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Comment by dugmartin | Hacker News Reader

The "design for unmaintainability" problem has been around for a while. I remember helping a friend change his plugs on this Ford Ranger in the early 90s. The closest two plugs to the firewall required you to climb into the engine bay and basically hug the engine to get your arm into position to blindly get to the plugs. If you look around on YouTube you'll see some crazy mechanic videos where they show things like bolts located in impossible to loosen locations.

Cars used to be simpler to work on because a) they inherently were simpler and b) the engine bay used to have a lot of room to work in. Both of these things are not coming back.

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> Cars used to be simpler to work on because

No, it's because they are designed to be assembled from complete sub-assemblies. Maintenance is not assumed to be done on the sub-assemblies while they are in the final product. Under warranty, workshops are intended to replace entire sub-assemblies with new/rebuilt parts.

It's effectively a deliberate decision from the 80s that enabled faster assembly while warranties were shorter. For cars that are out of warranty, it doesn't matter either way.

The problem in the article occurs when Ford tries to pay someone to repair faults that were not planned to happen during the warranty time. Impossible, because it's completely uneconomical.

I've encountered these headaches helping friends with their vehicles, and every time I'm reminded how much I prefer wrenching on my 80s-90s era mazdas.

My old protege even had an access port in the fender well added specifically to remove the crank bolt with an extension. If it were an Audi the FSM would point you to the engine removal process as step 1.

> If it were an Audi the FSM would point you to the engine removal process as step 1.

And once an OEM has committed to that sort of design it spirals.

"chuck the timing chains on the back, who cares, the engine gets pulled for everything regardless".

For cars that are out of warranty, it is an advantage, as the car will be scrapped sooner, thereby opening up a hole in the market that needs to be filled with a new car.

An advantage to the manufacturer, that is. For the consumer, it leads to never ending car payments for life, or surprise bills that approach the cost of a replacement vehicle.

But if it happens too much the cars will have low value on the secondhand market, and therefore be less desireable to new car purchasers because they will suffer more depreciation. Not all buyers look at that stuff but smart ones do.

It's kind of always been that way to varying degrees. In the 70's/80's, changing the Porsche 911 spark plugs required dropping the engine.

Also, in addition to planned obsolescence and repair hostility is Design for Manufacturing (DfM) that doesn't care about maintainability, safety, comfort, or durability, only lowest cost to shove things together on an assembly line. This is why there are some cars that require removing the wheel well to change the oil filter and other that have things completely out-of-order or require absurd tools to service. My grandfather was a 30 year Chrysler dealer mechanic who had a dozen or so custom tools for very specific purposes.

Source: Dad had an A/C & electrical mechanic shop next to a Porsche specialist shop.

In the 70's/80's you could fit a person in the engine bay of a Volvo. So, varying degrees of complexity and difficulty to fix things.

The red block Volvos would also run for literally millions of miles, and outside of the turbo models were pretty thrifty on gas. We've fallen a long ways.

Volvo may have fallen a long way, but US cars of that time were literal trash that 100,000 miles was about the total useful life of the car before far too much needed replaced. I'm old enough to remember how Japanese cars started taking the US by storm because of it. They sipped gas in comparison and drove forever.

>Also, in addition to planned obsolescence and repair hostility is Design for Manufacturing (DfM) that doesn't care about maintainability, safety, comfort, or durability, only lowest cost to shove things together on an assembly line.

Exactly. It's basically fight club math. Spend $10 on a click-fit connector that can't be disassembled but that a $60/hr (though they only see a fraction of that) UAW laborer can plug in in half the time can't easily short-insert that can be visually checked.

The fact that it costs $200 the 1/10000 times it fails under warranty doesn't matter with those numbers. And you don't even care about the 100/100 times it fails at 2-3x the warranty period.

Of course, you're burning credibility doing this. But credibility doesn't have an obvious mapping to a number and stonk go up, KPI go up, bonus get paid, nobody cares.

There is ultimately a feedback cycle in that maintenance and reliability problems reduce used car values, and those drive lease rates. When manufacturers have trouble making the numbers work on cheap leases then that eventually hurts sales volume, but it takes many years for that effect to show up.

You can milk the public for like a decade of "shareholder value" between such time as you change things and the public wises up.

Luckily you don't have go drop the engine to change spark plugs on modern water cooled Porsche 911s, but let me tell you about changing plugs on mid-engined Cayman/Boxster platform. The 4 cylinder cars are easier but 6 cylinder cars require 3-4 different combinations of sockets and extensions and tiny European hands to really get in there.

I've seen some video comparisons between American cars and Toyotas, and Toyota seemed to have figured out how to make cars a lot easier to maintain than the American companies. I saw one case where changing a simple fuse required several hours of disassembly in the American car but only 30s in the Toyota. It's about priorities. It's about ethics. American companies don't give a fuck, and it shows. And American companies don't give a fuck, because Americans largely don't give a fuck.

I know someone who had an older Chrysler 300, and you had to take a wheel off to change the battery. Baffling. I'm not much of a mechanic, but the Honda's I've owned over the years have all been easy to work on. At least in the engine bay.

Tbh, taking a tire off isn’t that difficult.

BMW can be kinda a pain (its under a liner in the trunk, making you work at weird angles (and part emptying your trunk) but the benefit is your battery isn’t exposed to the elements and probably lasts longer for that reason.

I believe there's a modern (GM?) truck out there that has a belt rated for something like 250K miles...but when you have to replace it, the entire engine needs to be removed.

Sounds like the Colorado. It's a reason they'll pry my S10s, GMT400 and GMT800s from my cold dead hands as they're more reliable, cheaper to service and easier to service.

Don't forget one of the latest automotive mistakes, the "wet timing belt". This is a rubber timing belt (not a chain) that runs through your engine oil disintegrating and clogging up your oil filters.

If anyone here owns a car with that system I recommend taking it to your trusted mechanic and discussing with them to do additional preventive maintenance on it.

Don't forget one of the latest automotive mistakes, the "wet timing belt". This is a rubber timing belt (not a chain) that runs through your engine oil disintegrating and clogging up your oil filters.

What cars use those?

A lot of 4 cylinders and the Duramax 3.0L engine. The claim is that these belts reduce noise because chains are "loud".

Wow, yeah, it looks like the Duramax engine has a 15-year belt replacement interval that costs $10K at today's rates.

They aren't even trying to hide the whole planned-obsolescence thing at this point. Average age of cars on the road is approaching 13 years now, so someone who buys a Duramax-based vehicle will end up with a metal and plastic brick that costs more to maintain than it's worth, just because of the timing belt alone.

Build a drop-in crate EV conversion kit now. Cheap shells available soon.

That is the worst idea in the history of ideas

It's 180k miles. It's the 3.0L Duramax because the oil pump is on the backside of the engine using an oil submersed belt rather than a chain or set of gears. So you have to drop the transmission, exhaust, oil pan, and take the back side of the engine cover to replace a belt that should have been a chain. It _may_ be faster, to simply disconnect everything and pull the motor.

Source: I own one of these engines and I dread having to pay ~3k for this maintenance in 3 years. I like the engine, just not this maintenance ticket item.

In the 1955 Citroen, standard French family car of the era, the timing chain sits behind a cover about 1/2" from the firewall, the whole engine has to come out to change it.

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