Engineered Obsolescence

mike_l

menamestom said:

mike_l said:

TTony said:

Car manufacture today is all about weight reduction - to improve mpg, reduce emissions, etc.  Hence the use of aluminium in place of steel, the loss of the standard spare wheel, etc.

Add that with the increased use of electronics in cars, and I really doubt that you'll see many 20yo cars still on the road in 20 years time.

For other "durables", I can't help thinking that it's primarily cost-driven, including the shift of most manufacturing to a land far, far away where standards are different ...

With cars there's a *lot* of EU bullshit laws regarding what cars *must* have fitted.

Example, tyre pressure monitoring. Completely unnecessary, you can see a flat/low pressure tyre, yet the EU has passed a law which states that all new cars (since January last year) must have sensors to detect tyre pressure.

What if you get a puncture on the motorway in the middle of a journey? Would be nice to see a tyre has lost 5psi, rather than feel there is an issue when it is half deflated and you are going 70mph. I think it sounds like a useful system.

You'd know if you got a puncture at 70 (I have) the car's handling goes all over the place.

Besides the monitoring system (I've seen plenty) and non are totally reliable.

2 examples, When I worked at Renault, the detectors would go off, without the tyre going flat. The "fix" was to either replace the whole system (4 sensors, receiver box and related wiring) or to reset the parameters from 2psi to 99psi, thus by-passing the system.

Mum's Mercedes has a sensor which goes off if the tyre loses 0.5psi.

koneguitarist

I work on Doors and cranes etc, and a couple of points I would like to make is, all cranes used to be made so heavily over the top and over engineered, they would be able to take far more than their stated capacity, and are still working well today.

This is because steel was cheaper and manpower was plentiful, however as costs have gone up, computers have taken the place of real engineers and the bare minimum is now used, with the event that a slight overloading can often ruin a crane with disastrous consequences. 

A company that I worked for making doors used cheap components that they knew would last a couple of years at most. When I complained regarding quality, I was told "you are missing the point, the door fails they buy another," Now I am actually In charge of doors on a large site I fail them under HS reasons. 

All for the sake of about £10 a door!

Phil_aka_Pip

TTony said:

With my early cars, I'd check tyres, oils, water (etc), regularly - weekly.  OK, so cars are more reliable now, don't burn through oil like they used to ... but you've still just got 4 small pieces of rubber keeping you safely on the road, and if you don't look after them properly, it doesn't matter how many warning indicators you've got on the dashboard.

Modern engines DO burn oil. At least Poxhalls do. From experience, plus seeing it somewhere on their website. It also happened to the Ford I had previously. My Volvo didn't, but that has hardly a "modern" engine.

'Tis true you don't have to set the contact breaker gap and file them with wet&dry. 'Tis true you're not resetting rocker clearances frequently. But stone me, when the damn thing refuses to start in the morning, man, you're in deep trouble.

I'd rather have something I can fix.

chillidoggy

Not true in the case of my '07 Mondeo diesel, Phil. I've had it nearly five years, and never needed to put any oil in whatsoever. It gets done at service intervals, and that's it.

chillidoggy

TTony said:

jellyroll said:

Are you guys seriously arguing that cars today are inferior in reliability & longevity to the piles of sh*t we had in the seventies and eighties? It might be true for Mercs, but it's not true of any middle of the road (excuse the pun) brand.

Not the 70s & 80s, but I think we'll come to see cars made c1995-2010 as being the "best" built in terms of their durability.

There are exceptions that originate from Norfolk, TTony..................

Axe_meister

chillidoggy;492409" said:

Not true in the case of my '07 Mondeo diesel, Phil. I've had it nearly five years, and never needed to put any oil in whatsoever. It gets done at service intervals, and that's it.

You should still change the oil every year. Dirty oil can increase wear on an engine

Sambostar

A 2.5Di Transit pushrod engine will do 400,000 on the same oil.  A 2.4TDCi overhead cam Transit engine will break if you look at it wrong.

thomasross20

I do automotive IC development for modern cars and **** me it's difficult - all down to safety, of course. The hoops you have to jump through and the complexity of the parts.... obviously we don't want the chips burning out once all cars are drive by wire!

