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It’s funny how I extrapolate car design sessions in my head based on software design sessions.

I sold my bmw after 15 years of multiple bmws because their design is so poor for maintenance. I had cooling system problems that required hours of labor to get to just to replace a plastic part that cost $5 where an aluminum one would cost $7.

It seems to me that bmw was designing for best case scenarios where everything goes perfectly. And since it’s supposed to go perfectly who cares if it’s $5000 to fix because it will “never break.”

Reminds me of Rube Goldberg software designs where 9 things have to happen in sequence for success.

The idea of rubust design that assumes everything breaks and you can still operate is one I value. I look for car companies (and everything I suppose) following this principle.

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My last 4 cars were BMW. I love the way they drive, but ...

I think they are optimized for the EU leasing market. 4 years, 120.000km. If you buy one for long ownership and want more out of them (they can most certainly do 400=500k km reliably), you have to take care of them from day 1. You change the maitainance schedule (which by default is set to lowering fleet lease costs and who cares beyond that), learn about and do preventive maintainance (such as replacing the entire cooling around 120k km), stricktly use BMW oil (for the additives) unless you are realy knowledgeable about it, and invest in a decent fault scanner (to lnow what is going on and not just run up expensive maintainance bills at the BMW shop).

If you think that's all too much hassle, just lease them short term or buy something else.

Thats why they've been increasing the service interval to silly numbers. 3 years ago, 10k miles, now... 18k miles for the same model of car for the first service! Absolutely insane.

Yep, and remember, "lifetime" in BMW speak is 120k.km/4y, not "forever".

I never considered buying a BMW before they put out an EV (the i4, not the i3). One of the reasons is maintenance, the EV still needs some, but much less than an ICE.

I'm about to change the transmission fluid in my i3.

It's at 100k miles and there's no user-facing documentation for the procedure, as the oil lasts "for the lifetime of the vehicle".

Turns out, this particular procedure is simple.

(Other common wear items, like the suspension damper boots, or the engine mount, or the AC compressor, or a set of tires every 12000 miles ... it adds up.

The i3 was a cheap acquisition. Doesn't drive like a BMW, but apparently it wears like one.)

I heard that the i3 has some horror stories if you got the hybrid (basically a diesel engine that can produce electricity to charge your battery) or your battery had issues out of warranty. Not really sure though, everyone I've met who owns one really likes it still in 2025.

I had the i3 with the upgraded headlights. Left blinker stopped working one day. Well, turns out before the upgraded headlights that would have been a quick easy bulb change. After it require replacing the entire headlight unit, a $800 part plus labor.

I decided to wait and see if I could find some other way, and in the meantime the car got hit while I was driving in a round-about. Moved the car several meters, but hardly any visible marks. The repair company wanted to fix the paint and get a new rim for the rear tire, but when I told them the car had been thrown a few meters they had a closer look and found a crack in the carbon fiber frame. And with that the car was totalled.

On the bright side, glad I hadn't just forked out the $1200 or so for a new headlight unit...

Some i3 models, like mine, lack the internal-combustion engine and its fuel tank, and i3 enthusiasts call it the "BEV", for Battery Electric Vehicle. The one with the gasoline engine is the "REx", for Range Extender.

The REx models use an engine design based on one of BMW's motorcycle engines; as such, I'm pretty sure that it's not a diesel. The gas tank is only about two gallons; to qualify for EV tax credits in some markets, the battery capacity needed to exceed the energy available from fossil fuel.

That battery capacity for initial models is woeful by today's standards. The design started with 17 kWh, upgraded batteries in later model years doubled that figure. Mine is a degraded original with about 12 kWh available. Freezing temperatures can cut that by half.

I drive it like grandma and get more than 4 miles per kWh. But it was less $$ than a golf cart. (I learned about EV tire expenses after purchase.)

I was looking for this reply as well; definitely my perception that a lot of mid- to high-end cars are engineered to drive and feel great for 4-5 years, and after that it's kind of a crapshoot. You can see it as well with the various subscriptions, for app connectivity, M2M infotainment data, etc— all of it is oriented around that same time horizon.

