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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

This is clearly about BEVs, they are much harder for a local mechanic to “overhaul” when the key component, the battery, reaches the end of its life.

I think its great that they are thinking ahead like this, it’s also good for the communities where Toyota have factories in the UK. There has been so much talk about how the lifetime of a BEV is much longer than a ICE, bringing them back to the factories for “re-manufacturing” helps to ensure jobs in communities that have been badly hurt by the automotive industry before.

I suspect this is where the whole industry is going to go, the smaller local mechanics are sadly going to disappear but if we see the remanufacturing happening in the countries of use that’s at least a plus.

The other thing this does though is further entrench the manufactures in the second hand market and tie yet more customers to their financing plans.

EDIT:

Wanted to add, that this also helps the manufacture keep control of the value in the battery’s which is probably the largest single const in a BEV. Remanufacturing the battery’s themselves will be massively important.

It will be interesting to see how this effects British Car Auctions (the company) who have a near monopoly on the second hand market.

View on HN

Generally in the UK cars get scrapped because they failed their MOT. Everything tested during an MOT (except emissions, which I've never seen fail) is also present on electric cars. It's basically checking brakes, suspension, lights and body rust.

Maybe there'll be less mechanics, but I doubt they'll disappear because they can't do engine work. Engines are super reliable these days - it's the stuff around them which develops problems.

Well, the article says:-

> "I think we’re very familiar with the usual two- to three-year cycles that are extremely popular in the UK, [...] Toyota will take vehicles back to the factory after their first use cycle (ie a typical lease contract) and refurbish them

This article isn't about "remanufacturing" cars at end-of-life - it's about three-year-old cars.

> cars at end-of-life - it's about three-year-old cars.

That sounds so ridiculous to anyone living in the UK. The second hand market here dwarfs all other routes to obtaining your own vehicle. I've never bought a car less than 10 years old.

I don't quite understand your point: are you suggesting he equated 'end of life' with 'three years old'? He was doing precisely the opposite.

It's completely separate things. They think they've found a way to market 2-3 year old cars as new. It's a good idea, most cars lose a third to half of their value in the first two years. Anything they can eat out of that by changing the seat leather is pure profit

Does the UK not already have the "Certified pre-owned" programs that car dealers in the USA have had for decades? You buy a certified pre-owned Ford, GMC, Toyota, etc, and it's a used car that has been inspected and refurbished, coming with a warranty. That's what this sounds like, just with a third round tacked on.

I took from the article that they are referring to fleet cars, which sounds about right

Yeah, but the majority of new cars on the road are leased or on finance. A lot of people/companies really do get new cars every three years or so.

Citation needed.

Looks like new cars account for around 25% of all car sales in the UK[1].

It would seem that of new car sales, 93% are leased[2]

> The percentage of private new car sales financed by FLA members in the twelve months to October 2021 was 93.0%, a similar level to the same period in 2020.

[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/299841/market-volumes-of...

[2]https://www.fla.org.uk/research/motor-finance/

First owners though tend to hold for 2-3 years as part of a PCP/PCH

This sounds like the US concept of a Certified Pre-Owned car (at least that's Ford's term for it).

The car is used, often just off-lease, but it's inspected by the dealership and minor repairs are done so it can be resold with the original warranty essentially reset as if it were new.

We have that here in the UK, the thing that’s different with this plan it to take the cars back to a factory (potentially alongside new cars being built) to be worked on.

It is much more like how Apple, for example, sell refurbished devices that have been put back down a production line for remanufacturing.

I think the intention is for the remanufactured cars to be almost indistinguishable from a brand new car (as an Apple refurbished device is).

I would wager very little beyond a detail cleaning is done to a "Certified Pre-Owned" car. Maybe they give it a mechanical once-over and a quick computer diagnostic scan to be sure it doesn't have any obvious problems.

Make it look as new as you can, sell it at a premium as a "certifed" car, with maybe a 2-year warranty. Profit.

Even a 5 year old car is very unlikely to have any major mechanical issues unless it has been abused.

Right, you aren't paying for the inspection, you are buying the extended warranty with a pretty name.

I bought a certified pre-owned Mazda CX-5 and it had new brakes, all fluids flushed, new battery, new serpentine bet, new tires, and many other refreshed replacements and cleanings. It was really only $1000 more than like used CX-5 and came with a new manufacturer warranty. Was worth it in every way.

