Comment by prepend
4 hours ago
It’s funny how I extrapolate car design sessions in my head based on software design sessions.
I sold my bmw after 15 years of multiple bmws because their design is so poor for maintenance. I had cooling system problems that required hours of labor to get to just to replace a plastic part that cost $5 where an aluminum one would cost $7.
It seems to me that bmw was designing for best case scenarios where everything goes perfectly. And since it’s supposed to go perfectly who cares if it’s $5000 to fix because it will “never break.”
Reminds me of Rube Goldberg software designs where 9 things have to happen in sequence for success.
The idea of rubust design that assumes everything breaks and you can still operate is one I value. I look for car companies (and everything I suppose) following this principle.
Porsche had a research program about a very reliable car in the 70s. It has some odd technical choices from today's perspective. https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/when-porsch...
One would assume taxi companies etc would be willing to pay for cars that have high uptime and reliability. But I think they drive mostly the same stuff as regular people. At least one would assume they could get beefier suspension and transmission and high displacement downtuned engines.
In general new cars are still vastly better than old ones. 90:s cars rusted from everywhere after ~8 years while most cars nowadays have zinc coating and more plastic and are still mostly fine after 15 years.
I don't think it's a coincidence that an enormous number of rideshare/delivery drivers drive priuses though. Reliable, not too expensive, low maintenance, and high mpg is kind of exactly what you'd expect them to look for.
The only slight pain in those priuses is removing the windshield wiper assembly to get to the spark plugs closest to the firewall. It's not like they didn't have enough room in the engine bay to the left to better engineer this. But it's something that you rarely have to do. Maybe 2-3 times for the life of the car if it reaches 300k+ miles.
Not to mention still roomy!
> One would assume taxi companies etc would be willing to pay for cars that have high uptime and reliability. But I think they drive mostly the same stuff as regular people. At least one would assume they could get beefier suspension and transmission and high displacement downtuned engines.
Here in the UK until recently it was all Skoda Octavias, nice simple comfortable cars with a reliable diesel engine. Prior to that, it was all Citroën Xantias - again, nice simple comfortable (really comfortable with their hydraulic suspension) cars with a big reliable diesel engine.
It's not uncommon to see them hit well over half a million miles, often in less than five years.
> while most cars nowadays have zinc coating and more plastic and are still mostly fine after 15 years.
In your part of the world, maybe. I live in the middle of the salt belt in the US and we get about 10 years out of most cars. That's when you start seeing rust holes in the fenders around the wheels, when most of the frame has flaked away and the floor pans become involuntary structural elements.
If you're a car nut who spends extra time and money on preventive maintenance and rustproofing, you can get a few more years. But the rust comes for your car at some point anyway.
Car manufacturers know how to make the frames and bodies last longer, this is not an unsolvable manufacturing and design challenge. It's just that nobody is getting a raise for going to their boss and saying, "I know how to make the company sell slightly fewer cars..."
I live up North (capital N) from you, where we have ~4 months of calcium spread on our roads to manage the accumulating ice every winter. A well-maintained car has the chance to live long enough to succumb to rust from that.
Rustproofing is still a good treatment to get done to delay and minimize damage, but it's a thorough and slightly expensive job.
People who have a hobby car usually retire it in a garage from November to April-May instead.
Just look at what's on the road today, there are many more older cars still running than in the past. Even in the salt belt.
It's not just BMW, it's basically all car manufacturers. There are several car maintenance YouTubers who complain about it for many brands. For example "The Car Care Nut" complains about Toyotas being badly designed for maintenance, questionable material choices, etc..
The problem is that $2 here and there adds up, and at the level of the whole car it can add hundreds, or thousands of dollars of extra cost for reliability that the user can't experience directly. For some percentage of owners the plastic part works fine for the whole time they have the car. On the other hand sturdier parts add expense in the case of an accident or replacing parts during routine maintenance.
I watch "The Car Care Nut" sometimes, as I've got a Toyota. Nothing I've ever seen there would lead me to put Toyota into the same maintenance cost/difficulty category as BMW or Mercedes.
Consumer Reports puts them at almost opposite ends of the spectrum, as well.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-maintenance/the-cos...
I've owned a few Mercedes and didn't find them really more difficult to work on than other cars of similar age I've owned. I haven't owned any that are really new, so that may have changed. I haven't owned any BMWs but their reputation for being difficult to work on and overengineered goes back decades.
Anyone can build a car that will never fall apart. It takes a great deal of engineering to build a car that just barely doesn't fall apart.
