I will agree that I would rather have the older/rock-solid tech in many optional features. E.g. unless the motor and switches and wires needed to roll up/down my window are designed to last 300,000 miles, I'll just take the old hand crank. Thank you very much.
That is kind of the point. My keyless entry on my Honda died after about 7 years, 70,000 miles or so. The engine took considerably more abuse from me and is still going strong (the clutch blew out, but given what i did to it over time, i wouldn't hold that against the Honda engineers).
But what you posted spoke to me about the volume and 'impressiveness' of the engineering effort and not the simplicity. I'd prefer to not see the superficial evidence of a lot of "engineering", i'd prefer less engineering and to have it all just be bulletproof, stupid and simple and work well.
I guess in my mind simplicity and longevity are an integral part of good engineering.
I'm a mechanical engineer by profession and the "old school" mandate with respect to new projects was the KISS principle. KISS meaning "Keep It Simple Stupid". The thinking was that with each additional increment of complexity you sacrificed some reliability.
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Over the last couple of decades, there has developed an ever evolving complexity to everyday consumer products. There is even a term for this phenomenon. It's called "feature creep". It is consumer driven. Joe six-pack is confronted with the choice between buying an electronic gizmo that has 15 buttons and a similar gizmo that has 25 buttons for the same price. The gizmo with 25 buttons has got to be a better value, right? So Joe and all of his buddies buy the 25 button gizmo and before long the 25 button gizmo is the new benchmark for the industry.
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RCC's comment about power windows is a good point. Power windows in new cars are almost a standard feature now days. Within the last month I witnessed two different incidents where the driver of a later model car had to open his door to deal with a situation where normally rolling down the window would have sufficed. Presumably, their power windows did not work. There is a lot less to malfunction with the good old hand crank assembly and it's got to be cheaper too.
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Look at TV's. Burned out pixels have to be at a certain ratio before the warranty kicks in. How about producing a product that doesn't have burned out pixels? Can't do it? Then you shouldn't be selling it.
All engineering has trade offs. You can't make a LCD TV that never has burned out pixels, but the trade off is you can get a 40"+ TV that's just an inch thick and can be seen clearly from most seats in your house. If you don't like it, buy a CRT.
Too much of this thread is sounding to me like some old guys yelling "I don't like change". The well manufactured products you like are mostly still available, but you just have to pay more for them than for the cheaper products. Turns out that most of the country is fine saving 50% off the price of a product even if it breaks down sooner. Good for them, this is capitalism and everyone gets to make their own decisions. Sometimes, that savings will pay off because the product gives them 60% of the use for half the price. Other times they only wanted to use 30% of the product anyways so they still win. And sometimes, they lose with their shoddy products.
You just bought a piece of crap, there are plenty of great cars that are being made today.
Please do me a favor and name one.
My last two cars were an '02 BMW and a '05 Lincoln. They both paled in comparison to the older cars I own/have owned in terms of regular maintenance chores and options that don't break at 20,000 miles.
I didn't buy a Kia or a Hyundai, FWIW.
I just can compare the '05 Lincoln to the '95 Lincoln I owned and the '95 was a lot more substantial in paintwork, bodywork, coachwork, interior appointments, etc.
And don't even get me started on the crap BMW is putting out these days compared to their earlier work.
It's like the Porsche Cayenne... Who in the heck thought a Euro Import Sports Car marque needed an SUV version? Doesn't that completely go against what the marque was originally about?
The stuff being made today is JUNK, regardless of price point.
If you disagree, then give me a brand that uses substantial sheetmetal, excellent mechanicals with minimal regular maintenance, systems that don't go haywire at the smallest sign of battery discharge, excellent coachwork with top quality materials AND installation, switches, motors and relays that are made to last more than the warranty period, etc.
I am amazed that BMW puts out such a substandard product compared to 40 years ago.
The ball is in your court.
BMW's nickname for most of the 70s and 80s was "Bee Emm Trouble You" because that's what they did. Not as bad as the British cars of the 60s, but frustrating as hell to keep in good working order, especially when it took 3 weeks to get a basic part. The new cars are much more reliable, although nearly impossible to work on at home.
The Cayenne is a great product. I don't personally care for them, but they sell well and the profits have enabled Porsche to develop great sports cars at relatively reasonable prices. And give the Porsche purity a rest - Porsche makes farm tractors.
The funny part is you're ragging on Kia and Hyundai, who are probably the only two companies committed to quality right now.
If I had to pick one company to satisfy your question, I'd probably choose Audi. But I'm sure they're too much plastic for your tastes.
Try driving the Cayenne Turbo S and tell me that that beast shouldn't have been made.
I dont know why they have the Cayman, but the Cayenne is one of the best handling SUVs on the road, maybe just short of the FX
The Cayman is the best car Porsche has made in a long time. It is everything the 911 should be. The 911 diehards who insist all Porsches must be RR platforms have forced Porsche to nerf it, unfortunately. A Cayman with the GT3 motor would be epic. The 911 is a 40+ year project on fixing an engineering mistake.
