Perhaps the Mustang went down the assembly line backwards.
Sorry. Weekend joke.
Engineers today may be smart guys/gals, but they are just employees in a large corporate environment. They work to requirements developed by marketing to optimize profits. They have very little creative control over the final product design.
Have you ever wondered why a part was so difficult to replace and why the “engineer” designed it that way? It was designed for ease-of-assembly as that directly affects profitability. The part was probably not hard to install during the assembly process, say when the engine was assembled prior to installation in the car. Ease-of-maintenance is only a concern to the buyer or maintainer during the middle and end of the car’s life cycle, it has little influence in the showroom. Ease of assembly directly affects the corporation’s cost to produce the car and profit margin. Ease-of-maintenance will therefore be a secondary requirement to ease-of-assembly.
The requirement to integrate the design for ease-of-maintenance must come from the end user, the car buyer, just like reliability finally became a concern when the buyers had a choice of more reliable cars. Reliability is a concern early in the lifecycle of the car and is a concern to new car buyers. The market, or group of people, that buys new cars do not plan on maintaining the cars themselves. The group of people that maintain their own cars do not typically buy new cars, so they are not considered in the marketing requirements.
I can’t recall seeing “easy to maintain” in any new-car marketing literature or media. If that requirement is not a major influence on new car sales, it won’t be a major influence on the requirements that marketing gives to engineering.
“Easy to Maintain” is also called “Maintainability” and is a standard military specification, and for good reason. The gas turbine in a Chrysler tank, for instance, could be exchanged in 1.5hours or so under battlefield conditions.
One of the courses I teach is the maintainability of industrial equipement. It covers accesibility, removal with or without special equipment, refurbishing, Life Cycle Replacement procedures, etc.
Sophicticated companies assign a maintenance and reliablility engineer to the idustrial design team that builds the plant. The Japanese term SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dies) refers to the very quick change over from producing one product to another.
GM, Ford and Chrysler all built vehicles for the military and know all about serviceability and maintainability. I think these features and qualities should be legislated into car design by now since few companies will bother until that happens.
The most problems we hear about are with minivans, where everything is buried, and heater cores, A/C evaporators, fans, timing belts, windshield wiper motors, etc. have all become nightmarishly difficult to replace.
“However, these OLMs have not been around long enough to get a good picture of how well they work in the long term.”
They've been in most GM vehicles since 2000, and in some (the Northstar V8 Caddys for instance) since at least 1994. Those Northstars get plenty of oil seal leaks (due to complex gasketing) but have not had any problems related to extended oil change intervals. If 16 years isn't enough to determine if it works or not I don't know what to say.There is a grain of truth in that. Henry Ford got the idea of the assembly line by visiting the giant Chicago shaughterhouses, where a whole animal started at one end and ended up as various meat products at the other end!
He was just smart enough to realize if you ran such an arrangement backwards, you could assemble a car faster and with a lot less labor!
Actually, “easy to maintain” was probably never a major selling point, but I’ve read car reviews and comparison tests in 1970s magazines where ease of changing things like spark plugs, fuel and air filters, distributor cap, oil filters, etc. were rated. To some extent, I think these things used to be taken into consideration when people purchased a new car.
Now, with the perception that you “can’t even work on your car anymore”, and most people not doing simple maintenance like oil changes for themselves, people don’t seem to care.
It’s the same way with home computers these days. Just like with cars, people just don’t “get their hands dirty” as much as they used to. In the 80s, people built their own systems, swapped tips on how to get things to work, and did a lot of their own programming. Now with computers admittedly being much more complex (like cars), people don’t take the time to learn how to maintain their own equipment, often relying on the equivalent of “Quick oil change places” to maintain their machines, often with similar underwhelming results.
Perhaps it’s more of a commentary on the shorter attention span and faster-paced lifestyles of people these days, compared with a few decades ago, but I digress.
Good post; the complexity of cars makes doing your own maintenance and repairs intimidating. I trained as a mechanic in the army but restrict my car work to oil changes, a battery every now and then and lighbulbs.
The older Maytag washers and dryers were designed for eay repair; the pump, motor, heating element or belt could be changed out in no time. The Maytag guys demonstrated this to me. Today’s appliances don’t have that anymore.
On small appliances and many electronic goods is says “no user replaceable parts inside”. In other words, just chuck it! Our 8 year old Panasonic microwave just packed it in; burned out turntable motor. It also fried other wiring. With the current cost of labor, it’s not worth fixing.
Education is a terrible thing, isn’t it?
When I said engineers are not allowed to design cars properly anymore, I wasn’t referring to the compromises required by regulations, finance, marketing, and legal. I always enjoyed developing a good design WITHIN the parameters. What turned me off of engineering was that once a very good and demonstrated design was complete, some idiot executive would always demand that the cost be reduced by some arbitrary amount, without any idea or basis of how it could be changed or why he chose that amount. The difference between a reliable and effective product and a lousy once is often only pennies. I see it every day in much simpler products that fail prematurely because someone chose a bearing that was inappropriate when the right one cost 20 cents more.
I simply got exasperated with going through FMEAs and eliminating design or production problems, only to have someone over-rule good engineering in favor of risking a recall. One (of many) had to do with a ball joint that was pressed into a control arm and had a snap ring for redundancy. We pointed out that manufacturing variability would almost certainly result in a loose ball joint at some time over the product life, but the cost of that 25 cent snap ring became someone’s bonus for suggesting its elimination. All previous designs had the snap ring. The first failure and subsequent recall came within months of launch and cost millions of dollars. Who does the public blame for these things?
