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I think you’re seeing malice where none exists, particularly in those VW examples. VWs have always required a lot of special tools to work on, but usually for good engineering reasons making things smaller, lighter, simpler, and easier to manufacture. They will happily sell the tools to the public, and for most VW models, a few hundred dollars worth of special tools is all you need for any DIY repair- I personally have accumulated pretty much every VW special tool for every model and year, and find the special tools tends to make them easier to work on for a home mechanic- less stripped bolts, etc. than other cars. A 12 point star on a brake caliper is really not a rare tool, and it is so much quicker and easier than trying to fit a huge socket in that awkward space.

If VW had been trying to make the mk3 engines bad for planned obsolescence, then why did the mk4 engines like the ALH TDI and the 1.8T earn reputations as some of the best engines made? VW had quality issues in the 90s that they later attacked and fixed, but it was just sloppy leadership and engineering, not a plan.

What engine exactly are you seeing broken cams on? My guess would be this is not VWs fault but a mechanic failing to keep track of the ordering and orientation of the cam bearing caps and swapping them around- they’re line bored and any modern engine will break the cam if you do this. I’ve seen it on a mk2 GTI.

I am not sure if you wanna go into discussing Diesel engines now, especially with all the engine software problems when it comes to AdBlue, and when it comes to Dieselgate, which, by decision of all involved courts, was malice.

While I agree that some models improved when it comes to performance (especially in the 1.8 - 2.0 Turbo range as that's the sweet spot when it comes to cc) and technical failures, I would still say that all newer models have more problems with software. So much that it's really not even necessary to create these problems even in regards to regulatory requirements or safety compliance.

Just thinking about the messy code that I've seen to pass ASIL-D requirements makes my skin boil.

> I am not sure if you wanna go into discussing Diesel engines now, especially with all the engine software problems when it comes to AdBlue, and when it comes to Dieselgate, which, by decision of all involved courts, was malice.

I mentioned the ALH TDI from the MKIV Golf/Jetta only, which is a legendary engine, with a ton of them having now reliably reached half a million miles with no major work required. This long predates the dieselgate cars, and adblue was never used on the 4 cylinder VW diesels anyways.

As an aside, yes dieselgate was intentionally criminal, but was sort of the opposite of a quality issue. VW couldn't figure out how to get their engines to work reliability and drive well with current technology at the time and still meet emissions requirements, so they cheated. They had to fix them (I own one) and they are still good, but not as good as they were before the fix- worse fuel economy, less reliable, excessive adblue consumption (in 6cyl models). The ethical thing to do would have been to pull all of the diesels from the market instead, which is what many of their competitors did at the time. Passenger car diesels in the USA are effectively dead because the emissions requirements render them less practical than gasoline cars.

VW had serious quality issues in the 90s that weren't strategic, but were actually causing their company to lose its reputation and nearly collapse. They turned it completely around when Ferdinand Piëch started running things- they were arguably making the highest quality cars at in the world any price point during his tenure as CEO. The quality of current VWs has now fallen back down again, even lower than the 90s cars unfortunately.

I bought a 2013 Passat TDI, one of the dieselgate models, after they completed the recall repairs. I thought I was getting a great deal at the time. Unfortunately, the “fix” seemed to cause some other issues, at least in my case. I religiously used Liqui Moly certified low-ash oil, and kept up with the maintenance schedules. Even still, the turbo wore out at around 100k miles and had to be replaced, and then the new one was exhibiting the same symptoms only ~20k miles later, and would likely have eventually given up as well if the car hadn’t been totaled before it got to that point. Cold weather would cause it to run like dogshit until everything got up to operating temps, and then it would usually run fine the rest of the day. The fuel economy was also never quite as good as I expected, it always struggled to get better than 35mpg.

My mechanic told me that engine was really poorly suited to city driving, which was a lot of my activity, and short trips caused an inordinate amount of carbon buildup, which he cited as the cause of my cold weather performance issues. Anyway, I think it’s probably a great car for folks with a lengthier commute. I learned my habits and routines were likely murder to a TDI engine, but especially those dieselgate models.