I've often thought of getting an older car myself (no emissions test, easy to work on, can fix it myself if it breaks while I'm on vacation, will continue to operate after an EMP event, can get lifetime vehicle plate with no annual tab renewals, etc). There's something to be said for the older iron. Much like I'd be perfectly happy to have Windows 95 still running on my home computer—it did everything perfectly well that I need to do now at home, and MUCH faster than any of today's operating systems do. Hmmm . . .
Random crashes, praying your video drivers don't corrupt your windows installation, hoping the new hardware you bought will work without a reinstall (rarely did), random crashes, BSOD on a semi-regular basis... yeah, sure miss those days.
If you are going to design a neat gadget/option for a car, then make sure it will work flawlessly for years, not months.
Has anybody actually looked at how thin factory paint is on cars these days? It used to be that paint could withstand the abuse of rocks, birds, car doors, etc. Worst case scenario would require you to buff out a color mark, etc. Nowadays, you try to buff out a factory paint job and you are into the primer before you know it if you are not exceedingly careful.
That really came as a shock given the advances in paint technology over the years.
But then, just like new homes, the thinner the paint, the more profit to be made.
Did you miss the 80s, when paint peeled off within a year of buying many cars? Or the 70s, where repainting your car because the factory paint was heavily contaminated was considered routine? Yes, modern paint is thin, but the technology to apply it is so vastly superior it doesn't need to be thick. It was thick in 70s because nobody knew a better way.
There are a handful of cars with really bad paint, but it's not the norm.
Look at TV's. Burned out pixels have to be at a certain ratio before the warranty kicks in. How about producing a product that doesn't have burned out pixels? Can't do it? Then you shouldn't be selling it.
Manufacturers would be happiest if their items broke before you left the showroom, forcing you to buy another one, lol!
I am looking for items that are substantial, well built and made to last, and I find today's products to be lacking.
Well, a burnt out pixel is certainly much worse than popping a capacitor (one of hundreds on a typical CRT TV) and having to pay 1/2 the cost of the TV to have someone replace it.
You do have one thing right - most products are made to be disposable to a degree. When your average consumer replaces a car every 3-4 years, why build it for 12? Anything beyond 5 is a bonus, really. That is not, however, a new thing.
I'm a mechanical engineer by profession and the "old school" mandate with respect to new projects was the KISS principle. KISS meaning "Keep It Simple Stupid". The thinking was that with each additional increment of complexity you sacrificed some reliability.
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Over the last couple of decades, there has developed an ever evolving complexity to everyday consumer products. There is even a term for this phenomenon. It's called "feature creep". It is consumer driven. Joe six-pack is confronted with the choice between buying an electronic gizmo that has 15 buttons and a similar gizmo that has 25 buttons for the same price. The gizmo with 25 buttons has got to be a better value, right? So Joe and all of his buddies buy the 25 button gizmo and before long the 25 button gizmo is the new benchmark for the industry.
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RCC's comment about power windows is a good point. Power windows in new cars are almost a standard feature now days. Within the last month I witnessed two different incidents where the driver of a later model car had to open his door to deal with a situation where normally rolling down the window would have sufficed. Presumably, their power windows did not work. There is a lot less to malfunction with the good old hand crank assembly and it's got to be cheaper too.
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First - power windows are actually a bit cheaper and also lighter than hand cranks. That wasn't true 10 years ago, but it is now. Yes, they fail, but cranks do too.
Second - you're absolutely right about scope creep. Content creep is probably more accurate. I talked with some Honda PD people a few years ago, and I asked them about the incremental changes to the S2000 - they were all done so dealers had a selling point vs an old model. "The Z4 has traction control, we need to have traction control too". None of it made the car better, it was just an item on a list that consumers could check off.
Also, the sheet metal vs plastic thing. Thick sheet metal does NOT protect you! The front and rear parts of the car are designed to collapse. Modern cars have substantially reduced the energy transferred to the occupant in a collision. Air bags further reduce that. So yes, the car is a throwaway, but a new car is much cheaper than a new body. Plastic bumpers are designed to give in low speed impacts. The 5 MPH plastic bumpers were put in cars because of lobbying by the insurance industry; the bumpers substantially reduced repair costs in low speed collisions!
Urgh... and just for the record, before you jump on me for being a young punk, a lot of the cars on my wish list are older sports cars from the 70s and 80s. Not because they're better than sports cars today, but for sentimental reasons. Functionally speaking, cars today are better in almost every way than anything from the 60s, 70s, or 80s. That's not to say there isn't room for improvement, though.
First - power windows are actually a bit cheaper and also lighter than hand cranks. That wasn't true 10 years ago, but it is now. Yes, they fail, but cranks do too.
