Modern vehicles are just so much shite

boogieman

Phil_aka_Pip;62396" said:

I know they don't. But I do!

Trouble is you're doomed whatever they do. Suppose they actually made really good quality cars that ran for decades and had long lasting parts that were easily fixable in your drive. Then no one would need a new car very often. But the prices would shoot up, cos the manufacturing costs would be huge and their profit margins would go through the floor. Personally I prefer the happy medium of something relatively reliable but at a reasonable cost.

ROOG

It's not helped that we in the UK have such an influential company car culture, every thing seems to be in pursuit of low mpg and low CO2. So when the car is sold new to the company and their employees, they get what they want, when it drops into the used car market and becomes 5 years old the problems of some of the 'leading edge' technology come to light. The private owner is already becoming aware of the risks the super efficient diesels present, often resulting is large bills, an earlier post listed them.

There will come a time when the allure of a techie ex company car will no longer be attractive proposition, who knows that time may have already come. From the problems I have seen in our company fleet, I know that I wouldn't be keen on one as a 3 yr old used private buy.    

Col_Decker

The biggest issue with modern cars imo is the lack of a spare wheel. Mrs Deckers old car (Ford C-MAX) had no spare. In its place was a can of resin stuff and a pump. Which of course could repair your puncture assuming:

the tyre was still on the rim

the puncture wasnt on the side wall or shoulder

the wheel wasn't damaged

you didn'y need to go over 50 mph

and you were ready to buy a new tyre after as a 'mended' one can be properly repaired.

 

spare wheels FTW

ICBM

They actually do care. They want the car to be reliable for at least three years, because warranty repairs cost them money and most are offering that sort of warranty now. They actually want them to be reliable for a fair while after that too, or it damages their reputation, second hand values fall, and new buyers are then put off as well because they don't want to be faced with high depreciation. But they want them to fail in uneconomical-to-repair ways at about the end of the second ownership period, so it kills off the long-term used market and produces more new sales. Unreliability at more than about six years old doesn't affect their reputation and new sales significantly because those buyers are mostly not in the market for a new car anyway, and depreciation from that point on is to the scrap value.

So the car manufacturers' goal is to build a car which will remain perfectly reliable with almost no attention for the first three years, need servicing but stay reliable for about the next three, then fall apart completely within about ten... which is close to what many of them are achieving now. Its a very precise art to calculate this sort of thing - Henry Ford allegedly told his engineers that he wanted them to work out not only how to improve things that were breaking, but to how to reduce the quality of those that weren't.

stickyfiddle

Col_Decker said:

The biggest issue with modern cars imo is the lack of a spare wheel. Mrs Deckers old car (Ford C-MAX) had no spare. In its place was a can of resin stuff and a pump. Which of course could repair your puncture assuming:

the tyre was still on the rim

the puncture wasnt on the side wall or shoulder

the wheel wasn't damaged

you didn'y need to go over 50 mph

and you were ready to buy a new tyre after as a 'mended' one can be properly repaired.

 

spare wheels FTW

Have wisdom. Mine, almost unbelievably, came with a full alloy spare, though that means you can't use the extendable boot floor, as that only leaves room for a space saver. Do they give you both, so you get all the options? Fuck no!

ICBM

Mine comes with a 'space saver', so the first thing I did was to go and buy a proper alloy (with tyre) from a scrap dealer. Obviously I can't carry it in the car, but at least it's only a drive home away.

It saved my bacon this year when I went out in the morning to take the car for its MOT and found a flat tyre - it had got punctured the night before but I didn't notice since it didn't go flat before I got home. You can't get an MOT with a space-saver on, and I wouldn't have had time to go to the tyre place for a new one.

musicegbdf

+1 about the resin stuff for a puncture. Complete crap. My daughters Audi had this stuff , and becuase of it she was off the road for a week . As she has a 85 mile round trip to work to a place that cannot be accessed by public transport she was really stuck.  I bought her a spare wheel and tyre for xmas , but cost me a fortune !