Exactly. Those 100 point inspections that are used to "certify" a pre-owned vehicle may include such challenging tests as:

- Car starts

- Windshield wipers present

- Door locks work

- Key fobs work

...etc

My certified pre-owned GMC Acadia has a 5 year GM bumper-to-bumper warranty on top of the original factory warranty. I had to pay for it, but the dealer fudged the financing rate to almost 0% to completely cancel it out over the term of the loan, so the loan "interest" is basically paying GM for the warranty rather than the bank.

It's specifically talking about lease cars too - car manufacturers actually already have agreements with lease companies to take back cars after 3 years, which is a key reason car manufacturers have 'approved used' car sales. This arrangement is particularly common with company cars.

That may be the case for cars from dealer/manufacturer lease/hire-purchase schemes, but for the big corporate leasing companies (e.g. Arval, Leaseplan, et al), the cars usually get picked up at the end of the lease and dropped off at the nearest BCA facility and auctioned off ASAP.

(Which is amusingly the cheapest way to buy your car at the end of lease... just ask the pick up driver where he's taking it...)

Is that true, I always thought they ended up in the car auctions.

It depends on a few factors.

Typically, what happens post-lease is that the inspection will help determine whether the vehicle is of the correct 'quality' to be Certified Pre-Owned (i.e. sufficient quality or fixing whatever's wrong and selling as CPO is worth doing) and that's kinda the first decision gate.

After that, I would assume that the dealer getting the lease back has some pull as to whether they keep it, but that might be contingent on a few factors like what your agreement with the leasing company is and what your current floorplan is like. (Many dealers in the US don't own most of the inventory on their lots, so any car you keep on your lot eats into that line of credit.)

Oh, also the agreements between the financing companies and the auctions themselves. In some cases the agreements are extremely tight, and there are only small windows where someone doesn't already have the 'rights' to sell a vehicle. (That was a fun project.)

These large corporate lease agreements aren't done through the dealer network in the UK - they are done through a lease company which liaises directly with the car manufacturers.

I'm from the UK and it may be different in other places - but I have a friend who works for a large automaker in their second hand ex-lease team who explained this to me, so it absolutely exists here at least!

Would be interesting how this compares to leasing a car as many do. Mindful there are many who already buy and sell back to dealers within 3 years and then buy new again. How well Toyota will be able to compete with that and the second-hand market will be the sink or swim for this initiative.

While I don’t disagree it’s also worth noting that for example the brakes on BEVs last significantly longer due to regenerative braking, up to 200k miles I believe. This is much longer than the “three year cycles” that the article is taking about. There is also no more oil changes or exhausts on a BEV.

So yes, there will be local mechanics for things such as bodywork and tires, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see only 10-20% of the number of them in 20 years time.

Brake pads and discs last longer yes. But brake calipers can seize if left unmaintained, especially in northern states that use salt on the road (and this may be worsened if they are used less). Brake fluid is hygroscopic and should be replaced every 2-3 years regardless of use, otherwise corrosion can occur in the brake lines. There are plenty of hydraulic and mechanical items on BEVs to keep small shops busy.

The current brakes and fluids are built on the assumption they'll be heavily used and wear out. We're already seeing changes in response to the new situation, e.g. using lighter, less corrosion prone metals so I'd expect to see continual improvements in this over time.

https://www.designnews.com/automotive/lightweight-aluminum-b...

Tesla's have a 2 year maintenance cycle. They replace the brake fluid, the cabin air filter and do an inspection.

Brake fluid is one of the last somewhat frequent maintenance items. It looks like newer Tesla's have all electric breaks so technically there's very little reason you would need a mechanic since replacing the air filter is easy (at least compared to brake fluid changes).

All electric brakes? Do you mean that there is no mechanical / hydraulic link between the pedal and the pads?

What happens when the power fails?

-I guess the brakes need power to be disengaged against a spring force; this is quite common on electric motors in industrial use.

So, power fails? It stops. Quickly.

I mean it's common in air brakes used in commercial trucks as well. If air pressure is lost the brakes close: That's the failure condition.

Done likely because these vehicles are larger and hydraulic brake fluid runs the risk of boiling (air compresses unlike fluid) and/or catching fire.

As for brake fluid and fires, I had a neighbor's Ford Explorer (more like Exploder?) catch fire while parked and it burned down to the chassis due to this: https://www.cozen.com/admin/files/publications/Motor_Vehicle...

Also because running hydraulic brake lines to trailers is impractical.

Is it though? I grew up on a farm and we have had implements with detachable hydraulics.

Okay, less practical. Imagine trains had hydraulic brakes. Just another thing to go wrong.

It’s probably similar to how planes have red and at links.

Planes have what? I think that your text-to-speech understood you improperly, but I cannot figure out what it was.