I brought up the power windows argument, and I almost regret it. The problem isn't that power windows are inferior, it's that many of the windows put into cars in the mid 90's were inferior. If I were buying a 2009 car, I would have no qualms taking one with power windows and expecting them to function perfectly until well after 2020.
This, coincidentally, is how technology progresses. The first cut of something new usually has flaws which are eventually resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
BTW, there is also a name for something that continues to function well past what it's life-expectancy "should" be - it's over-engineering. Laws change, manufacturers go out of business, and technology advances. If you are driving around a 50 year old behemoth of a car made of solid iron and running on leaded gasoline, that means the car has outlived it's purpose, not that it was better made. Such a car risks injuring both it's occupants, and most importantly innocent bystanders. The parts that do fail cannot be readily replaced, and it's burns a fuel that was eliminated due to it's toxicity.
Somehow, this whole argument is starting to strike me like someone arguing how terrible it is that we don't use asbestos in building materials anymore. After all, the stuff couldn't burn and did an admirable job of insulating the home. Or maybe much older homes are better because they used a thick plaster instead of sheetrock on the inner walls. Sure it cost way more, and sure people had to run electricity wires along the outside of the walls when that became common, but by golly those walls would break a fist before someone could punch through them.
FWIW, Chrysler was using hardened valve seats as far back as 1954, at least, making unleaded vs. leaded a non issue.
Regarding over-engineering... the internal combustion engine is still being used to power 99% of all vehicles on the road today. Seems to be that even a Model T can be run on the road today, so how can its engineering be obsolete or over-engineered?
When gasoline is no longer available and the cars are still around, but can no longer run, then overengineering could be applied.
As long as we run them on gas, they are still viable.
Where to begin? I have worked on CRT's thank you very much and they are far easier to fix than a burned out pixel. I have worked on both Vector and Raster. Once you get past the HV wire discharge, they are simple and straightforward.
I have also applied paint, acrylics, urethanes, enamels, latexes and lacquer to cars, guitars, cabinets, homes and furniture.
Paint technology is great, but you have to apply enough to actually protect the item, that's what it's for.
Today's cars are lacking heavily in this.
BMW's from the 70's and 80's are cake to work on. Most will easily go 300K with minimal maintenance. The crap they spew out now is just that, crap! Overpriced junk with a minimal lifespan.
I would LOVE to get into an accident with you in a 1956 Dodge over your newer Audi. I can guarantee you that you would end up with a totalled car and I would end up with a small dent in the bumper.
Today's cars do have technology that has improved, but SUV accidents have consistently proved that the heavier the body, the more damage you will do to the other car.
Enjoy your Audi, Plasma screen and thin paint, I will stick with what lasts and requires minimal maintenance and ends up putting the other guy in the hospital.
Anti-technology? Only when the technological advancement sucks (e.g. Vista anyone?)
You keep consuming, America needs the tax revenue!
I would LOVE to get into an accident with you in a 1956 Dodge over your newer Audi. I can guarantee you that you would end up with a totalled car and I would end up with a small dent in the bumper.
And you would both walk away without any serious injury, thanks to the fact that the newer Audi absorbed all the energy from the collision.
Get into a wreck in a 1956 Dodge with someone driving another 1956 Dodge and your cars may come out mostly unscathed, but the humans inside will most likely end up the hospital.
In a collision the energy has to go somewhere. I'd rather my car take the damage than my guts. But maybe that's just me.
Get into a wreck in a 1956 Dodge with someone driving another 1956 Dodge and your cars may come out mostly unscathed, but the humans inside will most likely end up the hospital.
And there lies the beauty of driving an old car today. The chances of getting into an accident against another '56 Dodge are very small, which is just one more reason why I don't see the problem. I would much rather take my chances in making the decision to drive a '56 Dodge than have the government dictate what I should or shouldn't do.
I don't want anyone to tell me I have to change with the times. That's the bottom line.
If I choose to burn gas that I paid for in an inefficient manner, why shouldn't I be able to?
If I am willing to pay the price for older technology, why shouldn't I be able to?
Newer is NOT always better, despite what advertisers and lobbyists would have you think.
First - power windows are actually a bit cheaper and also lighter than hand cranks. That wasn't true 10 years ago, but it is now. Yes, they fail, but cranks do too.
I brought up the power windows argument, and I almost regret it. The problem isn't that power windows are inferior, it's that many of the windows put into cars in the mid 90's were inferior....
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RCC and WestSideBilly -
Power windows are not inferior, they are just less reliable. Instead of a simple hand crank, you now have up to 4 switches, a motor, a fuse link, and a wiring harness (am I forgetting anything?). Each of those components has a reliability factor which increases the chance of malfunction. I've had to replace / adjust a "limit switch" twice on a power window on my Pathfinder. Last I checked, manual windows don't have limit switches.
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Don't get me wrong, power windows and power door locks are great. They add convenience and my lady really appreciates the added security of being able to roll up all of the windows and lock the doors just by pushing a couple of buttons. But please don't tell me power windows are as reliable as manual crank windows.