ICBM

thomasross20 said:

I do automotive IC development for modern cars and **** me it's difficult - all down to safety, of course. The hoops you have to jump through and the complexity of the parts.... obviously we don't want the chips burning out once all cars are drive by wire!

Not until the warranty has just expired, anyway .

Gassage

Rocker said:

More and more I find that "things" don't last as long as they should. Things were built better in times not long passed. Examples are interior door handles and kitchen taps. Our original doors were changed after about 20 years usage. In that time only a couple of door handles needed replacing. The replacement doors are in place around 10 years yet most of the door handles needed to be replaced. The lever falls off when you open the door.... The same with kitchen taps, the inserts fail after little more than a year service. And they don't fit exactly either and always need some filing or sandpaper use to get them to work properly. But my main point is that they appear to be designed to work for a certain length of time (which is getting shorter every year). Anyone care to comment......

You want quality? Buy dLine....I used to be the Marketing Director for them years back...

Ridiculous prices though and totally over engineered- if Pete Cornish made door handles thses would be his...

http://www.dline.com/brands/d-line/underside-1/

£120 for a set over lever handles + you have to have a special lock which costs another £70..! But amazing quality- the onlyhardware ever specified by Norman Foster and Richard ROgers' practices...

When I did my house up in Shep Bush I blagged £5000 quids worth off them as a favour to me for all the years I worked for them- the bathroom fittings are amazing...

http://www.dline.com/brands/d-line/underside-1/

And lifetime warranty...

The guy that designed them all, Knud Holscher, diesigned the Porsche push bike and also the world's definative colostomy bag...and he designed the famous Danish coffee pot tht you can knock over and doesn't spill...

Sambostar

What was the recall on the Prius a few years ago, wasn't it a fly by wire brake problem or something wasn't it?

I will never understand the over engineering of actuators and solenoids/relays operated by a digital pulse and digital technology. 

Definitely prefer mechanical designs and simpler ABS pumps and wheel sensors reading the cogs for example of you want some degree of traction control.  But even that was crap.  LSD are advanced for me and they are mechanical. 

I guess digital has it's advantages, but it gets to a point where the whole of your house heating, lighting, blind control and media won't work if there is a solar flare or your IPad Air battery goes.  Killing people in foreign lands by digital tech remote drones is definitely the ultimate in digital technological advancement, but again it creates more problems  than it solves.

Ultimately I think we should go back to the water wheel.

Cars that run on computer chips are just wrong.

chillidoggy

Axe_meister said:

chillidoggy;492409" said:

Not true in the case of my '07 Mondeo diesel, Phil. I've had it nearly five years, and never needed to put any oil in whatsoever. It gets done at service intervals, and that's it.

You should still change the oil every year. Dirty oil can increase wear on an engine

I don't change the oil, the guys at the garage do it when the car is serviced. At the correct intervals, I might add, which is 18,000 miles in this case. I never have to add any oil between services, though. Which I find incredible, but it's true.

I did have a Mk2 Cortina 1500 many years ago, which used to burn a pint of oil in about 150 miles. Shows how things have moved in, eh? Mind you, it smoked so much, the old bill pulled me over on a few occasions because they thought the car was on fire.

mike_l

thomasross20 said:

I do automotive IC development for modern cars and **** me it's difficult - all down to safety, of course. The hoops you have to jump through and the complexity of the parts.... obviously we don't want the chips burning out once all cars are drive by wire!

When I was working at Renault, one of the guys I worked with was going to his RTE (Renault Technical Expert - Master tech) course and one of the other guys had a brand new Scenic with all electric everything. However the Scenic lived up to Renaults electrical reputation, and, in the outside lane of either the M6 or M1 (I can't remember which) lost all the electrics, so no engine, brakes, steering, nothing........