My guess is “red and at” -> “redundant”

We need a text-to-speech-mishaps-translator.

Around here a problem with discs and brake pads as well and forb electrical vehicles in particular.

Wear keeps rust at bay but when they don't get enough wear to remove rust it can make the discs uneven and at that point it can easily spiral out of control.

I mean, I've had this happen a few times (I drive a manual, looking ahead and coasting/timing to avoid full stops means I'm light on the brakes.)

But every time, it's exhibited as a 'pulsing' feel on the brakes that is alarming before it is dangerous. I suppose to the untrained it could be confused for ABS kicking in but to me it's a very distinct feeling.

Electrical is a huge problem, as complexity skyrockets we need mechanics to diagnose and repair. Mechanics will adapt, not disappear.

Brakes are dead simple to replace and cheap to do so. Regenerative braking is insignificant in the scheme of refurbishing vehicles.

At some point do we stop calling the people who fix our cars “mechanics” and start calling them “electrics”?

It's a fair question. The amount of earthing and electrical safety required, when repairing EVs, is quite something.

How can you earth an EV? It’s isolated.

Is the label important? Thanks to CAN, LIN, and automotive ethernet the competent mechanics now have things like a picoscope which affords them the ability to diagnose signal issues.

Electrical is the one thing my local mechanic struggles with. My guess is if EV's really take hold he will be heading for early retirement.

Yep, mechanics generally dislike electrical work.

Yes, but replacing rotors and brake pads is the work of minutes on most modern cars.

Bodywork can easily make a car a write off, especially if exotic materials (aluminum, carbon, composites) are used.

Ycombinator has a startup, robotire, that build a robotic tool to replace tires.

> Everything tested during an MOT (except emissions, which I've never seen fail)

Don't think this is true, I was looking at the MOT record of a car a few days ago and emissions failure was definitely stated as MOT failure reason.

I drive a 12 year old car which has been brilliant mechanically but on the past two MOTs it has failed the emissions test but passed the second time with the aid of a fuel additive. My understanding is that this is now the defualt procedure with local garages.

Pro tip for the emissions test: make sure the catalytic converter has had a chance to get red hot (by taking the test after a high speed drive).

Ah, goodhart's law strikes again. Car won't pass emissions? Drive it harder before the test!

I'm under the impression that many emissions testing programs (at least in the US) have discarded their more sophisticated testing mechanisms and now just rely on the ECU saying everything is okay. Since most cars on the road are new enough to have that ability. Oregon definitely ditched the dynos, and while they use a sniffer for really old cars, I wouldn't be surprised if they ditch that before much longer.

They're getting a lot more strict on ECU testing, too. Used to be you just needed to have no check emissions codes being thrown. Now they're more thorough, for most ECUs they can check to also verify no modifications to the emissions settings (can't just tell the computer it has no cat so it doesn't throw codes).

In my state they will just do engine light & ECU test for new cars. On older cars (>=10 years) when they do the IM240 test on a dynamo but if you look at the emissions limits they are all 100x what a normal car produces. Here's the GPM values (reading/limit) from my last test on a 2011 Honda Pilot:

Hydrocarbons 0.023/1.2 (1:50) CO 0.3/15 (1:50) CO2 502/NA (guess this one has no limit?) NOx 0.081/2 (1:25)

Maybe some states apply newer, stricter limits to older cars retroactively but in my experience as long as a car is operating normally it is impossible to fail emissions. I wouldn't be surprised if the ECU threw a code before the dynamo test caught something. IMO the most practical check they actually do is the presence of a functioning gas cap.

> IMO the most practical check they actually do is the presence of a functioning gas cap.

Even that throws a code these days. 14y.o. BMW has a pump that pressurizes the fuel system to check for leaks and it’s usually the pump that breaks and throws a code.

17y.o. Corolla threw a fuel system code but it was the gas cap.

Only thing is that this pressurization check system only runs when the weather is warm enough, so resetting a code usually lets you pass e-testing as “Not Ready” because months can go by. Maybe there’s differences in summer/winter e-testing criteria.

I don't know if it happens this way any more, but my last Subaru would do the pressurization test about 30 minutes after the car was turned off. Kinda weirded me out the first time I went into the garage and heard what sounded like something in the rear of the car inflating. Turns out that is exactly what it was doing.

Ford vehicles also do this.

Mine failed an emissions test (11yr old diesel mondeo with 170000 on the clock), but passed when I took it for a thrash round the M25 and a load of additive in the fuel tank.

The next year emissions weren't an issue, mainly because the only journey it did was a 250 mile run up the A1/A66/A6 and back again on a weekly basis.