I found the hard way that nowadays manufacturer's authorised (branded) service centres optimise for making you get rid of the car. For instance, I had something wrong with the car, they kept gaslighting me that the car is absolutely within specs and drive exactly how it should. Next appointment they admitted that maybe something indeed is wrong, but probably not. After complaint they said the car is faulty but it will be very very expensive to repair and maybe I should consider buying a new one. They they offered me part exchange for one of their approved used models framing it as a gesture of good will and that it will be cheaper than the repair. Unbelievable.

Porsche had a research program about a very reliable car in the 70s. It has some odd technical choices from today's perspective. https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/when-porsch...

One would assume taxi companies etc would be willing to pay for cars that have high uptime and reliability. But I think they drive mostly the same stuff as regular people. At least one would assume they could get beefier suspension and transmission and high displacement downtuned engines.

In general new cars are still vastly better than old ones. 90:s cars rusted from everywhere after ~8 years while most cars nowadays have zinc coating and more plastic and are still mostly fine after 15 years.

I don't think it's a coincidence that an enormous number of rideshare/delivery drivers drive priuses though. Reliable, not too expensive, low maintenance, and high mpg is kind of exactly what you'd expect them to look for.

Not to mention still roomy!

The only slight pain in those priuses is removing the windshield wiper assembly to get to the spark plugs closest to the firewall. It's not like they didn't have enough room in the engine bay to the left to better engineer this. But it's something that you rarely have to do. Maybe 2-3 times for the life of the car if it reaches 300k+ miles.

Engineers hate mechanics. How can they feel your wrath unless you specifically design a giant “fuck you” into every vehicle shipped?

Being a total mechanics noob I watched a youtube video guide and did it myself to my Prius V in roughly 30 minutes. It is actually pretty easy to do. Just unscrew a couple of 10mm and 14mm bolts. I really like my prius V. it requires less maintenance that ICEs. And all the scheduled maintainance is pretty much DIY.

Also, I no longer consider any EU car brands at all. I think they wasted all their prior brand value and now buying them is simply not a smart decision.

Not enough people know how cool the Prius hybrid system is. One would think having EV + gas would add complexity, but it actually allows them to delete a lot of parts. There is no clutch, no belts, no starter, there's practically nothing that can break. Not knowing how the regen affects braking I brought my Prius in for 80k service and asked for new brake pads and mechanic asked me why I want to replace them, they look good as new.

Only downside is the flimsy high efficiency tires, I've spent more money on tows and tires than I saved on gas.

Isn't there even less in a proper BEV? You lose the benefit of being able to pay the gas tax though.

You also lose the ability to pull over virtually anywhere and refill your tank in five minutes, as well as the maintenance benefits that come from a decades-old design versus whatever software horrors are lurking in your car.

To top that all off, in parts of CA electricity is now 50c/kWh, which makes it roughly equally expensive to charge an EV as it is to buy a tank of gas.

I love electric cars, but there is a gap between what they COULD be and what they are.

> To top that all off, in parts of CA electricity is now 50c/kWh

It's trending up to $0.90-1.00/kWh in places now.

The only reason to think an ICE vehicle doesn't have software horrors is if the vehicle in question is itself decades old. Practically every software horror of an EV is going to be found in modern ICE vehicles as well. In fact some of them have more horrors than some EVs. Subscription seat warmers anyone?

If you buy a BMW, maybe. I have a new Honda and it's perfectly fine.

> while most cars nowadays have zinc coating and more plastic and are still mostly fine after 15 years.

In your part of the world, maybe. I live in the middle of the salt belt in the US and we get about 10 years out of most cars. That's when you start seeing rust holes in the fenders around the wheels, when most of the frame has flaked away and the floor pans become involuntary structural elements.

If you're a car nut who spends extra time and money on preventive maintenance and rustproofing, you can get a few more years. But the rust comes for your car at some point anyway.

Car manufacturers know how to make the frames and bodies last longer, this is not an unsolvable manufacturing and design challenge. It's just that nobody is getting a raise for going to their boss and saying, "I know how to make the company sell slightly fewer cars..."

Just look at what's on the road today, there are many more older cars still running than in the past. Even in the salt belt.

