Automobile complexity

[Moontanman]

Fifty years ago automobiles were produced that anyone could maintain. keeping a car on the road was easy, fixing them when they broke was easy enough for almost anyone to do.

 

Now cars are so complex that even minor things need a professional mechanic to work on them. No thought is given to the owner maintaining his car and the car is not only put together in a way that make it difficult to maintain the car is actually put together so there are few or no user serviceable parts.

 

Would we be better off if cars were built so that as much as possible of the cars up keep could be done by the owner/user?

[CraigD]

Fifty years ago automobiles were produced that anyone could maintain. keeping a car on the road was easy, fixing them when they broke was easy enough for almost anyone to do.

 

Now cars are so complex that even minor things need a professional mechanic to work on them. No thought is given to the owner maintaining his car and the car is not only put together in a way that make it difficult to maintain the car is actually put together so there are few or no user serviceable parts.

 

Would we be better off if cars were built so that as much as possible of the cars up keep could be done by the owner/user?

I think you’ve brought up perhaps the most profound question of automobile technology of our or any generation!

 

Having kept a 1978 VW van on the road at the same time as 1992 Chevy Cavalier, I had a lot affection for air-cooled VW suitcase engine, matched by a lot of contempt for the wretched GM J-car engine (which, along with its equally wretched engine compartment, seemed to me purposefully designed to hurt anyone who dared approach it from above ;)). On the other hand, the VW engine really needed a full overhaul - all rings and bearings – every 100-150,000 miles, while late 1990s GM engines would usually perform flawlessly for 200,000 miles as long as their oil was changed regularly (not mine, unfortunately, hence my fear and contempt of it).

 

From the perspective of an individual with moderately good mechanic skills, the question for the past decade comes down to, I think: do you prefer a vehicle while will require a good bit of work that you can do easily, or one that will likely require no work, but if it does, will be difficult to impossible for you?

 

There’s another important perspective, however: emissions. Even though many old cars, like my ’78 VW van, had good fuel economy, it’s exhaust emissions were terrible by more modern standards. Were the engine of every passenger car in my urban area suddenly replaced with a VW engine, total fuel consumption might slightly decrease, as would CO2 emissions, but air quality would be seriously reduced, so much so that it would actually increased respiratory illness and death. And while more owners would be able to service their own vehicles, many – I’d guess at least 2 times – more total hours of maintenance and service would be needed.

 

A couple of observations from my wretched Chevy years:

• The special cable and software that allows a PC to act like the specialized computer diagnostic machine garages have is well worth it’s cost. Though I got them because I like gadgets, I think they at least halved the time I spent working on the beast, and saved even more mental aggravation.
  
• Real shop manuals, though pricey and harder to buy, are better than those by Chilton, etc. If you’re someone who likes to work from a manual, they’re likely worth their cost.
  
• Most modern cars, especially compacts, are designed to be accessed from below, while elevated on a lift, not from above. There’s likely little that most people can do about this, since even the lightest and most portable car lift costs more than most cars. My father, however, discovered that his house, which had an attached garage, actually had a deep crawl space under the garage, which though it appeared to have a thick concrete floor, was actually only a thin layer of concrete of plywood on floor beams. A weekend project of removing a bit of the floor between a couple of beams (along with making a wooden hatch to cover the hole), a bit of raking and a plywood 4x8 in the crawl spacespace made it into a service bay nearly as usable as a garage lift.
  Though I've never done it, if you have a lot of level yard, I'd give serious thought to digging a pit/trench that you can drive a car over.
  

 

Looking forward, I’m hopeful that pure electric vehicles may result in cars with so little need for and such simple maintenance and repair that more people than ever will be able to maintain their own cars. If this comes to pass, however, electrical safety education will be important, as the typical electric car has enough voltage and power to handily kill a careless experimental armature mechanic.

[alexander]

No thought is given to the owner maintaining his car and the car is not only put together in a way that make it difficult to maintain the car is actually put together so there are few or no user serviceable parts.