In the US many states have are no emissions testing so not passing a test, worst case, means selling it a state over which is only a small loss of value. How many cars in the UK are on the road with near 300,000 miles on them?

My car failed the emissions MOT a few times inthe UK and it was less than 10 years old at the time.

> There has been so much talk about how the lifetime of a BEV is much longer than a ICE

I haven't seen this talk - I think most cars get scrapped when the chassis rots, or the suspension goes, or the tech’s obsolete - not when the engine dies which is probably the last thing to go. So BEV should be no different?

> ... not when the engine dies which is probably the last thing to go.

The engine can be the last thing to go, if you are good about checking and changing your oil.

If you let the oil run low, or let it sludge up, or don't promptly detect a cooling system leak [1], that will damage the bearings, and then it is only a matter of time before it dies.

[1] Some engines can have the head gasket start to leak, which lets coolant into the combustion chamber (which is bad). Worse are the engine designs that integrate the water pump into the engine block. If the water pump leaks (which they often do, it drips coolant directly into the oil, which is super bad.

An external water pump, in contrast, will just leak on the outside of the engine onto the ground. In either case, the coolant will run low, and eventually the engine will overheat. However, in the external pump case, you can just fix the leaky pump, and assuming you didn't try to run it overheated, you're fine.

But with an internal water pump, by the time the coolant has run low, you've severely degraded the oil too, and likely damaged the bearings. In addition, replacing the internal pump usually means dropping the entire engine out of the vehicle, which is far more costly.

Thus endeth my rant on water pumps.

When I was seventeen my dad said I could have the old family station wagon to drive if I would replace the water pump on it. He got me a water pump from a junk yard and the appropriate Chiltons manual for a 1973 Chevy Impala and it took me about four days (real mechanic time would probably be 4 hours) and then my dad sold me the car for $1.

Some things about it stand out in memory. Engines were so big and un-compacted back then it was relatively easy to fit your hands and tools where ever they needed to go and pieces of the engine basically looked like what you’d expect them to be.

The other thing I found out later was that my father was desperate to sell me the car, because it allowed him to get me off his insurance. I was a 17 year old boy, with one fender bender already under my belt and my parents had just bought a new Mercedes sedan. For insurance purposes, as a licensed driver living with them, without my own car the insurance company considered me a driver of the new car and the insurance was outrageous. After my dad sold me the car, I was off their main policy and on a separate one. Very tricky dad.

Something that is extremely anecdotal experience for me, especially given I have never owned a car, is that things like "check your oil" are weirdly a feature mainly of american media. To the extent that its sort of led me to believe its something that isn't really necessary, like taking vitamins when your doctor hasn't told you you have a deficiency. I'm only really realising this assumption of mine now, so is this even remotely true?

I don't think ive ever heard about people talking about changing their oil here in europe in actual day-to-day life, but I have heard much more about antifreeze or windscreen wiper fluid or even water/coolant.

I looked up the oil change schedule for my car once. Same car and specs available in both the US and the UK (minor compliance issues like colour of indicators beside.) In the UK the manufacturer recommends changing every 20,000 miles or two years, in the US every 5,000 miles or six months. Same car!

I have never changed my oil in my car, despite having it over a year, and won't look to do it for another year yet. I think that would give most Americans a heart attack.

They've got an entire industry over there changing oil 4x more frequently than actually required.

Absolutely bizarre.

Is this possibly related to E10? E10 is the norm in the US but, as I understand it, E5 is more common in Europe. I don't know the chemistry but I do know that there are concerns about ethanol adversely affecting the life of engine seals, moreso in older vehicles not designed for it, but there's at least a fringe of people who insist it's an issue for modern engines as well.

I also know that there are some appreciable differences between EU and US standards for diesel (higher cetane number in Europe) which adversely impacts the performance of small diesel engines in the US, but I don't know if there are any similar issues with gasoline.

I'd also be curious about the manufacturer's specified oil. It is surprisingly common for new vehicles in the US to still specify conventional or blended oil, where 5k miles is a more common change interval. I've seen as high as 15k mile change interval specified in the manual for a US vehicle but the manual also specified full synthetic only (this was a turbocharged engine which tends to adversely impact life, I wonder if a similar naturally aspirated may have listed 20k).