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Somehow we got way off-topic there to the point where it was no longer even remotely about "The Economy" or even cars, so I split the posts after this to a new thread over in "Everything Else" - Personal Responsibility TO THE EXTREME
Please feel free to continue the personal responsibility thread there.
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Anyway........
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We made the mistake of telling a few car sales-people that we may be interested in taking advantage of the cash-for-clunkers program. We don't answer the phone anymore. It seems that we had better put a deposit down on the car of our choice before the funding is all gone. Apparently the day the program starts is 24 July, and the funding is expected to last just for "days". It all seems a little desperate to me.
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We made the mistake of telling a few car sales-people that we may be interested in taking advantage of the cash-for-clunkers program
This is why I only give them a pseudonym with a made up phone number when they ask for contact info. The reality is that the cash for clunkers program is just another way for the Feds to bail out the auto manufacturers.
$3500 will disappear the minute you drive off the lot in terms of depreciation. It reminds me a lot of the $8000 tax credit. You are underwater on your home for more than $8K the minute you are handed the keys because of all the commissions, excise tax, title and escrow, etc. you would have to pay if you sold it right away.
You would think they would offer it on late model used given all the lease returns and repos. that the auto makers are taking back.
At least the financing and accounting depts. would remain employed.
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I don't agree with Michele Singletary very often, but I think she's got this one mostly right.
. Cash for Clunkers' Is a Clunker of a Law
. If you have a clunker that's also a gas guzzler, the federal government wants you to trade in the car so it can be scrapped, while you get a cash credit toward the purchase of a new, more fuel-efficient vehicle.
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The Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Act of 2009, or CARS, was pushed through Congress and signed by President Obama, purportedly to cut down on harmful vehicle emissions.
. But in truth, this is welfare for the limping auto industry.
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been given $1 billion to fund the program. However, the law doesn't apply to used cars, encourages people to take on more debt, and doesn't require the new cars to get substantially more in gas mileage............
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I'm sorry, this is not the time for tax credits with a $1.2Trillion federal deficit since the government FY began [Oct 08].
We don't need tax increases and we don't need tax credits right now; and assuming the cash for clunkers causes a shift to mend the recent 71% drop in Japanese cars to America too....aren't we giving out American debt to sustain Japan instead of just our own country?
Wake up and smell the coffee, the Japanese would tell us...LOL
Power windows are not inferior, they are just less reliable. Instead of a simple hand crank, you now have up to 4 switches, a motor, a fuse link, and a wiring harness (am I forgetting anything?). Each of those components has a reliability factor which increases the chance of malfunction. I've had to replace / adjust a "limit switch" twice on a power window on my Pathfinder. Last I checked, manual windows don't have limit switches.
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Don't get me wrong, power windows and power door locks are great. They add convenience and my lady really appreciates the added security of being able to roll up all of the windows and lock the doors just by pushing a couple of buttons. But please don't tell me power windows are as reliable as manual crank windows.
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If I had to look at the whole system, for a single window: A 3 to 5 way switch (auto up/down being the 4th and 5th), a pair of relays, 2 limit switches, a motor, a fuse, and the wiring. Each part (excluding the wiring which is "lifetime") has a MTBF in the 10-15 year range. Unfortunately the low end can be painfully short, particularly for the limit switches.
But I've been in a handful of cars with failed hand cranks, too. A lot of 70s cars seemed to make either the crank or the slider out of really soft metal that would bend/crack and render the window stuck, usually in the down position.
As for ultimate reliability - at the 5 year window, the reliability of hand cranks is probably 99% vs about 95% for power. Of course, at the 20 or 30 year mark it's probably closer to 75% vs 50% (or less).
Manual crank windows do malfunction. I had a '69 Karman Ghia where the mechanism jammed up because the window became misaligned and I actually partially stripped the splines on the shaft for the crank. Even simple systems can fail.
......aren't we giving out American debt to sustain Japan instead of just our own country?
Wake up and smell the coffee, the Japanese would tell us...LOL
That's not the whole story. Honda has 3 assembly plants in the U.S., Nissan has 2, and Toyota has 5. I'm sure the thinking is that propping up the auto industry will protect U.S. jobs in those plants and others. I'm not saying I agree with the strategy, just that there is some self interest involved in helping "foreign" car manufacturers.
IMO this was more of a handout to dealers than any one car company. Nearly all companies (domestic and import) have large surpluses of 2008 and 2009 models that they are unable to sell, even with generous interest rates and other programs.
Regarding over-engineering... the internal combustion engine is still being used to power 99% of all vehicles on the road today. Seems to be that even a Model T can be run on the road today, so how can its engineering be obsolete or over-engineered?
When gasoline is no longer available and the cars are still around, but can no longer run, then overengineering could be applied.