That depends on the car, ofcourse. Example would be a subaru wrx, the car is made for rallying and tuning, and it is not hard to work on the car, i mean 2 people can take the engine out in less then 4 hours, without breaking a sweat too much, in comparison, a diesel jetta takes approximately 12 hours of labor-intensive work.

 

Not all cars are being don't this way, but as tolerances become smaller and room for error tighter, the manufacturers don't want people servicing cars, because it will cost them more at the end, so they give warranties and get people to bring their cars to pros, pros that will look over the car and ideally identify things that may be going shortly, to do preventative maintenance, that also ends up being cheaper then having to replace a lot more later. As my friend that works as a BMW cert mechanic at a local dealership "You won't believe what people do when they are not made to maintain the car, i have seen brand new bmw's coming back after 35000 miles without a single oil change, sludge build up under the lid, and the owners trying to fight my charge to change their oil; i dont even want to work on these cars, they are junked by the owners, why do i care? The cars are almost better off with clean-handed sales people, that will religiously bring their cars to change oil, and i, as a mechanic respect that, because the car is much better maintained, and will always take a look over some parts to make sure they are not about to start going, and make sure i follow all the maintenance procedures, check the history, etc, to keep the car in the pristine condition it's in"

 

I mean it really depends on cars, the smaller and smarter the car, the less you are able to mainain it without knowing exactly what you are doing, where a car that is made for playing around. Plus there still are makers that put little electronics in their car, and the cars turn to be great pieces of mechanical engineering, like a vauxhall vxr8 for example.... (lucky UK bastards :) )

[Moontanman]

For instance I have a 95 Toyota Avalon, it needs a new set of spark plugs, To change out the back plugs I have to remove the intake manifold, not to mention large numbers of hoses, wires, and ducts and filters just to get to the intake manifold. I can get someone to do it for me for about $200, a $25 set of plugs I could change in 15 minutes in most cars but this one needs to have major work done to get to the plugs! God help me if i had to change the alternator, or power steering pump or water pump or any one of a dozen components that should be easily user serviceable.

[arkain101]

I did a little thinking about this the other day:

 

Today we have a very large variety of vehicles. I suppose some of the reasons for this is consumer demand of choice, and the competitive field of manufacturers constantly trying to out do the others in order to gain the most capital over the market, and to survive. (Whatever the reasons, this is off the topic and could drag on to far)

 

I do agree we do require a variety of vehicles for different applications and uses but too much variety is wasteful of resources and energy. Even though competition drives the advancement of technology, which is a good thing relatively speaking, it is also a wasteful way of operating.

 

Instead of vehicles being designed to last us a significant portion of our lifetime they are being designed to constantly replace the previous "new replacement". Each time a model of a vehicle changes it creates the problem of being partially incompatible with the same previous model. This means millions of parts can only be used in one small area of application, which means the billions of dollars and endless amounts of energy used to make the vehicles and parts has gone to a kind of waste because it can only supply a use for a small section of Newer models that will in the end be pushed down into the used catagory.

 

My point is that yes we make cars today too complex. The key word here is make. I think we make too much complexity. It is like the cell phone craze of this day and age. Entire landfills could be filled with the amount of electronic gizmo's - like cell phones - that are being manufactured, bought, used, and thrown away in a matter of months. The same kind of situation is happening with cars today.

 

We know we could design a bodyless unified vehicle that was capable of good efficiency, good power, good reliability and longevity yet is able to have different styles of body design attatched to it to meet the demand for diversity and purpose. A vehicle that is also built with the thought and plan in mind for future upgrades and re-use. In general, vehicle that solves a significant part of the problem of resource and energy consumption.

 

If we had such a vehicle design today that had been on the road for the last 10 years anytime your vehicle broke down a replacement part would be 5 buck$ and 5 steps away. Mind you, this is only a few quick ideas and by no means "the solution".

 

Would we be better off if cars were built so that as much as possible of the cars up keep could be done by the owner/user?