Yeah, they do survive better with more long distance driving, but ultimately the newer common rail diesels are complex, fragile, and inefficient compared to the old TDIs. They succeeded in getting the emissions much cleaner, especially after the court mandated retrofit, but at the expense of everything else that made them economical and practical. I could get 60mpg in my 2000 TDI golf with a 6 speed manual.

>What do you think happened with the Golf 3 engine design? They made the camshaft structurally weaker, so the engine will blow up more easily.

Wow, talk about an oversimplification. The Mk3 moved from an 8-valve to a 16-valve engine; yes, this adds more valvetrain failure modes but also brings myriad other benefits, increased power, better fuel economy, reduced emissions…

The idea that a carmaker would purposely engineer flaws into core engine components in order to drive future sales doesn’t make much sense.

> The idea that a carmaker would purposely engineer flaws into core engine components in order to drive future sales doesn’t make much sense.

There is a legend that Mercedes 190D was built like a tank and this caused customers to not buy the next iteration. Mercedes solved this, making cars a bit unreliable.

>The idea that a carmaker would purposely engineer flaws into core engine components in order to drive future sales doesn’t make much sense.

You need to realize modern business revolves not around one-and-done, but around recurring revenue streams. To the "business minded" the only thing that doesn't make sense is leaving money on the table.

Selling people grenading engines is not a great way to build recurring revenue streams. And building performant, efficient, and reliable engines is hard enough without intentional sabotage

Nevertheless, as long as everyone else optimizes to the same metrics (minimized Bill of Materials, and building for assembly, not service), it may not be great, but it undeniably works.

Wanna start a car company?

> [...] so you weren't able to change them yourself.

This should be illegal. You're supposed to do what, stay on the roadside for 20h before an authorized repairman can reach you? What if the weather is harsh, and you run out of basic supplies like food or your medicine?

Towing exists.

> really frustrating that there is no legislative intervention against this.

Ironically, things are like that in a big part because of legislative and regulatory intervention.

> They made the camshaft structurally weaker, so the engine will blow up more easily. The rest of the engine is almost identical. Talk about being bad at hiding planned obsolescence.

A lot of such things are just workarounds to reduce weight and meet tightening emission standards.

Every thing that can be built with less metal, thinner walls, lighter metals will be built like that when every gram matters.

Tighter tolerances, increased pressures, increased temperatures, higher rotational speeds. All of this leads to increased efficiency, but sometimes (not always) the trade-off will be decreased reliability.

> The real reason ... driving old cars is because they're easier to modify, easier to maintain, and easier to buy replacement parts for.

the real reason is that if a manufacturer makes their car same as those repairable, easily maintainable old cars, they will soon lose customers (as they stop needing to buy new ones!).

Planned obsolescence out-competes in a market economy that does not have regulation against it, esp. in a saturated market (like the US). The gov't could legislate, but then businesses cry foul - not mention that these manufacturers hang the sword of damocles over the gov't in the form of job losses (but of course, out-sourcing is OK...)

Any workshop can command WV screwdrivers, at least in the EU. I think the new regulation is that if you don't have the piece, or the tools necessary to replace the piece, you have to produce the plans on how to do it.

I know someone who had an issue with his old WV Kombi, and thought it would be the last drive (Around 2020-2021). He found an auto shop who could manufacture pieces and replaced every single malfunctioning pieces from plans they got directly from WV.

What are the best cars to buy these days for self-service and tinkering?

Vehicles no newer than 2010 would be the general rule of thumb.

I believe its more about optimization for price and minimum amount of km you need to design something for.

And in regards of screws: If you have too many laypeople doing stupid shit for critical components, you might also think 'lets fix that by adding a barrier'.

Why would that be your problem? Make it a warranty violation, and they can either get it fixed themselves, or pay you money you wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

Because people lie and still give you 1 star rating perhaps.

The same people, the ones prone to tinkering with their cars, might give you a one star rating for putting the car together with proprietary screws.

Don't get me wrong, i do not like it either but I do think often enough they do this for this kind of reasons and not to be dicks on purpose.