When engineerng managers object, they are usually fired because they’re not being “team players” and they’re replaced with younger engineers eager to move up. But years ago, engineering expertise was respected and no design would go forward without their approval. The Challenger disaster resulted from a bad engineering decision that the manufacturers knew about and the engineers tried to revise. But they were over-ruled and later pressured to “go along” and give their approval. Then a blue ribbon panel was put together and through finite element analysis they “discovered” the proper parameters for O-ring use. Those parameters were available in every O-ring handbook, and should have been used in the design in the first place.
I wish all young engineers success and enjoyment in their careers. When I was doing actual engineering, I enjoyed it immensely. When it became nothing but meetings and arguments, I decided life is short and my talents too valuable to waste on people who don’t respect them.
I find it funny all the whining about not being able to work on new cars.
First, cars nowadays can go 100K and the only thing you have to do is change oil - OK, maybe a battery, or a belt. It’s not like the old days where oil changes were every 1K, points and plugs were a yearly thing, water pumps and generators failed constantly.
Why make things accessible if you only need to change it once or twice in the life of the car?
You just have to realize that cars don’t have chokes - they have fuel enrichment. They don’t have points - they have ECU’s. Good diagnostics always trumps parts changing.
Same with the Vega AND Pinto…Although the Vega was MUCH MUCH worse…You could change the oil every 2k miles with the BEST oil (even by todays standards) and it would still be burning oil by 50k miles…The silicon lined cylinder walls were just NOT durable.
Fords 2.3l 4-cylinder of that era wasn’t much better. GM and Ford were playing catchup trying to build a small car that everyone wanted because of the rising gas prices. And in doing so they skipped a few things (like quality).
Unfortunately my requirement cycle is NOT fun at all…We have clueless marketing managers who make ridicules requirements…If they understood how the product even works then MAYBE they’d make better requirements. We do have engineering requirements which are fun…but most of our customer requirements are a pain. Some required us to redesign major portions of our product…Not to mention conflicting requirements that Marketing determined to BOTH be high priority. I literally spent 3 hours in meetings and numerous e-mails to marketing that you can either A or B…NOT both…Seems that BOTH requirements were promised to two different customers.
Anyone remember the 1986 Shuttle disaster??
Engineers that built the booster rockers mentioned in memos years before the disaster that there was a problem with the design of the seals…and the shuttle NEVER should be launched at temps below 70 (I think it was 55 at the time of the launch). It was upper management of the at Morton Thiokol’s that decided NOT to fix the problem…The engineers did the right thing…MANAGEMENT didn’t.
I find it funny all the whining about not being able to work on new cars.
First, cars nowadays can go 100K and the only thing you have to do is change oil - OK, maybe a battery, or a belt. It’s not like the old days where oil changes were every 1K, points and plugs were a yearly thing, water pumps and generators failed constantly.
I don’t know about you…but I don’t buy a new car every 100k miles…usually every 300k miles…So even with the best made vehicle there are going to be failures that need to be fixed.
There are some things that are made very very difficult by manufacturers to do…even the simple maintenance…Cars where you have to remove the battery just to replace a bulb…or oil filters that require you to drop a splash guard (10 bolts)…
Yes, jt it is, and you are the one who needs it.
When you boil it all down to the root, what the research says is that the OLM was designed to keep track of a specific set of properties in the oil. What they found is that the system does keep track of those properties very well. So all they say is that the system does what it was designed to do.
None of it is about verification of engine wear & tear or longevity.
I could have gone on about it, but frankly I wasn’t particularly eager to go on about how to do critical thinking.
You change your oil however you want. I will do mine how I want.
All the way back to the near the beginning of this thread - I don’t trust something just b/c a company puts it out. My engine also has piston slap; has had the LIM done twice (before I owned it); and has a classic 4T65E hard shifting defect in the transmission; a cooling system lined with Dex sludge… So you’ll forgive me if I just make some of my own independent judgments about the maintenance.
CapriRacer, most cars don’t go 100k miles.Most repair work at dealerships these days consist of warranty work.
CapriRacer, most cars don’t go 100k miles
Maybe the ones you buy??? I’ve yet to own a vehicle in the past 30 years that didn’t go past 100k miles with 0 repairs…
Now I will agree that MOST people don’t keep cars past 100k miles…but that doesn’t mean they don’t last that long.
The famous “O” Rings! The need for these was not technical but political. In order to split up the NASA work to various states, the units were not built as one piece, but from sections.
Perhaps I could have worded my post better and said: In the FIRST 100K, most cars only need oil changes. The point was that compared to before, modern cars are very reliable and the idea of making regular maintenance items easily accessible - well, there aren’t many items that need regular maintenance - so why should they make them easily accesible?
“Maybe the ones you buy??? I’ve yet to own a vehicle in the past 30 years that didn’t go past 100k miles with 0 repairs”
Really? You must live a charmed life. Especially since 30 years ago would be 1980, and the '80s weren’t known for amazingly reliable cars. So you never replaced a starter, alternator, exhaust system, etc. on any of your vehicles prior to 100K? I’m assuming you must have bought them all new—none even required a trip to the dealer under warranty?