I live up North (capital N) from you, where we have ~4 months of calcium spread on our roads to manage the accumulating ice every winter. A well-maintained car has the chance to live long enough to succumb to rust from that.

Rustproofing is still a good treatment to get done to delay and minimize damage, but it's a thorough and slightly expensive job.

People who have a hobby car usually retire it in a garage from November to April-May instead.

I have a 2009 Civic that has no noticeable body rust, despite being in Michigan. Two times I've had to get minor body work done (not rust-related), the bodyshop owner commented that he never sees them this clean anymore. I chalk it up to being diligent with car washes, especially in the winter. Purists will cringe at this, but I'm fine with sacrificing some surface appearance (the paint doesn't look too bad, considering how many carwashes it's seen) in exchange for longevity.

Which part of Michigan are you in? I know some people that live up in northern Michigan where they don't bother salting the roads in the winter and just put down sand instead which I would imagine contributes to better longevity

I'm in Grand Rapids. We use tons of salt here.

> One would assume taxi companies etc would be willing to pay for cars that have high uptime and reliability. But I think they drive mostly the same stuff as regular people. At least one would assume they could get beefier suspension and transmission and high displacement downtuned engines.

Here in the UK until recently it was all Skoda Octavias, nice simple comfortable cars with a reliable diesel engine. Prior to that, it was all Citroën Xantias - again, nice simple comfortable (really comfortable with their hydraulic suspension) cars with a big reliable diesel engine.

It's not uncommon to see them hit well over half a million miles, often in less than five years.

Galvanised bodyshells and panels has been a thing since the 80s, or indeed the 70s for Volvo and Saab.

How do modern Volvos stack up on longevity? Reputation seems mixed here in the States.

It's not just BMW, it's basically all car manufacturers. There are several car maintenance YouTubers who complain about it for many brands. For example "The Car Care Nut" complains about Toyotas being badly designed for maintenance, questionable material choices, etc..

The problem is that $2 here and there adds up, and at the level of the whole car it can add hundreds, or thousands of dollars of extra cost for reliability that the user can't experience directly. For some percentage of owners the plastic part works fine for the whole time they have the car. On the other hand sturdier parts add expense in the case of an accident or replacing parts during routine maintenance.

BMW has been the worst of the worst for a long time though. [0] is a representative example, but pretty much any "car brands ordered by upkeep cost" list will have BMW out on their own planet.

Before Teslas really took over the "high income tech worker" market, in Seattle you used to be able to get a used BMW for quite cheap, because all the Microsoft and Amazon workers would lease them and then they'd go on the used market when the lease was up. I actually considered doing this, but multiple mechanics said very bluntly, "don't, this is a trap, the maintenance costs will eat you alive".

[0]: https://www.crsautomotive.com/what-are-the-total-costs-of-ve...

It was practically a stereotype that all of the young male H1Bs had a BMW desktop background on their work computer. I knew one guy who practically bankrupted himself by buying one the moment he thought he could afford it. The mandatory insurance got him. And then we found out he’s a terrible driver. Thing was in the shop all the time.

I watch "The Car Care Nut" sometimes, as I've got a Toyota. Nothing I've ever seen there would lead me to put Toyota into the same maintenance cost/difficulty category as BMW or Mercedes.

Consumer Reports puts them at almost opposite ends of the spectrum, as well.

https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-maintenance/the-cos...

I've owned a few Mercedes and didn't find them really more difficult to work on than other cars of similar age I've owned. I haven't owned any that are really new, so that may have changed. I haven't owned any BMWs but their reputation for being difficult to work on and overengineered goes back decades.

There was an era where Mercedes were insanely easy to work on, with the detail you’d expect from unleashed German engineers.

I didn’t know the 123 hood folded all the way back until near the end of having one!

https://www.classiccarstodayonline.com/2022/04/22/mercedes-1...

BMW uses bolts that require people to buy a special set of drivers to work on them, don’t they? Like giant inverted torx bolts.

External Torx. They're not so unusual. Even General Motors has used those in some places for eons -- I still have the set of them I bought at Autozone to replace the brakes on a Saturn a couple of decades ago.

The real fucker in automotive fasteners is XZN, aka Triple Square. These are all over VW products.