You don't have a clue what over-engineering means do you? Anything that is designed at great cost to outlive its own usefulness is over-engineered. A freeway that we constantly need to repave is not over-engineered. But a fifty lane highway that is two hundred feet deep (into the ground) built for a one-time event is over-engineering.
For the vast majority of cars, their lifetime is less than twenty years. It doesn't matter how much steel you put in the chassis, 90%+ of the cars from a given year will be junk in 20 years. Sure, a few Model Ts still run (at great cost to their owners), but the vast majority have been totaled or rusted apart in the meantime and Ford is not providing any new replacement parts for such old cars. Given this, any materials put into a new car to make it last (on average) longer than about 25 years are generally wasted - the victims of over-engineering.
Did anyone else see this on Paul Kedrosky's blog - Honda Accord, then and now?
I am just eyeballing this, but it looks like over 30 years of the marquee it has gotten 50% heavier, but 2x as powerful with over 2x the torque and 10% better mileage. I had a 1982 Honda Accord. It was as gutless as they came. And that was the car that built Honda's reputation
The average thickness of the pavement in the American freeway system is 11 inches. According to various sources, the German autobahn is constructed with a thickness of 27 inches. It is a lot more expensive to lay a roadway twice as thick as necessary. Why the difference? The autobahn has basically an unlimited speed limit. Road surface imperfections would be catastrophic when traveling at 160 mph. Not so much when you are traveling at 65 mph on a U.S. freeway. The autobahn is not "overengineered".
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Last time I checked, U.S. elevators were built with a safety factor of 11. In other words, elevator systems in the U.S. are designed to withstand 11 times the load they are certified to withstand. It is a lot more expensive to build a system 11 times more strong than it needs to be. Why the huge safety factor? Failure of an elevator system would be catastrophic. People would die. U.S. elevators are not "overengineered".
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Except for the high end consumer market, overengineering is pretty much kept in check by cost of production. If the feature has no market value, it is dropped. Public safety considerations can overide this constraint, if significant. .
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Except for the high end consumer market, overengineering is pretty much kept in check by cost. Public safety considerations can overide this constraint if significant.
Very true. Consider our two biggest (so far) local employers. Boeing, being an aerospace company, tends to over-engineer everything. Do the wings on an airplane really need to be capable of bending this far? By contrast, how stable does your consumer OS really need to be?
I think I read someplace that the Boeing 747 has 4 or 5 redundant hydraulic systems, routed differently thruout the airplane. The hydraulic systems are critical for control of the aircraft and the consequences of failure of control could be catastrophic (obviously).
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The cost of designing and building redundant systems is not the overiding consideration in this case. If you should ever have the ultimate misfortune of being aboard a damaged 747, I'll bet you will forever be thankful for redundant (overengineered?) systems.
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I think I read someplace that the Boeing 747 has 4 or 5 redundant hydraulic systems, routed differently thruout the airplane. The hydraulic systems are critical for control of the aircraft and the consequences of failure of control could be catastrophic (obviously).
Did anyone else see this on Paul Kedrosky's blog - Honda Accord, then and now?
DJO-
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Thanks for posting those graphs. I had an '85 Accord hatchback. It was fun to drive and the most practical / economical car I have ever owned. (note that gas mileage for the Accord peaked in '85). We drove it for eight years until it got T-Boned on the driver side and totaled. (Driver walked away with no injuries.)
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The thing that was most remarkable about that car was that I got 80,000 miles on the OEM Bridgestone tires. I have never gotten more than about half of that with any other car / tires that I have owned before or since. I attribute the high gas mileage and low tire wear to the fact that it was pretty light car, compared to today's Accord.
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I actually remember that Honda was once sued for making very light cars that were presumably less safe. I don't know what happened with respect to that lawsuit. Other than the fact that mandatory safety features have been added over the years making cars heavier and less fuel efficient, maybe Honda (and other small car manufacturers) were "encouraged" to make their cars more hefty to avoid litigation?
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? By contrast, how stable does your consumer OS really need to be?
Windows 7 is really stable. In 3 months I have rebooted once for a component upgrade.
That's great, but when a MS (or Apple or Linux or Google eventually) product crashes it's only annoying and when a Boeing (or Airbus) product crashes it makes the front page of the news for days.
Besides, there's nothing really wrong with the fact that most OSes are less stable than most aircraft. One reason why aircraft designs change so slowly is due to the safety requirements. That a software maker can push out a moderately unstable product and patch it a week later allows experimentation and radical progress. Even the much maligned Vista or just about any Linux distro are VASTLY superior to Win95.
I had an '85 Accord hatchback. It was fun to drive and the most practical / economical car I have ever owned. (note that gas mileage for the Accord peaked in '85).
On the subject of fuel economy, I found this site to be quite interesting: Aerocivic.
Basically this dude took his 1992 Honda Civic CX and added a bunch of homemade body parts ($400 in cost) to minimize the coefficient of drag. He got it down to 0.17, and now frequently gets over 70mpg.
