Guess that's all MT requires.
MT car of the year is determined by what company will give them more money…PERIOD.
@Dagosa “The Tesla model S proves that the electric motor simply embarrasses any internal combustion motor in terms of durability, torque, compactness, simplicity and efficiency.”
You are joking, right? Current news would not agree.
Edmund’s long term Tesla S had to have then entire drive train swapped out for unspecified problems.
Electric cars have the potential to be reliable. We’re far from showing that yet.
MT car of the year is determined by what company will give them more money...PERIOD.
That or maybe a lot of flaws don’t show up when you judge a car basically by borrowing a brand new one for a couple of weeks.
@texases
The replacement was do to a noise in the back under acceleration. Rather then diagnose the problem where there away from the factory, they just replaced the entire unit, pretty easily I might add, and sent it back to the factory. Do we know what it was…?
That is a teething problem having to do with lack of support not necessarily a deficiency in the motor itself. ( and may well not have been)
So many modern engines and cars with 200k miles plus makes it a hard choice.
I bought my '94 F150 specifically with the 300 I-6 because of its reputation as a tough, torquey motor that lasts 300+K in fleet use…UPS van tested.
For its specific application (economic transport of cargo not exceeding 4,000#), it’s damn near optimized. Stinks pretty bad for operations outside its core competency, though (read: boat anchor of a motor in a sporty sedan).
COTY has nothing to do with reliability. They pick cars that represent what they think is best about the industry that year. If reliability was paramount, they’d pick some incredibly boring car like a Corolla and their magazine would be down the tubes in short order.
The Third Tesla has gone up in flames in the last 6 weeks http://abcnews.go.com/Business/tesla-fires-weeks-raise-doubts-elon-musks-company/story?id=20830108
@oblivion You’re absolutely right. Thanks for the correction!
My vote for the worst transmissions are,
The first Chrysler Ultra drives that came out, while they were technologically advanced, reliablity issues plauged them.
Ford taurus/windstar transmissions. I have heard alot of horror stories about them, plus they shift poorly even when new.
The worst engines?
How about the 6.0 ford powerstroke, they have all sorts of issues.
You can fix them to be reliable, but a 50k truck shouldn’t need the engine redone to be reliable.
6.5l Gm diesel- Only die hard gm guys liked these, blocks crack, cranks fail, injection pump issues
The infamous Cadillac V8-6-4 many horror stories on that engine.
@americar: That’s a trifecta. Three bad engines rolled into one!
“The infamous Cadillac V8-6-4 many horror stories on that engine.”
…and I can add my horror stories to the list.
During the summer of…'83?..'84?..I had a job as a limo driver.
The veteran drivers knew enough to avoid the one V-8-6-4 model in the fleet, so I–as the rookie–frequently wound up with that dog.
I was warned that I needed to warm-up the engine for at least 20 minutes (in the summer!) in order to avoid stalling, but nobody warned me that, once on the highway, you never really knew what to expect if you had to floor the accelerator. Sometimes it would react normally, but–most often–it would continue to run on what must have been only 4 cylinders, and it was actually dangerous to drive, simply because that vehicle couldn’t get out of its own way when you needed to accelerate. Just imagine being on the entrance ramp for an Interstate highway, and finding out at a critical juncture that you have essentially no acceleration power!
Around the limo company, the nickname for that Fleetwood Limo was the V-8-6-4-2-zero.
The V8-6-4 wasn’t necessarily a bad engine, just the control system was a nightmare. The engine itself, while a bit underpowered as all Detroit iron was in 1981, was of the same basic design as previous Cadillac engines. But the primitive fuel injection system coupled with an electronic valvetrain and ridiculously slow and unreliable computers was a disaster. With the displacement system disabled, these engines were far more reliable than the HT4100 that replaced them.
Now, 30 years later, variable displacement is catching on again.
Now, 30 years later, variable displacement is catching on again.
The primitive control system probably is what gave variable displacement a bad name. We got much better microprocessers now.
I’m not so sure if I would trust a car that plays the Microsoft Windows bootup tune when the ignition is turned on though.
Did you know that controling power by disabling cylinders goes back to the days of hit-and-miss stationary engines?
“The V8-6-4 wasn’t necessarily a bad engine, just the control system was a nightmare.”
What you say is true, but…it was a package deal, unfortunately, and thousands of people remember their Caddy having “a bad engine”–even if the problem was not actually the engine itself.
This bad technology emerged in the days when GM was notorious for rushing products to market w/o doing sufficient long-term reliability testing, and–essentially–they used the first & second year buyers of new products as their (unpaid) testing staff. By tracking warranty claims, they were able to see where the problem areas were, and could then begin–belatedly–to fix their initial mistakes.
However, this process took a few years, and, all too often, GM would finally, “get it right”, just in time to pull a particular design from the market, due to low sales figures that were the result of the bad early reputation for a model.
If they had just done it properly in the first place, they would have spent far less on warranty claims and been able to keep certain models in production for a longer period of time, thus making much more money than they theoretically saved by eliminating long-term testing prior to product release. And, they wouldn’t have wound up with tens of thousands of dissatisfied owners who swore, “never again”, in terms of buying a GM product.
The V8-6-4 is one reason why I chose to discuss the drivetrain rather than the engine and transmission separately. I don’t think that you can consider them separately unless you are familiar with one engine and more than one transmission attached to it. That’s why my Regal 3800 came in second to my Honda V6. The 5-speed auto in the Honda is geared to provide good power throughout its useful range, while the 4-speed Buick suffered at highway speeds.
I don’t think that quality and execution issues were unique to GM in the 80’s. In fact, I think most of the 80’s was just horrible for cars. I think Asians makes had a little leg up on domestic makers because they already were marketing to smaller, cleaner, more efficient standards before we were.
In their defense, I don’t think the technology to do what they wanted or needed to do was available to anyone in that era. Unless you want to compare cars to the space shuttle, there was no way to devise a modulated displacement engine with the speed and reliability we expect today. I mean, what kind of home computer did you have in 1980? How fast was it? What did it do? Microprocessing just wasn’t where it needed to be to what it needed to.
@acwmasrer Right; in the 80s we stuck to the tried and true; I had a 1980 Olds Delta 88 with the Rocket V8 and 4 barrel carb. Ditto for my 1984 Chevy Impala V8 and the 1988 Chevy V8 Caprice. These cars, workhorses for any government and police and taxi services, were reliable, but needed more repairs than today’s good cars. We tried some front wheel drive cars with disastrous results.
We never worried about them on long holiday trips.