Comment by harrall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harrall | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

> 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...

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.

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