What drives me mad is the fact that we had production cars 20 years ago that got 40-50mpg (1990 Geo Metro XFI was rated 43/51), and now someone comes out with an overcomplicated hybrid drive system that gets only marginally better mileage (2010 Toyota Prius is rated 51/48) and we're supposed to be impressed.
Big fat whoop. So you came up with a way to achieve 1990 fuel economy at twice the price!
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That is kind of the point. My keyless entry on my Honda died after about 7 years, 70,000 miles or so. The engine took considerably more abuse from me and is still going strong (the clutch blew out, but given what i did to it over time, i wouldn't hold that against the Honda engineers).
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Over the last couple of decades, there has developed an ever evolving complexity to everyday consumer products. There is even a term for this phenomenon. It's called "feature creep". It is consumer driven. Joe six-pack is confronted with the choice between buying an electronic gizmo that has 15 buttons and a similar gizmo that has 25 buttons for the same price. The gizmo with 25 buttons has got to be a better value, right? So Joe and all of his buddies buy the 25 button gizmo and before long the 25 button gizmo is the new benchmark for the industry.
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RCC's comment about power windows is a good point. Power windows in new cars are almost a standard feature now days. Within the last month I witnessed two different incidents where the driver of a later model car had to open his door to deal with a situation where normally rolling down the window would have sufficed. Presumably, their power windows did not work. There is a lot less to malfunction with the good old hand crank assembly and it's got to be cheaper too.
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All engineering has trade offs. You can't make a LCD TV that never has burned out pixels, but the trade off is you can get a 40"+ TV that's just an inch thick and can be seen clearly from most seats in your house. If you don't like it, buy a CRT.
Too much of this thread is sounding to me like some old guys yelling "I don't like change". The well manufactured products you like are mostly still available, but you just have to pay more for them than for the cheaper products. Turns out that most of the country is fine saving 50% off the price of a product even if it breaks down sooner. Good for them, this is capitalism and everyone gets to make their own decisions. Sometimes, that savings will pay off because the product gives them 60% of the use for half the price. Other times they only wanted to use 30% of the product anyways so they still win. And sometimes, they lose with their shoddy products.
BMW's nickname for most of the 70s and 80s was "Bee Emm Trouble You" because that's what they did. Not as bad as the British cars of the 60s, but frustrating as hell to keep in good working order, especially when it took 3 weeks to get a basic part. The new cars are much more reliable, although nearly impossible to work on at home.
The Cayenne is a great product. I don't personally care for them, but they sell well and the profits have enabled Porsche to develop great sports cars at relatively reasonable prices. And give the Porsche purity a rest - Porsche makes farm tractors.
The funny part is you're ragging on Kia and Hyundai, who are probably the only two companies committed to quality right now.
If I had to pick one company to satisfy your question, I'd probably choose Audi. But I'm sure they're too much plastic for your tastes.
The Cayman is the best car Porsche has made in a long time. It is everything the 911 should be. The 911 diehards who insist all Porsches must be RR platforms have forced Porsche to nerf it, unfortunately. A Cayman with the GT3 motor would be epic. The 911 is a 40+ year project on fixing an engineering mistake.
Random crashes, praying your video drivers don't corrupt your windows installation, hoping the new hardware you bought will work without a reinstall (rarely did), random crashes, BSOD on a semi-regular basis... yeah, sure miss those days.
Did you miss the 80s, when paint peeled off within a year of buying many cars? Or the 70s, where repainting your car because the factory paint was heavily contaminated was considered routine? Yes, modern paint is thin, but the technology to apply it is so vastly superior it doesn't need to be thick. It was thick in 70s because nobody knew a better way.
There are a handful of cars with really bad paint, but it's not the norm.
Well, a burnt out pixel is certainly much worse than popping a capacitor (one of hundreds on a typical CRT TV) and having to pay 1/2 the cost of the TV to have someone replace it.
You do have one thing right - most products are made to be disposable to a degree. When your average consumer replaces a car every 3-4 years, why build it for 12? Anything beyond 5 is a bonus, really. That is not, however, a new thing.
First - power windows are actually a bit cheaper and also lighter than hand cranks. That wasn't true 10 years ago, but it is now. Yes, they fail, but cranks do too.
Second - you're absolutely right about scope creep. Content creep is probably more accurate. I talked with some Honda PD people a few years ago, and I asked them about the incremental changes to the S2000 - they were all done so dealers had a selling point vs an old model. "The Z4 has traction control, we need to have traction control too". None of it made the car better, it was just an item on a list that consumers could check off.
Also, the sheet metal vs plastic thing. Thick sheet metal does NOT protect you! The front and rear parts of the car are designed to collapse. Modern cars have substantially reduced the energy transferred to the occupant in a collision. Air bags further reduce that. So yes, the car is a throwaway, but a new car is much cheaper than a new body. Plastic bumpers are designed to give in low speed impacts. The 5 MPH plastic bumpers were put in cars because of lobbying by the insurance industry; the bumpers substantially reduced repair costs in low speed collisions!
