The real scary part is when you only sometimes work on your car. You get to see all the mistakes the "pros" made. Missing bolts, over/under torqued lugs, and my current pain: replacing the battery 3 times when there's clearly a parasitic load that needs diagnosis.
Oh God - flashbacks to trying to replace a blown bulb in my Focus. "This will be easy". Two hours later and some bleeding knuckles later, took it to the garage for them to swear at.
A mechanic is well-positioned to notice that a particular car engine has an unusually high rate of a certain type of failure, and very often to identify the root cause of said failure. If Subaru head gaskets fail because they're bathed in fluids when the engine isn't running, and Ford Tritons spit out spark plugs because they only used 3.5 threads in an aluminum head, mechanics who work on them will notice. Rossmann is in an equivalent position.
Of course there may be good explanations for design decisions that negatively impact reliability, but it's reasonable for owners to be grumpy about it. It also wouldn't completely shock me if there's a former Ford engineer out there somewhere collecting a paycheck from Helicoil, a manufacturer of threaded inserts used to repair stripped spark plug holes, with no current job duties.
I have a similar feeling toward my car's problems. I think it's the general issue of reproducibility that can cause such a feeling. You know the problem is there, but you're not sure of the cause, nor can you reproduce it reliably. Immediately, the issue becomes top priority because you don't know what to expect.
Agreed, in that the fasteners get stretched, fatigued, difficult to manipulate.
But it still happens. Having a means of greater torque gets past that failure condition and reduces the work burden.
And that's a net good. Older people, young, small, women with nails, guys who may not be very strong, someone hurt or sick all see a much improved task, well in bounds for them.
This is precisely why I brought all my kids up knowing these things. Same for anyone I've helped. I'll leave it with them and just go get another lever. cheap.
Better to be equipped to get this done than be stuck, merely understanding one should not be, but is anyway.
A small extension of this thinking means equipping the vehicle with common sense, useful tools. BMW does this from the factory. Most go unused, but its ultra cheap insurance. May actually end up applying to another vehicle. All good.
It really doesn't take much to equip a vehicle for trouble cases. Anyone who does is likely to get a nice return on that modest investment in skill and gear at some point in their lives. This is true even when their skills are somehow lacking, or they become physically unable somehow.
Getting help means people, and it often means tools. Having both is again, cheap insurance.
Talking about a damaged fastener on your way from the trouble incident is a great problem to have when compared to the side of a road.
A mechanic is in a good position to notice that when a car fails, it tends to fail in certain ways. Far too often, though, they then generalize to claims that the car is likely to fail in that way, but that is not necessarily the case. It may be that they fail 1% as often as competitors and due to a relatively fewer number of causes. Without being in a position to see the absolute failure rate, a mechanic may incorrectly conclude that those parts they see failing are especially badly designed even if they are more reliable than the industry average.
I had my first two engines on my current car (2007, current engine 2013) replaced before finally having a reliable car (manufacturer paid for both replacements after noting there were defects and not anything I had done).
some times stuff is just borked up until a certain point and some of us get unlucky with the quicker to die versions.
sucks, but we need to look at the averages, not the outliers.
* editing to add that I would still recommend my car make and model, because it's just so damned awesome, but I would hate for others to go through what I went through.
> Design iteration is typically a long tail phenomenon - new issues keep coming up as the system (car) faces new scenarios.
Even a high-resource prototyping program can only go so far with scenarios like - wear and tear/part fatigue, adverse environmental conditions, local peculiarities (e.g. regulatory requirements for uncommon configurations), unintended but common maintenance mistakes etc.
Which is why automakers typically recommends a maintenance schedule that catches the vast majority of potential failures before they occur on the road.
How does this, or anecdotes of your family's Fiat, relate to engineering and verification practices of parts coming in from suppliers?
It’s not the drive train I worry about on a new car. Those components are relatively easy to replace even if they can get expensive. The big problem I worry about is wiring and electronics. If the wiring is messed to the whole car might get totaled because finding someone to diagnose is near impossible
Or why the error codes are kept secret from the user, resulting in only the dealership, not your local independent, being able to fix some things.
And also the requirement of specialist tools to do non-specialist jobs like set the engine timing, and then charging a lot for purchase of the tool. It will be interesting to see how serviceable electric cars become once they are old enough to start being parted out and the used market expands to those who 'just need something to go from A to B'.
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