Wait, wait - aren’t you the cookie engineer Who did the site about cloud flare and did the auditing of the malware sites hosted by cloudflare?

OK, now I remember - it was this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38496499

... which I was very intrigued by and I tried to contact you via your web based email submission on cookie.engineer but it broke/failed.

Would you please elaborate[1]:

- who was the person who ran crimeflare, etc.

- Where can I learn about the lawsuit(s) that made them suspend this reporting/indexing ?

I am (potentially) interested in resurrecting these efforts but would like to have a better understanding of them first.

[1] email info@rsync.net if you don't want to respond publicly.

Guess eventually people will buy the cheapest cars and treat it as a consumer product that breaks down every few years, like a laptop. Or simply find a remote job and rent a car.

Welcome to the Dystopian world.

> Guess eventually people will buy the cheapest car

It looks like lots of people choose to lease very expensive cars, and give them back after 3 years for a new one, dropping a obsolescence time-bomb onto the second-hand market and providing a strong signal to manufacturers that there is a substantial maintainability-insensitive market segment.

I am still surprised that no manufacturer has a balls-out "buy our cars, they will NEVER DIE, anyone can service them, and your kids will still be driving them" model, as they might have lower returns from not gouging over subscriptions, planned obsolescence and parts and software lock-in shenanigans, but they'd instantly capture a market segment.

I also advised some Chinese manufacturers to produce cheap, dummy home appliances and then sell to the Western market with a bit of mark-up, as more people are fed up with the smart ones. Not sure anyone is going to try though. Looks like everyone is in the data business.

China already competes in that market in the USA with Haier.

Electronics are cheaper than high quality electromechanical stuff, and allow you to give any product a veneer of sophistication and modernity that the modern consumer still perceives as being a sign of higher quality.

Our love of blinken-lights will be our downfall.

And you can make very shiny out-of-the-box finishes even in quite shitty materials that will decay quite quickly: soft plastics going gooey, white plastics yellowing, all plastics becoming brittle, poor anti-rust coatings, soft paintwork, etc, etc.

You should see motability

It’s largely a market signal, it seems. I was listening to a podcast with an ex-GM engineer and he said basically the business end is entirely driven by financing vehicles. Very little profit is derived from selling a car itself, nearly all the profit comes from the finance end of the business either on leases or car loans. Americans overall drive cars for a very short period of time before upgrading.

That, coupled with massive consumer preference for “zero maintenance” vehicles like supposedly not having to change transmission fluid for 100k miles. The manufacturers know that such a schedule will guarantee (more) damage, but it’s considered a marketing expense to handle early failures under warranty but sell the idea your car just needs an oil change every 10k miles and nothing else. After that first owner and warranty period the parts are simply considered a consumable.

If you plan on keeping your car for more than 3-5 years, toss the maintenance schedule handbook in the trash and figure out what an actual reasonable schedule is. It’s probably at minimum double the recommendations are.

Just curious how does one figure out the real maintenance schedule? I own a Tucson 2020 and plan to buy a Honda or Toyota in a couple of years.

Vibes? I jest a little bit.

For my car it’s been message boards with enthusiasts and mechanics who work on my vehicle. Luckily (or not…) mine is a somewhat niche performance car so people tend to nerd out over them.

A lot of it though is ignoring the vendor recommendations for outsourced parts like transmissions - go direct to manufacture and see what they say. This does seem to involve having an “insider” with manuals intended for service techs.

I also imagine fleet vehicle schedules might be informative as well.

Unfortunately I don’t have a very clean direct answer on it - it was a lot of feeling around and when in doubt erring on the side of over maintaining vs under.

Some is simply basic common sense though. We have not developed lubricants that can last over a decade and 120,000 miles in temperature ranges from below zero to hundreds of degrees.

70's American cars were not very far from this. The competition from Japanese manufacturers really helped to improve this.

And ironically, the reason why Japan invested so heavily in high quality was to overcome their former image of low quality products that severely hampered their ability to sell to international markets.

I am not a libertarian that holds a religious belief on the infallibility of the market, but a lot of times, the market gave us better outcomes than any regulation.