Urgh... and just for the record, before you jump on me for being a young punk, a lot of the cars on my wish list are older sports cars from the 70s and 80s. Not because they're better than sports cars today, but for sentimental reasons. Functionally speaking, cars today are better in almost every way than anything from the 60s, 70s, or 80s. That's not to say there isn't room for improvement, though.
I brought up the power windows argument, and I almost regret it. The problem isn't that power windows are inferior, it's that many of the windows put into cars in the mid 90's were inferior. If I were buying a 2009 car, I would have no qualms taking one with power windows and expecting them to function perfectly until well after 2020.
This, coincidentally, is how technology progresses. The first cut of something new usually has flaws which are eventually resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
BTW, there is also a name for something that continues to function well past what it's life-expectancy "should" be - it's over-engineering. Laws change, manufacturers go out of business, and technology advances. If you are driving around a 50 year old behemoth of a car made of solid iron and running on leaded gasoline, that means the car has outlived it's purpose, not that it was better made. Such a car risks injuring both it's occupants, and most importantly innocent bystanders. The parts that do fail cannot be readily replaced, and it's burns a fuel that was eliminated due to it's toxicity.
Somehow, this whole argument is starting to strike me like someone arguing how terrible it is that we don't use asbestos in building materials anymore. After all, the stuff couldn't burn and did an admirable job of insulating the home. Or maybe much older homes are better because they used a thick plaster instead of sheetrock on the inner walls. Sure it cost way more, and sure people had to run electricity wires along the outside of the walls when that became common, but by golly those walls would break a fist before someone could punch through them.
Regarding over-engineering... the internal combustion engine is still being used to power 99% of all vehicles on the road today. Seems to be that even a Model T can be run on the road today, so how can its engineering be obsolete or over-engineered?
When gasoline is no longer available and the cars are still around, but can no longer run, then overengineering could be applied.
As long as we run them on gas, they are still viable.
Where to begin? I have worked on CRT's thank you very much and they are far easier to fix than a burned out pixel. I have worked on both Vector and Raster. Once you get past the HV wire discharge, they are simple and straightforward.
I have also applied paint, acrylics, urethanes, enamels, latexes and lacquer to cars, guitars, cabinets, homes and furniture.
Paint technology is great, but you have to apply enough to actually protect the item, that's what it's for.
Today's cars are lacking heavily in this.
BMW's from the 70's and 80's are cake to work on. Most will easily go 300K with minimal maintenance. The crap they spew out now is just that, crap! Overpriced junk with a minimal lifespan.
I would LOVE to get into an accident with you in a 1956 Dodge over your newer Audi. I can guarantee you that you would end up with a totalled car and I would end up with a small dent in the bumper.
Today's cars do have technology that has improved, but SUV accidents have consistently proved that the heavier the body, the more damage you will do to the other car.
Enjoy your Audi, Plasma screen and thin paint, I will stick with what lasts and requires minimal maintenance and ends up putting the other guy in the hospital.
Anti-technology? Only when the technological advancement sucks (e.g. Vista anyone?)
You keep consuming, America needs the tax revenue!
Get into a wreck in a 1956 Dodge with someone driving another 1956 Dodge and your cars may come out mostly unscathed, but the humans inside will most likely end up the hospital.
In a collision the energy has to go somewhere. I'd rather my car take the damage than my guts. But maybe that's just me.
And there lies the beauty of driving an old car today. The chances of getting into an accident against another '56 Dodge are very small, which is just one more reason why I don't see the problem. I would much rather take my chances in making the decision to drive a '56 Dodge than have the government dictate what I should or shouldn't do.
I don't want anyone to tell me I have to change with the times. That's the bottom line.
If I choose to burn gas that I paid for in an inefficient manner, why shouldn't I be able to?
If I am willing to pay the price for older technology, why shouldn't I be able to?
Newer is NOT always better, despite what advertisers and lobbyists would have you think.
RCC and WestSideBilly -
Power windows are not inferior, they are just less reliable. Instead of a simple hand crank, you now have up to 4 switches, a motor, a fuse link, and a wiring harness (am I forgetting anything?). Each of those components has a reliability factor which increases the chance of malfunction. I've had to replace / adjust a "limit switch" twice on a power window on my Pathfinder. Last I checked, manual windows don't have limit switches.
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Don't get me wrong, power windows and power door locks are great. They add convenience and my lady really appreciates the added security of being able to roll up all of the windows and lock the doors just by pushing a couple of buttons. But please don't tell me power windows are as reliable as manual crank windows.
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Please feel free to continue the personal responsibility thread there.
Anyway........
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We made the mistake of telling a few car sales-people that we may be interested in taking advantage of the cash-for-clunkers program. We don't answer the phone anymore. It seems that we had better put a deposit down on the car of our choice before the funding is all gone. Apparently the day the program starts is 24 July, and the funding is expected to last just for "days". It all seems a little desperate to me.