In any case the "change oil every 3k miles" guideline is long gone in the US, with 5k-14k being more common, but nonetheless 3k was common for long enough that it seems to be thoroughly instilled into the minds of many members of the baby boomer generation. I think this has given a certain license to the chain lube shops, long a source of suspect business practices, to continue to use 3k miles for their window stickers. That said I've seen even Jiffy Lube put in a window sticker for 7k miles, for a blended oil. There's a story (I don't know if it's true) that the 3k mile recommendation stuck around for so long only because the domestic automakers were uninterested in going to the expense of longer testing, and that situation changed due to both media involvement (Consumer Reports for example took this on as a big issue in the '90s) and competition from the Japanese automakers that had invested more money into research.

5k actually seems unusually low for a new production vehicle and I would tend to think that must have been specified for conventional or at least blended. Outside of some older engines with detergent-related concerns pretty much the only thing keeping conventional oil on the market is price and more and more vehicles are specifying synthetic only.

Finally, temperatures across the UK are much more moderate than across the US. While synthetic oils have less issues this way, oil behavior in terms of actual viscosity and lubricity tends to vary appreciably by temperature, and worst of all mostly when it matters most right after startup. This has an adverse impact on both oil and engine life. It's become less common for US vehicles to specify different oil grades for different seasons/temperature ranges (although some still do), but US maintenance guidelines are still going to be developed for a pretty wide temperature range that notably includes ambient temperatures in the 80-100F/26-37C range that significantly thin oil and are uncommon in the UK. A similar problem exists at the low end, in parts of the US cold start temperatures of 20F/-7C are routine and most vehicle manuals no longer call for block heat until you get down to nearly 0F. Oil can take a long time to "limber" starting from these low temperatures and that's hard on engine life and puts a lot of metal shavings in the oil. Manufacturers kind of have to set their maintenance recommendations at "lowest common denominator" since practical experience with seasonal/climate-based oil recommendations have shown that vehicle owners and maintenance shops are both extremely bad at following them.

Newer cars will usually tell you. Iirc, it averages around 8-11k miles or 4-5 months for my Honda.

It’s a weird topic that people get religious about. I will say that in the 90s when I changed it myself, the viscosity of the oil was very different if you went longer between changes.

I would expect the schedule for the first $X months/$Y km to differ from subsequent periods. Manufacturing tolerances are incredible these days but there is still going to be a period of high wear leading to less and less new particulate in the fluids. At some early point, months if not weeks or days after the mechanical bits all have experienced a range of conditions, a fluids change would be beneficial. Most of the wear having taken place, it will take much more time to reach the same level of contamination after the first fluids change.

Does your owner’s manual recommend abiding by certain speed/rpm limits during a break-in period? I’m pretty sure my (Canadian) old car/old truck do.

An oil change is cheap. It’s also far better to preventatively change the oil, that way the engine is running with optimum lubrication most of the time. If you wait to change the oil when it’s black sludge, it’s likely damage will slowly build up from allowing the engine to run with poor oil.

So why don’t the manufacturer recommend it? Especially since it’s comprehensively warrantied for seven years so entirely their problem?

Either 5 is justified by engineering or 20 is? One of them must be some kind of misrepresentation?

I used to help develop Diesel Engines before I moved into Software Engineering.

If they followed anything like what we did, they would just run load cycles on the engine in a test cell to simulate approximately however many miles of ‘normal’ use they want to validate the engine up to. During the testing the engine would be maintained, fueled, and oiled according to the maintenance schedule and customer guidelines the engine will be sold with.

After the testing, the engine would be completely broken down and analyzed. If there weren’t any signs of abnormal wear then the engine would be considered validated __under those conditions__.

The problem is when real-world use deviates from the testing conditions. Which is pretty much always. Then the manufacturer guidelines no longer apply.

If you run your engine harder than the test cycle load factor, you will need to replace the engine oil more regularly. If your fuel quality is crap, i.e. has any ethanol in it, you will need to replace your oil more regularly as fuel eventually gets into the oil, and ethanol results in high water content in fuels, and hence oil, which will break down seals as well as reduce overall lubrication.

If your engine breaks down due to poor oil quality from lack of regular inspection and replacement, then as a manufacturer I’d be very resistant to paying out on any warranty claim. Even if you followed the “guidelines” for oil changes, you still have a duty to inspect the oil regularly, both as a responsible driver and under the car manual guidelines. Using bad oil and / or fuel is very easy to test for.

Long story short, the oil change intervals guidelines are just that, guidelines, and real-world use dictates the maintenance schedule. Frequent oil changes, before the oil breaks down / becomes crap, is just a quick, cheap way to prolong the life of your engine or any mechanical device with bearings or sliding surfaces for that matter.