 

I think to answer this question it depends in what way we consider the phrase 'better off'. We could be better off individually over a short period of time, but be worse off as a whole. Better off as a whole over a short period of time, but worse off individually. Better off enviromentally and as a society for the long term but worse off indivdually in the short term.

 

I think we must face the fact that we are always worse off when refuse the opportuntiy to save energy and resources.

 

I think a cold hard fact is that it is a matter of time for the inevitable that we will fall into a state of distress and lose so much that we have gained if we do not make it an upmost priority to change the way we do things on a massive scale.

 

I think we are better off rethinking the whole scenario of the automobile industry from the ground up, so that however it is done, it is done better.

[Roadam]

One thing I thought about is that there will always be some advances in technology and engineering, so that vehicles are and will be mostly considered antics when they are at their tenth year. So it would be hard to design something that could be updated easily, much less even maintained. I am not sure even electrical cars could do that.

 

But if every car is made to be easily recycled and used to make new cars for example, that would mostly eliminate all the problems with current ones.

[alexander]

Moon, the new Cadillac cts, you have to lift the engine out to replace the plugs, its an 8 hour job at the dealers...

 

The problem with complexity is not even that they make the cars better, we demand the cars to be more complex, so they are simpler and safer. I always say that if you want to see what we will have in our cars in 3-5 years, look at the Mercedes S class today. With more and more decisions made by the car, to make your commute safer, more and more electronics are required to monitor the things that are being controlled. For some people its more then fine to have a simple mechanical beast that does not do anything fancy. But then you enter the real world. People like to not crash, people like to feel safer, people like luxuries, and people like to have a simple design with a central management system, simpler to control. That is what modern cars try to deliver. That is they created adaptive steering and cruise control to ease the driving, they created adaptive breaking, adaptive sway bars, obstacle detectors and self-parking to make it safer, they made all the controls electronic for mostly everything in your cars to make it easier to control, they ergonomically designed the driver position and console, to ease the stress for driving, they shortened the front a little to improve handling and aerodynamics, they created crumple zones to make it safer, they made the engine so that it can run on 1/2 the cylinders to save on gas, and all that technology takes up space, something really valuable in the car, thus they had to move the engine back, and make bigger alternator, bigger ac/heating system to accomodate the fact that most people want to be cozy in the car after less then 2 minutes inside, which creates less then an easy environment to work on anything, hoses, electrical, mounts, things underneeth things, and hard to get to is the result of making cars more catored to people's wants. They put sensors everywhere to monitor the car and be able to facilitate the functions, this makes parts units, and you have to replace the whole unit to fix even simple problems, this however has an upside, a bmw, connected to the diagnostic equipment can tell you exactly when something is not working right, when it happened, how it happened, as well as when and what you should replace to fix it...

[TheBigDog]

I have always had a different vision of car manufacturing. It is probably influenced by the old VW models where everything was based on the common platform but the variety was incredible. You had the basic Beetle, but also the sporty Carmon Gia, the utilitarian Thing, the iconic Bus, and the variations which were pickup trucks to dune buggies.

 

My idea would be to manufacture the foundation of the car. Frame, engine, drive train, windows, electric control system. There are government regulations that would mandate the specifics of what would need to be included on the car for testing and safety purposes.

 

What is more important than what comes with the car is what it comes without. It does not have paint or body panels. It has ducting, but not AC. It has no interior other than a temporary driver seat (which is returned to the factory). It doesn't even come with a roof.

 

The cars would require a few hours of final assembly when purchased. They would be built to make this an economic process. When you purchase a car you would pick out the style of panels and their coloring. The same basic model could become many different looking cars, and have many different focused purposes. In fact a used model could be converted from a hard-top to a convertible, or made to be a pickup by unbolting modules and replacing them, all in just a few hours of labor because they will be designed for this purpose.

 

I can envision them having hundreds of looks and styles. All of it driven by after-market companies that employ the basic model to market their own models.

