Oh take a look at the recall list of any car company in the world and you will find they all make simple mistakes, constantly. Probably a consequence of price pressure at all times. While cars are lasting longer than they used to on average, I feel like it’s been getting worse in some ways with cars lately turning into computers and good car/engine companies lately turning into bad tech companies without that much tech experience who outsource important parts and do lousy integration. And yeah, building assemblies or modules with non-replaceable parts is becoming more common.
Case 1: Ford Taurus wagon, my wife calls in a panic because it's blowing all hot air, and the dash is awash in lights. I get her to shut it off, wait a bit, and limp the last few km home. Turns out the serpentine belt goes around a pulley, the center bolt of which is screwed into the engine block. When the bearing started to go, there was friction, and the belt spun the bolt out and it fell off. It could have been reverse threaded, like one pedal on every bike, ever. But no. If it had, the bearing would screech, we'd get it replaced, instead of just silently falling out with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Case 2: Chevy Venture van, where the lights on the rear door all stopped working. Turned out the wiring harness for them ran through this accordion hose at the top, plugged into the bottom of a rain gutter across the top. So as soon as that hose broke its seal with the trough, the whole harness is shorted.
Funny, I have never experienced this sort of stupidity in the Toyotas and Hondas that have followed these last couple American-branded vehicles.
120 years of lessons learned undone in 120 college credits.
Automotive engineering is "high" engineering. Like "high" tech it suffers deeply from people trying to implement all sorts of showboaty crap they learned in college without truly grasping the bigger picture and the tradeoffs this will subject the whole system to.