>If your fuel quality is crap, i.e. has any ethanol in it, you will need to replace your oil more regularly

That is real-world use in most of Europe and is included in the higher mileage between oil changes compared to the US discussed here. I don't even think most Europeans inside the EU have access to ethanol free petrol? At least around here (Denmark) it would be illegal. If a car breaks down because of ethanol in the petrol it is of course covered by the manufacturer. Otherwise they might as well state "warranty 5 years but not if petrol has been added at any point".

The manufacturer specified intervals are just fine and you'd need to be an extreme outlier to have any problems with your oil following them. Maybe if you have a caravan attached at all times or drive off-road or racing or all of the above at the same time. Otherwise consumer law would mandate the manufacturer pay for any damages caused, as it damn well should. It is also the manufacturer that would have to prove the fault is yours. Not possible if the car have been serviced even if done by a third-party shop. The oil would have to be visible damaged even if looked at by a granny (they cannot demand you understand oil better than "it looks like oil and is inside the specified mileage").

> Even if you followed the “guidelines” for oil changes, you still have a duty to inspect the oil regularly, both as a responsible driver and under the car manual guidelines.

No this isn’t true. I check my oil as regularly as the manual tells me to, which is every two years. That’s literally the published inspection schedule in the UK for this car. If that isn’t regular enough and the engine wears that’s a warranty issue covered by the manufacturer.

Most manuals tell you to inspect the oil monthly or before a long car journey.

Waiting two years before realizing your engine is drinking oil is probably reckless which wouldn’t be covered under any warranty.

You mean literally checking the dip-stick? Yes they do recommend to do that more regularly, but if you mean dumping the oil out, they don't.

No consumer law would uphold that. Your 80 year old granny have to be able to see something is wrong with the oil by looking at the dip. Demanding anything else is requiring someone educated look at it which won't hold in any court in the EU.

Maybe the oil sold in Europe is more uniformly higher grade?

If I go to the local auto parts store here, I can spend ~$1.00/qt for oil or more than $10.00/qt for oil. Guess which oil most people will buy?

Also I don't really have any confidence that the dealers are using factory specified oil. I think they probably use the cheapest bulk oil they can buy. That's why I change my own oil, that way I know what is in the engine.

Amazing. Not only do the dealers I've used not use bulk oil (unlike most 3rd party shops) but I get the leftover (new) oil in the original metal can they used. It is definitely the factory specified oil. The specific car is part of the paint scheme directly on the can.

Seems to me reading the thread that the difference is because US dealers use crappy oil so they specify more oil changes? Or maybe it's just greed.

A counterpoint to this is that my car is manufactured in a single plant in Europe. It ships with engine oil in it (because it's driven on and off the transport ship). So I presume one sold in the UK and the US have the same oil in, yet Land Rover will tell you to change that exact same oil in the exact same engine after 20k miles in the UK and 5k miles in the US.

There’s a weird subset of Americans who are very “passionate” about motor oil. They argue about oil filters and formulations… almost audiophile like.

My guess is the guidance is to avoid some PR nightmare.

Fuel and oil quality is a lot more variable in the US, so are the environmental conditions, so you have to set the guidelines according to the minimum likely to be encountered.

Its hard to give a good recommendation as oil degrades at different rates depending on use age and weather. Lots of short and aggressive trips in the city will wear it out differently to some smooth motorway driving, mileage being equal.

Is it really a 4x difference? And don’t British people drive more shorter trips than the US so even if that’s the case it’s also the wrong way around?

Fuel and oil quality is a lot more variable in the US as it’s set at the state level, plus it’s just generally worse, so are the environmental conditions, so you have to set the guidelines according to the minimum / worst case likely to be encountered.

I presume that the UK schedule specifies synthetic oil, that does let the oil last a little bit longer. But not that massive difference.

One of the reasons people give for buying German luxury cars is because they only need the oil changed once a year vs the 3-4x a year for American or Japanese or Volkswagen cars.

I have a Japanese car (Mitsubishi), made in Japan and imported to Poland, sold with a manual in Polish. The manual says to change oil every year or 20kkm, whichever comes first.

And if it was sold in North America it would say something very different in the manual.

This isn't true. The VW service manuals for at least the last 15 years have had a 10k mile service interval for changing the oil and not 3-4X a year.

The plan I had with my VAG garage was a service once every 2 years. No need to change the oil more often than that unless I were to do a lot of miles.

> need the oil changed once a year vs the 3-4x a year for American or Japanese or Volkswagen cars

We bought a VW Polo, kept it for ten years, then changed it for a VW Sharan, and recently added a VW Up. Total miles driven must be around 200k.