Danny1969

The thing with cars is you have a 12V system so virtually everything needs to pull at least a few amps to do anything (for any given power the lower the voltage the more amps you need)  So rather than running switched lives from the point of control to the target it actually makes sense to give everything acess to a  common power bus and then simply "address" the target to turn on \ off via a shared control bus. That way you don't need a million wires all over the car carrying a load of current 

Except you do because these days everything has to be electric for the sake of it. A huge mess of electric solutions to non existent problems

Tyres always will need some replenishing, apparently they lose air through the actual tyre rubber ......... it was on Mayo's homework sucks a couple of months ago 

TTony

chillidoggy said:

TTony said:

jellyroll said:

Are you guys seriously arguing that cars today are inferior in reliability & longevity to the piles of sh*t we had in the seventies and eighties? It might be true for Mercs, but it's not true of any middle of the road (excuse the pun) brand.

Not the 70s & 80s, but I think we'll come to see cars made c1995-2010 as being the "best" built in terms of their durability.

There are exceptions that originate from Norfolk, TTony..................

True ... but normal people don't buy them

TTony

Danny1969 said:

Tyres always will need some replenishing, apparently they lose air through the actual tyre rubber 

I think that's call a "puncture"

Seriously, I've never known any appreciable loss of pressure through general use provided that the tyre is fitted properly and the valve is OK.  

ICBM

mike_l said:

When I was working at Renault, one of the guys I worked with was going to his RTE (Renault Technical Expert - Master tech) course and one of the other guys had a brand new Scenic with all electric everything. However the Scenic lived up to Renaults electrical reputation, and, in the outside lane of either the M6 or M1 (I can't remember which) lost all the electrics, so no engine, brakes, steering, nothing........

Ouch.

Although would that not still leave you with non-power-assisted steering and brakes? So if you got it out of gear quickly while you still had some momentum you could - theoretically, assuming no heavy traffic coming up (by what is now faster than you) in the inside lane - get it onto the hard shoulder?

Speaking hypothetically of course. Not that I drive a Scenic or anything...

Danny1969

TTony said:

Danny1969 said:

Tyres always will need some replenishing, apparently they lose air through the actual tyre rubber 

I think that's call a "puncture"

Seriously, I've never known any appreciable loss of pressure through general use provided that the tyre is fitted properly and the valve is OK.  

From Bridgestones website :  

Air migrates through rubber. Truck tires can lose 2 psi per month as a result of air passing through their sidewalls – like a balloon that shrivels up, but much slower.

That’s why regular inflation pressure checks are a must. Even if there’s nothing “wrong,” you can still be losing pressure.

And, when oxygen passes through rubber, it can come into contact with steel cords, causing them to rust too.

Between aging rubber and corroding steel cords, oxygen reduces retreadability.

And it was on Simon Mayo's homework sucks so much be true

thomasross20

mike_l said:

thomasross20 said:

I do automotive IC development for modern cars and **** me it's difficult - all down to safety, of course. The hoops you have to jump through and the complexity of the parts.... obviously we don't want the chips burning out once all cars are drive by wire!

When I was working at Renault, one of the guys I worked with was going to his RTE (Renault Technical Expert - Master tech) course and one of the other guys had a brand new Scenic with all electric everything. However the Scenic lived up to Renaults electrical reputation, and, in the outside lane of either the M6 or M1 (I can't remember which) lost all the electrics, so no engine, brakes, steering, nothing........

Yeah, I wouldn't want to drive one! ;D They want products in next to no time but also want the highest quality, it's ridiculous. Personally I tire of it all. I think we're going to go into a de-industrialisation phase. 

There are actually many good reasons for replacing mechanical parts with electronics - it's just the reliability question. 

ICBM

thomasross20 said:

There are actually many good reasons for replacing mechanical parts with electronics - it's just the reliability question. 

The stupid thing is that if they're spec'ed properly - ie over-engineered a bit - then electronics should be *more* reliable than mechanics, because there's nothing to wear. But then cost comes into it and nothing is over-engineered at all if anyone can possibly avoid it, which means that in practice it's usually slightly under-engineered...