ICBM

The resin kit thing is on my list of total dealbreakers on any future car, having seen the hassle some friends of mine had as well.

Cirrus

Why don't they just make tyres out of metal, then they wouldn't puncture!

Phil_aka_Pip

Cirrus said:

Why don't they just make tyres out of metal, then they wouldn't puncture!

They could make them out of solid rubber, but the government won't have it.

Col_Decker

like this

luscombe

I have a 66 year old aeroplane that is utterly reliable. It can be left 3-months at a time in a cold hangar, yet always starts 1st or 2nd pull on the propeller (there is no electric starter, so you need to hand prop it to start the engine. The secret to it's reliability is simplicity (as it is with most vintage aeroplanes). The engine is a simple, pushrod valve gear,  large capacity (so lightly stressed) flat four with no timing belts, or electronics to fail. The ignition system utilises magnetos that don't even need a battery to operate, so a battery failure would not effect the smooth running in any way. The magneto system is duplicated (with two spark plugs per cylinder, so in the unlikely event of a magneto failure the engine continues to run normally on the second magneto and ignition system. Servicing is very straightforward, the oil & filter needs to be changed after every 25 hours of flying time. Economy is never a strong point with aeroplanes, but it burns about 3 gallons an hour, cruising at 90 mph (using ordinary forecourt petrol). In still air that gives approx. 30 mpg. It's the only way to travel!

Phil_aka_Pip

Aeronautical engineering is proof that basic technology can be reliable. However I suspect that the mass production cost of it would be prohibitive.

ICBM

Vintage aeroplanes are lovely things.

I don't think they're more reliable than incredibly complex modern commercial airliners though. Obviously that's not a fair comparison because of the huge and expensive logistic organisation dedicated to keeping airliners reliable and safe, but they really are, astonishingly so - they're the safest form of transport per passenger mile* ever built. Private aviation is far more dangerous.

(*It may be true that that's not the correct way to measure safety since trains still beat them per passenger *journey*, which is what really counts, but they're still incredibly safe.)

bertie

ICBM said:

Vintage aeroplanes are lovely things.

did Trev Wilkinson design them ?

hungrymark

My first car was a G-reg Fiat Uno with a manual choke. It had it's charms (tyres like a bicycle's made it fun in the rain. Actual fun) but was a pain in the arse really. I have zero interest in fixing a car myself and it broke down a lot (and the brakes failed on the Snake Pass once, coming down into Glossop, which was interesting). Since then I've had various things and now drive an 08 Fiesta, on which I've put 86000 miles with nothing go wrong apart from my wife smashing the wing-mirror on a drystone wall, which to be fair wasn't really the car's fault. Modern cars rarely go wrong.

Phil_aka_Pip

@hungrymark you're right they don't go wrong as frequently but they're a pain in the arse the neck the bollocks and the willy all at the same time when they do.

FX_Munkee

Seriously, just get yourself and ELM327 interface (assuming your's is a relatively modern car ie OBD2) from ebay for £15 and some software and then you're as well equipped as your main dealer (sometimes better depending on the software).
There is generic software and manufacturer specific software so that will take a small amount of research.
I've got an Alfa and honestly MultiECUScan (was FiatECUScan) is better than the OEM software. It cost £50 for a full version and has repaid that many times over, just by being able to reset the service light and oil change req. warnings after a "home service".

chillidoggy

Cutting through all the usual crap, did you ever get your van sorted, Phil?

Sporky

Col_Decker said:

and you were ready to buy a new tyre after as a 'mended' one can be properly repaired.

They can still be repaired - it's just that the tyre places don't like cleaning them and make more money on replacing the tyre than repairing it.

ICBM said:

Henry Ford allegedly told his engineers that he wanted them to work out not only how to improve things that were breaking, but to how to reduce the quality of those that weren't.

Yup - he had agents go around the scrap yards noting what parts hadn't failed - if anything consistently outlived the rest of the vehicle then it had been made better than required and was a waste of money.