Comment by jlarocco
5 hours ago
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...
BMW uses bolts that require people to buy a special set of drivers to work on them, don’t they? Like giant inverted torx bolts.
External Torx. They're not so unusual. Even General Motors has used those in some places for eons -- I still have the set of them I bought at Autozone to replace the brakes on a Saturn a couple of decades ago.
The real fucker in automotive fasteners is XZN, aka Triple Square. These are all over VW products.
As fasteners go, they're fine. They work well.
The interface has 12 points, and it looks like something from the toolkit like an Allen key or a Torx bit might be the right choice, but it isn't that way at all: The angles are wrong (XZN angles are based on squares, not hexagons).
But that's OK: They make XZN socketry in factories every day that does have the correct angles. They're easy-enough to buy and to use.
The fuckery aspect is a human factor: Because it looks like it "should work" with a Torx driver or an Allen key, people dive in with the wrong tools and fuck it up for the next guy.
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.
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...
It was practically a stereotype that all of the young male H1Bs had a BMW desktop background on their work computer. I knew one guy who practically bankrupted himself by buying one the moment he thought he could afford it. The mandatory insurance got him. And then we found out he’s a terrible driver. Thing was in the shop all the time.
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