As fasteners go, they're fine. They work well.

The interface has 12 points, and it looks like something from the toolkit like an Allen key or a Torx bit might be the right choice, but it isn't that way at all: The angles are wrong (XZN angles are based on squares, not hexagons).

But that's OK: They make XZN socketry in factories every day that does have the correct angles. They're easy-enough to buy and to use.

The fuckery aspect is a human factor: Because it looks like it "should work" with a Torx driver or an Allen key, people dive in with the wrong tools and fuck it up for the next guy.

Anyone can build a car that will never fall apart. It takes a great deal of engineering to build a car that just barely doesn't fall apart.

To be fair the "The Car Care Nut" while clearly very knowledgeable and extremely good at his job, all he does is complain in his videos.

Edit: but at the end of the day all his own cars are Toyota/Lexus

What you're describing is the stereotype for "rich west europe" engineering culture.

Every now and then you see it leak out into some other environment, like Toyota and their pull-apart ball joints that "aren't an issue" because "the user will just service it on schedule" where it reliably causes problems in all sorts of dumb ways (because like anything else, designing stuff to within an inch of it's life takes practice).

Now, don't get me wrong, this European approach creates a lot of cool highly performant products, but it's stuff that tends to fall on it's face real good if you violate any of the assumptions made when designing it and the approach is naturally suited to some products more than others.

Here is an American example, Fox suspensions. Fox is one of the main producers of bicycle suspensions. Great products, but check their service intervals for a fork [0], 125 hours.

Now if you practice mountainbike you may ride your bike 1 to 5 times a week. Let's say you only ride once a week for 4 hours: 125 / 4 = 31, you would need to service your fork every 31 weeks. Add some few more rides and you have to service the fork twice a year.

Each service easily costs $150 if done by a bike shop. If you do it yourself (plenty of tutorials on youtube), you need expensive special tools, oil, special grease and spare o-rings and seals easily costs 30-40$ for every service. And you have to properly dispose the old oil.

[0] https://tech.ridefox.com/bike/owners-manuals/2979/fork--2025...

That service interval is pretty common across all bike suspension forks (and dropper posts are usually only around 50 hours).

A SR Suntour fork has a 100 hour maintenance interval, for example.

https://www.manualslib.com/manual/3730626/Sr-Suntour-Durolux...

Ask a car guy and they’ll tell you that German car makers have been known to be be maintenance money sinks for 40 years.

But German car makers are really quick to add new technology. They were quick to add ABS, fuel injection, complex suspensions, etc.

But have you ever tried to make something you built to easy to maintain? You have to reroute everything, redesign your layout, add access ports, switch fittings… my god it can take almost as much time as building the thing to begin with. As an engineering requirement, it’s a high impact one.

(OK most people probably don’t build physical things they design much, but I’m sure some of you play Minecraft. Especially for those contraptions, do you add access corridors, extra access entrances, plan access into the construction? No, most people just make some tiny hole somewhere to get in. You’re just happy it works.)

And at the pace some car makers add new technology, I don’t think they budget the time to go back and do that. I think with the quick pace of EV technology as well, previously more maintenance friendly car makers are in the same boat.

BMWs at least up to the mid-2000s are really cheap and easy to maintain. Parts are pennies, service documentation is readily available, and they're reliable enough that they last a long time with basic maintenance.

Compared to stuff like Toyotas or Hondas, they practically cost nothing to keep on the road.

> Compared to stuff like Toyotas or Hondas

Don't get this. I had a CR-V from 1996 (over 300k), sold it a few years ago, and can still see it cruising around the town. My previous Toyota Yaris was pretty much unkillable, just like a RAV 4 or a 1998 TLC.

You must live somewhere absolutely bone dry where it never gets cold enough to salt the road.

We were putting Toyota Hiluxes back to the leasing company at three years and they were going straight in the crusher.

Eh, I had one from the early aughts and it was pretty expensive to maintain. Simple things that have never broken on other cars I've owned, like the passenger side door lock, broke in my BMW. Headlight issues were expensive, and anything that required official parts was at least 3x as much as a Honda/Toyota/etc. repair.