 

This is aimed at doing a few critical things. The core of the car would be simplified for mass production at low cost and highly consistent product. The stock model should be designed to get greater than 40mpg. The aftermarket would supply ample power modifications having varying levels of compromise on the stock performance. It would allow a car to be "timeless" since updating the body panels could give it a new look to match changing styles. It gets the consumer right to the end of the assembly process so that you don't have to forecast the colors and styles that people will want and keep them in stock hoping that they sell.

 

The whole concept here is to simplify the car. The modular design would allow upgrades and fixes to be done without great complication. Similar to how motorcycle companies exist which simply sell you a stylized Harley Davidson, dozens of companies could be formed that simply sell cars based on this frame. Of course multiple frames could be available to allow greater diversity, but ideally they would share modular parts.

 

Like so many things in life, all it requires is to do it. Anyone think that a billion of the bail out money could be turned into a profitable venture this way? The hardest thing would be government regulation.

 

Bill

[CraigD]

My idea would be to manufacture the foundation of the car. Frame, engine, drive train, windows, electric control system. There are government regulations that would mandate the specifics of what would need to be included on the car for testing and safety purposes.

This reminds me of GM’s “skateboard chassis” concept of about 5 years ago. The idea here is that one could drop a variety of bodies onto one of these chassis, without any constraints on the placement of seats etc. other than the overall dimensions of the chassis. Controls are all “fly by wire”, and all the power and drive systems are below the cabin floor. Windows, vents/AC/heat etc. is all part of the body, with only an electric power cable connection to the chassis.

 

Regrettably, this concept was coupled with GM’s hydrogen gas fuel cell electric project, (it was called “hi-wire” for “hydrogen/fly by wire controls) so as their fuel cell research foundered, so did the chassis.

 

Most of the major manufacturers have seriously developed concepts similar to this, including such things as swappable “power modules” that would allow a vehicle to be quickly changed from one fuel/engine to another. Little of it has moved past research and prototyping to appear in a production vehicle. Many followers of the auto industry, including I, think this shows a persistent disconnect between R&D, management, and production engineering groups and “cultures” in large automakers.

[alexander]

Amen to that last paragraph, craig, i would expand that, not only have companies themselves had this problem, the government has also had this type of a problem.

 

to give you an example, GE was to develop a city bus that ran on hydrogen, for the city of Hartford. About 1/2 way into this project, the government officials interveened and added a simple clause, the bus had to run on a readily-available fossil fuel, and the development had to basically restart. They ended up creating a bus that has a natural gas refinery built into itself, they use methane to scrub natural gas to get hydrogen out of it. Yes, it still ends up being a no emission bus, simply because they use the mix to power the generator that facilitates further processing of nat gas, but still, the gov-t made the company develop a bus that bottom-line, ran on a fossil fuel.

[DFINITLYDISTRUBD]

Fifty years ago automobiles were produced that anyone could maintain. keeping a car on the road was easy, fixing them when they broke was easy enough for almost anyone to do.

 

Now cars are so complex that even minor things need a professional mechanic to work on them. No thought is given to the owner maintaining his car and the car is not only put together in a way that make it difficult to maintain the car is actually put together so there are few or no user serviceable parts.

 

Would we be better off if cars were built so that as much as possible of the cars up keep could be done by the owner/user?

Actually as recently as the late eighties, vehicles were still well within the skill level of the average home mechanic.. (even the early nineties as evidenced by my 91 f-250 which was fairly easy to service)....

excruciatingly expensive to service but not difficult....

 

As to modular vehicles....how would one determine which manufacturer provided the drivetrain, electronics etc.?

 

Some of us are fiercely loyal to a particular manufacturer (For me it's Ford cuz they build one heck of a pickup and the other two of the big three have let me down too many times)

 

Are we talking car manufacturing and distribution similar to the "kit car" market where you choose your engine and all of the other goodies or? Which if you got the money is a pretty cool way to go....(wish I had the cash)...course...I'm partial too recycling older rides...but that's becoming a painfully expensive route as well.