Based on a sekrit strategy - called reading then following the service manual - can confirm that (at least our) Volkswagens do not need their oil changing "3-4x a year"!

Are you in North America? The OP said that North America and Europe had very different oil change schedules. I haven't owned a Volkswagen for 30 years, so I guess it isn't surprising if it has changed.

Nope, American/Canadian manuals for VW cars tend to specify 16000 km or 10000 miles. I have experience with mk4 and mk5 VWs (diesel and gas) and they all had similar or the same oil change interval.

https://www.volkswagen.co.uk/en/owners-and-drivers/servicing...

(assuming you're not doing significantly more than 10,000 miles per year) "For the first three years of ownership, your car will require an annual service inspection and oil service."

This seems to be the recommendation for US/Canada too...

> One of the reasons people give for buying German luxury cars is because they only need the oil changed once a year vs the 3-4x a year for American or Japanese or Volkswagen cars.

No clue about American & Japanese cars, but for VW (and Opel) it's definitely just once per year (in Switzerland).

If your car is newish (under 8 years and under 100K miles), you can pretty safely ignore any routine oil checking and just change it every year or ~12K miles. At some oil change, the mechanic will tell you [or you will see] that you have an oil leak or consumption issue and should then start checking it more often. A newer car will use way under a half-quart of oil in 10K miles, which can be ignored entirely.

I change the oil on our CR-V every year (about 5-6K miles) and because it’s 17 years and 225K miles old it uses some oil, which I top up twice between annual changes.

The amount of oil changing done in the US is indeed excessive and driven by promoting the practice to consumers who, in general, couldn’t find their oil filter nor explain the function of oil and oil filtration, and can only judge based on what everyone is doing and whether they can afford it. The little reminder stickers to bring your car back in 3K (yes!) miles are a critical business supply for an oil change franchise.

In the 1980s, with conventional motor oil, 3k mile changes made sense. It was cheap insurance. With engines made today and synthetic oil, 10k mile intervals are not unusual. The quick-lube places will still put 3k miles on their reminder sticker, because it's more business for them.

Also be sure they are actually using the correct synthetic oil for your car, and not conventional 10w40 that would be appropriate for a 1978 Chevy.

The advent of closed-loop fuel control has helped oil service life as well, but I think the “it’s cheap insurance” psychology is a message that makes sense to primitive human brains well beyond the underlying engineering data, leading us to over-service expensive things.

> ... you can pretty safely ignore any routine oil checking and just change it every year...

No, no, no, no, no.

Stretch the oil change intervals a little if you have to, but you need to check the oil on a regular basis.

The oil level and quality are critical to the life of the engine. By the time the oil pressure warning light comes on, you may already have irreparable damage to the main bearings.

In the 1970s and before getting 100,000 miles on a car was a big deal, you would call all your friends for that, put oil in the engine, drive off in a cloud of blue smoke and 10 minutes latter having crossed that mark return and put more oil in. In the 1980s cars got a lot more reliable and so most don't remember how bad they used to be. Few cars, even old worn out beaters need their oil checked between changes, but it used to be a big deal and not doing it's would destroy your engine fast since it would run out.

So mostly it is pandering to old people, but it is still an expression

My car has 160k km since 2005. The problems are everywhere else except the engine

First - it is rusting a lot. Then the car door doesn't close properly when it is colder than -15 or -20. Then the car has decided that the esp is faulty 2 times on longer rides in cold weather and that the max speed should be 20kmh (luckily a restart of the car fixed that)

This is it - a car's structure just rots away at a certain point if it's being used. It's not a mechanical thing you can refurbish or replace - the car as a whole just starts breaking apart.

With the exception of a crappy Dodge which lost a timing chain which took out a bunch of the powertrain (under warranty--but it was never the same again), it's mostly fair to say that every car I've owned was retired due to rust.

  > Some engines can have the head gasket start to leak

It's OK, I drive a Subaru too.

I don't drive a Subaru, but it can be a problem on other makes as well.

In my (Australian) experience, the three main reasons cars get scrapped are engine failures, transmission problems, and kangaroos.

Rust is much less of a problem for anything manufactured this century. Suspension is pretty cheap to fix, it cost me <$2000 to get my entire front suspension replaced a while back.

> Rust is much less of a problem for anything manufactured this century. Suspension is pretty cheap to fix, it cost me <$2000 to get my entire front suspension replaced a while back.

I'm guessing you don't have below freezing temperatures, and roads sprinkled with salt every winter? That's the real suspension and car chassis killer.

I've also heard that it's similar near seas (or oceans), where non negligible amounts of salt from the sea are present as aerosol in the air.

