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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

Yeaaaaaahhhh, I don't know, man.

Every VW owner I've ever met had some kind of long-term electrical or wiring problem with their car. And that was with a gasoline or diesel engine.

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I have the opposite anecdata, this needs a citation, especially when compared against Tesla

Add me to the list of "I'll never buy VW again" people. Electrical problems, then when we waited 2k miles too long to change the timing belt, the whole engine was totaled. Later, same car ended up belching the turbo fan out the exhaust system. It was a $25,000 car that cost us $35,000. Never VW Again.

The engine being totaled was your fault, always change the timing belt on or before its due to be changed.

Sure... because the consequence for being 1 month behind on regular maintenance should be complete destruction of the engine with no warning.

I mean. I accept that there was negligence on my part there. But it wasn't a huge lapse and that is the crappiest of crappy failure modes. Never had another car as finicky and high maintenance.

When I visited Sarajevo my beaten down 1995 VW polo made the grim bosnian guy who's job it was to being tourists to their apartments smile — "This is a good car, you can get every part cheap."

And indeed I had to exchange the motor because my brother drove it too long without putting oil into it. Exchanging the whole motor block costed 500 Euros. My father exchanged one of his front lights for the same price.

>we waited 2k miles too long to change the timing belt, the whole engine was totaled.

Uh, if anything that is perfect engineering.

I hope this new all EV vehicle has a kick ass screen / tech stack system.

So many of their older ones are slow / janky etc. Carplay is a godsend on their other vehicles.

I'm assuming buttery smooth ipad like experience with great touch screen - can anyone confirm this? Burned too many times to trust the marketing vids.

I don't know about others, but the new Tesla Model S/X comes with a Radeon Navi 23 GPU which is basically a PS5 level gaming computer. You can play games on all Teslas. I think the traditional manufacturers are substantially behind when it comes to features / performance of the in-car entertainment systems. https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/27/22253258/tesla-model-s-ps...

Do you want performance or durability? You may not be able to have both.

Tesla hasn't been using automotive grade parts in its cars:

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...

Tesla says the main interface to the car was only supposed to function for 5 years. I don't think anyone buying those cars would have expected that:

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39065/tesla-claims-failing-tou...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-recall-idUSKBN2A21F...

Automotive grade parts do matter.

I'd rather take performance, if the computer is replaceable.

The whole car is replaceable. Is that an efficient use of money? And, if EVs are to be green, is that ecologically friendly?

I don't have to replace the car if I can upgrade the computer. Any computer gets old in 5 years.

Well, you can't.

Last week I drove a brand-new rented Golf VIII for 1500km and as the stack in in this ID does look pretty much exactly like this Golf's I'd say I can make a good guess about it. The system is smooth, definitely not janky, but also far removed from an ipad experience in terms of UX and control layout.

The UX is not very good. I sat in countless makes of rental cars and when there are tactile switches for core functions like climate control, I never had any problem whatsoever to use it without even thinking about it; even while driving I could say with confidence I can quickly adjust whatever climate control and not to have to worry about it. But here, to me, the strictly touchpad focussed input and menu layout was simply confusing. It's not intuitive where your paired Bluetooth phone options are, for example. The radio screen is a pain to use. I didn't dare messing with it while driving, and I didn't dare navigate through 2+ layers of screen to get to climate control while driving :/

Maybe it's bearable if you use that car on a daily basis and get married to it, but as a swing by experience, it's certainly not very impressive. Even the MINIs and BMWs I drove, with the weird spinning menu controller (at least in previous generations), where often better than the free form touchpad input in this car. I wouldn't know if anybody is able to make it better though (haven't driven that many different makes).

That makes me feel less bad about the VW Golf I had that would spontaneously turn it self off while I was driving down the road.

Fortunately this problem manifested itself early enough (6 weeks after purchase, with ~200 miles on to odometer) that we were able to win a lemon law case and get our money back.

Which is why I smile every time someone tells me that EVs are "more reliable" because they have "less moving parts". That might be true, but they also have vastly more components and structures, of all different sizes from cables down to nanometer features in silicon, that MUSTNT move, or it will fail.

How many cars are scrapped because they wore out mechanically, and how many are scrapped due to economically un-fixable electrical issues?

actually no, they don’t. drive train wise the have less fun enough. Resolver and current sensor.

Electronics is cheap and easy to replace. If properly designed and protected from heat and water - practically doesn't wear out. Mechanical problems like corrosion of structural parts is almost always uneconomical to fix.

Sorry, have you owned a car made in the last 10ish years?

Yes. Actually a brand new Mazda Cx-5. During the first 4 years it had 2 very minor mechanical issues covered by warranty and 1 minor electrical issue - broken USB (but not sure if that wasn't mechanical really, these ports are often fragile). Overall it was a very good car and much more reliable than the previous, much more mechanical Ford from 2007.

And my new car is still too new to tell anything, but AFAIK it is leading many reliability rankings - Lexus CT. Weird, considering it is a hybrid, isn't it?

I also have some electronic devices at my household that has worked flawlessly for over 40 years since manufactured - eg an analogue oscilloscope and lab power supply.

And a few new cheap LED lamps that half of them died within the first 6 months. :D

I conclude the thing is in proper design and high quality assembly, not electronics per se. It can be good, it can be also crap if done badly.

Have you ever seen a wiring harness get replaced in a car? Manufacturers will try to do this before declaring a car totalled because of wiring defects.

It's an amazing thing to witness. The car is literally stripped down to the frame and then reassembled again.

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