Some bits can be kind of expensive unless you know a good BMW indy. The nice thing about the older ones - particularly from like maybe E30 to E39 models - is there's a lot of "hacker culture" around them and it's easy to find someone who knows the Easy Way To Do It.

> But have you ever tried to make something you built to easy to maintain?

There is still a difference between e.g. Lada 2104 which, while admittedly having some strange fastening designs, was relatively straight-forward do (partially) disassemble and reassemble, and e.g. modern Fords where you can't to take the lights off of your trunk door without fully disassembling it first. Even better, the exact jigsaw puzzle of the design varies from one modification/year to another even for what is supposedly the same car model.

Ford seems to regularly re-design some sometimes-major part of their vehicles every model year, for better or worse. Some model years are banger and others are just a failed experiment, but you do get newer advancements.

Compare that with Toyota’s approach and it’s just small tweaks. It’s reliable, parts are standard, and they’ve had the chance to really dial things in but altogether it feels dated in some ways.

And of course German automakers have some of the latest stuff but a lot of it feels like version 1 stuff. It works and sometimes is really cool but just isn’t dialed in enough to be reliable.

It’s really interesting the different engineering cultures between different car companies.

I wonder where the new Chinese automakers stand.

> reuse parts down to the ancillary components of a vehicle, from the battery packs to the heat pumps and motors inside the car seats

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-byd-jon-mcneill-chines...

They also did a lot of pioneering work in DSG transmissions. I bought a Jetta when they finally moved it to VW from Audi. Great transmission and saved me a lot on brake jobs. Their DSG tune automatically engine brakes when you feather the brake pedal.

> But have you ever tried to make something you built to easy to maintain?

At work, all the time. The people who get it love working on or with my code. The ones who don’t look at me like I have a horn growing out of my head.

I'm sure the money you saved on brake jobs was more than eaten up by the DSG service intervals. The interval on my Jetta Sportwagen Diesel with DSG was 40,000 miles. That required special hardware (tools and dongles, IIRC) and software if I wanted to do it myself.

My vehicle before that was the Accord that had the shit transmission that bailed out reliably at 110k miles, so I’m sure I barely noticed. My Accord shat itself at 100,300 miles, in the mountains. Luckily it was noon, a warm day, and I had cell service.

Management only cares about analyzing and completing the 'happy path' because customers only buy 'happy path'. Customers don't (with rare exceptions) buy 'unhappy path', even though statistically it is a near certainty that where they will find themselves at some point.

I guarantee no engineer wanted an expensive, difficult to replace pyro fuse. Unfortunately, it doesn't particularly matter what individual engineers want, it's what the system wants, and the system wants to make money.

>I had cooling system problems that required hours of labor to get to just to replace a plastic part that cost $5 where an aluminum one would cost $7.

If the car has 10 places where the manufacturer saves 2 dollars, that is 20 dollars a car. At around 2.5 Million cars shipped each year that is 50 Million Euros each year profit for BMW.

The entire car industry is extremely cost sensitive, especially right now, with so much global competition and little consolidation.

The issue also isn't that the part is cost optimized. The issue is that it fails.

A car (especially ICE but even EVs) consists of tens of thousands of components. People like to point at things in cars and say "why did they save five cents there? And 10 cents here?", and the simple reason is if you bump all these components up one "quality level", if you will, that's thousands of bucks just in material costs. The twenty dollars of per-car savings are not profit, they're unit cost savings, which will contribute to profit, but also price. And margins in the car industry are rather tight, buyers are cost sensitive, it's not an industry where you save 10$ on parts and are able to pocket that, I don't think.

>it's not an industry where you save 10$ on parts and are able to pocket that

Why not? If you pay the suppliers 20 dollars less for those parts for each car, that is pure profit.

Keep in mind that cars are priced and developed for specific market segments. Cars aren't developed and then a price is decided based on what the components cost. Also keep in mind that some of the most exclusive and luxurious cars in the world (Lamborghini and Bugatti) share parts with some of the most mundane mass produced cars from VW.

> 9 things have to happen in sequence

This is literally how all software works. Except it is thousands of instructions. Further, it is very often that programs don’t handle anything besides the happy path.

I like to think I design my programs to handle many situations and to be able to function with many parts that still fail.

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