Perhaps it is because many ICE car components degrade with approximately similar pace. If it were just the suspension that would give up, it would be worthwhile to repair if the remainder had many km left in them. But if you know that it is just a matter of time until another expensive repair, then you throw in the towel at the first one, perhaps.

It’s not an ICE issue. Emissions controls drove reliability.

No such thing drives similar changes for other components. I drove a 2003 Honda Pilot 265k miles and get rid of it in 2019. It needed shocks, brakes and would have needed the exhaust system replaced soon due to rust. Just wasn’t worth the money.

I sold it to a guy I know for $2000, he drove it until last year, removed the engine and transmission, and sold it.

Toyota is famous for extreme durability in functional parts like engine or electronics. But also infamous, how the chassis rots away very fast.

Don't know what is the current status. Audi started dipping the bodies in zinc since 1987. So technologies exist.

  > Toyota is famous for extreme durability in functional parts like engine or electronics. But also infamous, how the chassis rots away very fast.

I wouldn't go that far. Toyota pickup chassis built by Dana (the rear end guys) were known to rust some time ago. Other than that, I do not know of any Toyotas that rusted away more than the average car would given any environmental conditions.

'Don't know what is the current status. Audi started dipping the bodies in zinc since 1987."

Fancy way to say galvanised?

Maybe galvanisation is a fancy way to say dipping in zinc?

Except galvanized is a common household term for a century but dipped in zinc sound exotic unless you realize the similarity.

There's a big difference between building the chassis out of galvanised parts, and dipping the completed chassis in a bath of molten zinc.

Its so easy to kill an engine by just skipping oil changes. What's more, as engines become evermore complex, the amount of failure condition that can total the car grow too.

Changing the oil as part of an annual service is already more than enough. Engines don’t break from oil in almost any use-case.

One problem is that modern cars have very small amount of oil in them. Which means that if you develop a problem they can run dry very quickly.

Not to mention injecting themselves into the second-hand battery market, which I suspect is going to be huge.

You have it right but I do not think the battery is the reason. The battery, while heavy, is mechanically simple.

Suspension bushings, springs, and shocks have a long life but, by the time the battery needs changing, are probably worn out. The wheels have been bashed enough to at least need straightening. The driver's seat padding and upholstery is probably shot. If it has a steel body it has dings and the corrosion protection and paint will need at least a touch up. The windshield is pitted.

This means it's not just a job for the local mechanic. They don't do paint. The paint shop doesn't do upholstery. Wheel straightening is a speciality shop. The only place to do all this in one place is either a bespoke restoration shop, or a purpose built remanufacturing facility.

There is maybe also a market for "re-manufacturing" ICE cars as battery ones.

As much as that sounds like a nice idea ICE and BEV are so fundamentally different I think it’s incredibly unlikely.

To properly take advantage of BEVs the drive chain is very different resulting in an incompatible mechanical structure. Also battery’s are very heavy (BEVs are significantly heavier than their ICE equivalents) which is why the battery’s are placed as low as possible. Retrofitting battery’s into ICE to make a BEV would result in a very bad and potentially dangerous weight distribution.

That’s not to say there aren’t components from an ICE that can’t be reused if they haven’t reached the end of their useful life (much of the interior for example). However there is already a good scrap market for these and so I think it’s unlikely manufactures will do it themselves.

There are plenty of recent TV programmes that show turning classic ICE cars into a BEV, typical range seems to be about 150 miles which would be fine for a lot of people. I'm just thinking that this could be done in a more systematic way instead of custom builds.

The alternative is to completely replace every current car with a new BEV, I don't think this can be done quickly enough or at low enough cost for most people.

Quite right, and there is definitely going to be a cottage industry of ICE to BEV conversions but I don’t see it as something that manufactures will want to get involved with due to the compromises needed.

You can already buy a battery Ford 351 crate motor and it's a drop in replacement for an ICE, you gotta do the batteries and we need to replace the heater with something electric, little baby heat pump.

Working on doing one now on a truck out at the family farm. I think this is going to be more common as we move away from ICE.

In the future everyone will be a battery mechanic. Just as dads in the 60’s and 70’s had a garage full of tools. But now they will have soldering stations and ammeters

I think you need more specialist equipment and training if you want to mess with high voltage electrical systems on BEVs.

Not for the huge high-voltage batteries in electric cars though.

This is I don't get. Why smaller mechanics can't work on these?

> BEVs

What's this? You've used it multiple times as if we're supposed to know what it means.

Battery Electric Vehicle

You can mostly figure it out from the context.

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