Production car engine bay accessibilty

[Guy Croft]

The motor industry gets a great deal of prominence, mainly for its technological 'advances'.

I specialise in race engines, but it's clear to me that engine bay design trends in the automotive industry directly affect UK dealers and engine specialists.

Those engaged in production engine re-manufacture have told me how very 'quiet' trade is. Many feel it will pick up again, but I'm not so sure because I think the underlying cause has been building up for some years. I am beginning to think it's got less to do with macroeconomics and more to do with design trends.

Fully integrated engine-transmission packages are now the 'norm' in cars. They are complicated to fix when they go wrong and extremely time consuming to work on. Main dealer overheads and thus repair costs are high. In many cases it is cheaper to sell the car than fix it, even if the fault is quite commonplace. The car will inevitably end up for sale, adding to the huge glut of 'new' second-hand cars on the market. Because of this knock-on effect it's not hard to see why new car sales for many marques are poor. Manufacturers are inadvertently upsetting the balance of the very trade they depend on.

Some serious design conclusions should be drawn from this — right now. Manufacturers should give as much priority to ease of maintenance as they do to, say, meeting emission controls. At present they do not, almost without exception.
Engines should be designed 'military style' so that a 'pack-change' can be completed within hours rather than days. The engine will be changed immediately for any internal fault. The support for engine rebuilding is straightforward to organise and, if streamlined, the cost of the replacement core unit will be minimal compared with an on-site repair.


GC

[RedLexus]

Agreed wholeheartedly GC . Another similarly related personal bugbear of mine is that as a result of you're point above , most younger mechanics , or apprentices , never get the rebuild a gearbox or differential , and a lot hardly ever even get into the crankcase! Either throw away the unit , ie gearbox, engine etc , or throw away the car seems to be the way the garages deal with it . I have seen this happen , when all the offending units may need is a bearing set , or a synchro rebuild etc . It will end in tears yet...

[Yugo_Turbo]

Thant's really shame.
Acctualy there are less and less real mechanics as the car industry advances...they are now just swapping old parts for new.
Noone fix them any more, it's the way allmost all things are made these days, to work until waranty pass, and if something breaks- just swap it with new one, dont bother fixing, beacuse it cannot be fixed.
It's not just in car industry, allmost all industry branches are affected with this new "fashion".
In the good ol' days, cars and generally everything was built to last...thats why you can here for Mercedes that was driven for lets say 1000000km... that want happen with these days Mercedes or any other car, unless you change 90% of the engine over that time :)

[1/4whit]

The problems stem from the obsession,which is manufacturing speed.Everything is designed to be assembled,preferably robotised,my problem as a mechanic (old enough to remember when manufacturers tried to incorperate ease of servicing into build & marketing strategy)is trying to explain this to customers.It is nonsensical to have to remove a subframe before removing a transmission unit on,well shall we say a cooking car? All this amounts to is huge bills for say a clutch fitment which used to cost 1/3 of todays money. This is usually paid for by the 2nd or 3rd owner so is not the manufacturers problem.As long as the production cost is low enough (which it never will be ) the 1st owner gets `value`,whereas quite often the 3rd owner is looking to scrap the car rather than pay £800 to have a clutch or 2nd hand transmission fitted.So whilst it would be bad practise in these `eco times`to life a vehicle at say 8yrs.effectively they can get away with it to some extent & so keep the sales machine ticking over.Sounds cynical I know,but Istill can`t work out why these large manufacturers are struggling to make money,p`raps they can`t see the wood for the trees.

[SteveNZ]

Unfortunately the majority of consumers view a new car just like any other appliance they own, disposable. The fact a 10 year old car maybe be cheap to maintain is irrelevant. Consumers want a new car because its just that, new! Manufacturers exploit this psyche well, engineering their cars to be obsolete.