To be fair the "The Car Care Nut" while clearly very knowledgeable and extremely good at his job, all he does is complain in his videos.
Edit: but at the end of the day all his own cars are Toyota/Lexus
BMW has been the worst of the worst for a long time though. [0] is a representative example, but pretty much any "car brands ordered by upkeep cost" list will have BMW out on their own planet.
Before Teslas really took over the "high income tech worker" market, in Seattle you used to be able to get a used BMW for quite cheap, because all the Microsoft and Amazon workers would lease them and then they'd go on the used market when the lease was up. I actually considered doing this, but multiple mechanics said very bluntly, "don't, this is a trap, the maintenance costs will eat you alive".
[0]: https://www.crsautomotive.com/what-are-the-total-costs-of-ve...
My last 4 cars were BMW. I love the way they drive, but ...
I think they are optimized for the EU leasing market. 4 years, 120.000km. If you buy one for long ownership and want more out of them (they can most certainly do 400=500k km reliably), you have to take care of them from day 1. You change the maitainance schedule (which by default is set to lowering fleet lease costs and who cares beyond that), learn about and do preventive maintainance (such as replacing the entire cooling around 120k km), stricktly use BMW oil (for the additives) unless you are realy knowledgeable about it, and invest in a decent fault scanner (to lnow what is going on and not just run up expensive maintainance bills at the BMW shop).
If you think that's all too much hassle, just lease them short term or buy something else.
I was looking for this reply as well; definitely my perception that a lot of mid- to high-end cars are engineered to drive and feel great for 4-5 years, and after that it's kind of a crapshoot. You can see it as well with the various subscriptions, for app connectivity, M2M infotainment data, etc.
I never considered buying a BMW before they put out an EV (the i4, not the i3). One of the reasons is maintenance, the EV still needs some, but much less than an ICE.
Thats why they've been increasing the service interval to silly numbers. 3 years ago, 10k miles, now... 18k miles for the same model of car for the first service! Absolutely insane.
Yep, and remember, "lifetime" in BMW speak is 120k.km/4y, not "forever".
What you're describing is the stereotype for "rich west europe" engineering culture.
Every now and then you see it leak out into some other environment, like Toyota and their pull-apart ball joints that "aren't an issue" because "the user will just service it on schedule" where it reliably causes problems in all sorts of dumb ways (because like anything else, designing stuff to within an inch of it's life takes practice).
Now, don't get me wrong, this European approach creates a lot of cool highly performant products, but it's stuff that tends to fall on it's face real good if you violate any of the assumptions made when designing it and the approach is naturally suited to some products more than others.
Here is an American example, Fox suspensions. Fox is one of the main producers of bicycle suspensions. Great products, but check their service intervals for a fork [0], 125 hours.
Now if you practice mountainbike you may ride your bike 1 to 5 times a week. Let's say you only ride once a week for 4 hours: 125 / 4 = 31, you would need to service your fork every 31 weeks. Add some few more rides and you have to service the fork twice a year.
Each service easily costs $150 if done by a bike shop. If you do it yourself (plenty of tutorials on youtube), you need expensive special tools, oil, special grease and spare o-rings and seals easily costs 30-40$ for every service. And you have to properly dispose the old oil.
[0] https://tech.ridefox.com/bike/owners-manuals/2979/fork--2025...
That service interval is pretty common across all bike suspension forks (and dropper posts are usually only around 50 hours).
A SR Suntour fork has a 100 hour maintenance interval, for example.
https://www.manualslib.com/manual/3730626/Sr-Suntour-Durolux...
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.
> 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.
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.
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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.
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> 9 things have to happen in sequence
This is literally how all software works. Except it is thousands of instructions. Further, it is very often that programs don’t handle anything besides the happy path.
Management only cares about analyzing and completing the 'happy path' because customers only buy 'happy path'. Customers don't (with rare exceptions) buy 'unhappy path', even though statistically it is a near certainty that where they will find themselves at some point.
I guarantee no engineer wanted an expensive, difficult to replace pyro fuse. Unfortunately, it doesn't particularly matter what individual engineers want, it's what the system wants, and the system wants to make money.
>I had cooling system problems that required hours of labor to get to just to replace a plastic part that cost $5 where an aluminum one would cost $7.
If the car has 10 places where the manufacturer saves 2 dollars, that is 20 dollars a car. At around 2.5 Million cars shipped each year that is 50 Million Euros each year profit for BMW.
The entire car industry is extremely cost sensitive, especially right now, with so much global competition and little consolidation.
The issue also isn't that the part is cost optimized. The issue is that it fails.