well along these lines and was a fairly good seller in China for its reliability.

Its reliability was compared to the China-native brands... not to the rest of the brands in the world. Difference is relative.

Hugely expensive service at major service intervals is pretty much the norm with luxury brands.

>'make it work.'

This is a major problem with capital taking over industries. Financiers don't care and also don't remotely understand what is happening in the details. Technologists running companies at least have the high level insights required to make nuanced decisions regarding whether to move fast or focus on quality. Finance just cares about the quarterly figures and we end up with a make it work rather than make it good approach to building tech. As long as we're making money who cares right. The Boeing scandal is a good example of this.

that’s definitely a big factor for sure, at least in my experience...

maybe our definitions of “technologist” is different, but i think even with technologists it’s important to understand that just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should (e.g alan kay’s “reverse vandalism”), and is still a danger with regard to entrepreneurship/business vs what is actually “good” for the world...

i think there is a lot to re-examine about how and why we do things...

I believe the phrase is "inverse vandalism". Terrific point regardless. When it's easier to create things that work 'good enough', not as much work will be put into making things as great as they can possibly be.

Yes I definitely agree re your reverse vandalism point. It's another dimension of the same issue.

I've stopped using "cheap" or "expensive" to describe mechanical things. I like the expression "designed to narrower tolerances", it conveys that something can be more expensive but also less durable.

As someone who constantly buys the cheapest version of something possible, I am now rarely surprised when it turns out to be the "best" actual version of it.

As mechanically inclined person:

"Designed to narrower tolerance" usually just means it's more expensive and accurate. For bearings it's great idea if you want longevity.

Allowance on the other hand is completely different matter.

the practice of buying the cheapest version of something, in my experience, should not be applied to things like tools. there is a remarkable difference between a $20 no-name multitool and a nice Leatherman, or a nice pair of binoculars and a cheap Chinese knock-off. electronics, of course, is a totally different story. everything has nearly the same brains, with perhaps a UI quirk or two on the cheapest version.

It should also not be applied to consumer electronics. When buying the cheapest no-name device available, you'll pay back what you "saved" in continuous frustration. These devices are as bad as possible; any worse and it'd be fraudulent to sell them.

Tighter tolerances often lead to increased reliability.

I think it is a matter of both domain for how things fail and how reliability is defined. In some circumstances looser tolerances can be a bit less efficient but more fault tolerant and thus 'reliable'. Although its lifetime might also be shorter than a tighter toleranced device if both were fed 'clean' inputs.

Of course the fault tolerance (apologies for overloading the term tolerance) also isn't guaranteed in every domain. If a seal breaking would wreck the process it certainly wouldn't give /any/ reliability over a tight seal.

How do you see fully electric cars improving over this situation you describe with low quality ICE car internals failing? For example, oil filters are no longer an issue if you opt for a Tesla.

How do you service electric cars compared to ICE cars?

Will the move to electric cars fundamentally hurt the car repair industry and will you have to go back to school to learn about servicing electric engines?

Thanks!

As it currently stands, electric cars are going to hurt the car repair industry, excepting body work. The parts on an EV either last forever, or are relatively easy to replace.

This is going to be a problem for most dealerships, as repair and service is a large chunk of their profit.

I agree that the car repair industry will be hurting due to electric vehicles, but not for the same reasons. As Tesla has shown, locking out non-corporate repairs is easy, even body work is something you can choke out from 3rd party shops by refusing to provide parts (hence the incredible repair costs for Tesla vehicles).

A profit driven electric car company can decide that any minor damage to the car will mean they push out a firmware update to brick the car. You don't own the software that makes the vehicle function, hence your at the mercy of the manufacturer letting you use their software.

> The parts on an EV either last forever

For now. It's an iron law of the market economy that once this sector becomes competitive, costs will get optimized to the point that - like currently with ICE cars - the reliability will be lowest possible that they can get away with. There's no law of physics saying EVs are built reliably; there just isn't enough economic incentive to start building low-reliability parts. That will change as EVs gain popularity.

There’s also an iron law that simpler machines are easier to make reliable, and the electric motor is orders of magnitude simpler than a supercharged multi-cylinder internal combustion engine.

Mercedes has a consistent pattern, going back at least to the 1960s, of excellent design sabotaged by inferior parts here and there. (I've repaired many of them.)

Fords, on the other hand, have a consistent quality.

I'll never own a Mercedes.

Ford? Look at the spark plugs on the triton v8... Awful

Need to service the turbos on Land Rover LR3/4/First gen Range Rover Sport Diesels? Easier with the body off.

This isn't by accident or incompetence, it's to maximise servicing revenue.

I wonder how they compute the fine line between luxury and crap so that people don't feel their brand new "high end" car was not what was advertised..

For the most part high end cars do work as advertised until the lease ends or they're traded in. At that point they become someone else's problem.

By consensus of the Joneses.

What car do you recommend?

What does Malaysia have to so with this?

He’s just implying cheap subcontracted labour from a foreign country where labour rates are lower.

There's also a different culture in Asia. In Europe if management tells you to do stupid /unoptimal thing employee can rejoinder.

In Asia they'll just do what they're told to do without questioning. You'll notice this immediately if you work with Asian people. They never discuss decisions with the management.

And as an Indian American[1] friend said the power relation means they do whatever stupid thing they are told to do by management rather throwing shit back.

[1] My friend has complained that managers confuse him with the Indians on a H1B visas and get bent when he tells them their idea is stupid.

It doesn't have to be Malaysia. They are being designed by people who will never use the product.

Ford EcoBoost engines that require a VERY specific oil and VERY regular oil changes (iirc something like "every 10k OR ever year, whichever is up first" or the timing belt disintegrates and you'll have immediate engine damage. Because of Ford's relatively unique construction of running a rubber timing belt in the engine oil.

BMW handbrakes are notorious and have been for decades. Even when they're factory new they won't really bite.

Compared to older oil and vehicles, 10,000 miles or 1 year is pretty long.

10k kilometers. Most VW engines are on a schedule of 20-30k or 2 years, though those have other, less dramatic, issues (direct injection + AGR = dirty intake valves). And while engines don't like it when you change the oil late, they're not immediately scrap metal.