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This is why I only give them a pseudonym with a made up phone number when they ask for contact info. The reality is that the cash for clunkers program is just another way for the Feds to bail out the auto manufacturers.
$3500 will disappear the minute you drive off the lot in terms of depreciation. It reminds me a lot of the $8000 tax credit. You are underwater on your home for more than $8K the minute you are handed the keys because of all the commissions, excise tax, title and escrow, etc. you would have to pay if you sold it right away.
You would think they would offer it on late model used given all the lease returns and repos. that the auto makers are taking back.
At least the financing and accounting depts. would remain employed.
I don't agree with Michele Singletary very often, but I think she's got this one mostly right.
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Cash for Clunkers' Is a Clunker of a Law
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If you have a clunker that's also a gas guzzler, the federal government wants you to trade in the car so it can be scrapped, while you get a cash credit toward the purchase of a new, more fuel-efficient vehicle.
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The Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Act of 2009, or CARS, was pushed through Congress and signed by President Obama, purportedly to cut down on harmful vehicle emissions.
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But in truth, this is welfare for the limping auto industry.
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been given $1 billion to fund the program. However, the law doesn't apply to used cars, encourages people to take on more debt, and doesn't require the new cars to get substantially more in gas mileage............
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I'm sorry, this is not the time for tax credits with a $1.2Trillion federal deficit since the government FY began [Oct 08].
We don't need tax increases and we don't need tax credits right now; and assuming the cash for clunkers causes a shift to mend the recent 71% drop in Japanese cars to America too....aren't we giving out American debt to sustain Japan instead of just our own country?
Wake up and smell the coffee, the Japanese would tell us...LOL
If I had to look at the whole system, for a single window: A 3 to 5 way switch (auto up/down being the 4th and 5th), a pair of relays, 2 limit switches, a motor, a fuse, and the wiring. Each part (excluding the wiring which is "lifetime") has a MTBF in the 10-15 year range. Unfortunately the low end can be painfully short, particularly for the limit switches.
But I've been in a handful of cars with failed hand cranks, too. A lot of 70s cars seemed to make either the crank or the slider out of really soft metal that would bend/crack and render the window stuck, usually in the down position.
As for ultimate reliability - at the 5 year window, the reliability of hand cranks is probably 99% vs about 95% for power. Of course, at the 20 or 30 year mark it's probably closer to 75% vs 50% (or less).
Good analysis and I am pretty much in agreement.
Manual crank windows do malfunction. I had a '69 Karman Ghia where the mechanism jammed up because the window became misaligned and I actually partially stripped the splines on the shaft for the crank. Even simple systems can fail.
That's not the whole story. Honda has 3 assembly plants in the U.S., Nissan has 2, and Toyota has 5. I'm sure the thinking is that propping up the auto industry will protect U.S. jobs in those plants and others. I'm not saying I agree with the strategy, just that there is some self interest involved in helping "foreign" car manufacturers.
You don't have a clue what over-engineering means do you? Anything that is designed at great cost to outlive its own usefulness is over-engineered. A freeway that we constantly need to repave is not over-engineered. But a fifty lane highway that is two hundred feet deep (into the ground) built for a one-time event is over-engineering.
For the vast majority of cars, their lifetime is less than twenty years. It doesn't matter how much steel you put in the chassis, 90%+ of the cars from a given year will be junk in 20 years. Sure, a few Model Ts still run (at great cost to their owners), but the vast majority have been totaled or rusted apart in the meantime and Ford is not providing any new replacement parts for such old cars. Given this, any materials put into a new car to make it last (on average) longer than about 25 years are generally wasted - the victims of over-engineering.
I am just eyeballing this, but it looks like over 30 years of the marquee it has gotten 50% heavier, but 2x as powerful with over 2x the torque and 10% better mileage. I had a 1982 Honda Accord. It was as gutless as they came. And that was the car that built Honda's reputation
Wikipedia definition of Overengineering
The average thickness of the pavement in the American freeway system is 11 inches. According to various sources, the German autobahn is constructed with a thickness of 27 inches. It is a lot more expensive to lay a roadway twice as thick as necessary. Why the difference? The autobahn has basically an unlimited speed limit. Road surface imperfections would be catastrophic when traveling at 160 mph. Not so much when you are traveling at 65 mph on a U.S. freeway. The autobahn is not "overengineered".
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Last time I checked, U.S. elevators were built with a safety factor of 11. In other words, elevator systems in the U.S. are designed to withstand 11 times the load they are certified to withstand. It is a lot more expensive to build a system 11 times more strong than it needs to be. Why the huge safety factor? Failure of an elevator system would be catastrophic. People would die. U.S. elevators are not "overengineered".
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Except for the high end consumer market, overengineering is pretty much kept in check by cost of production. If the feature has no market value, it is dropped. Public safety considerations can overide this constraint, if significant. .
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Very true. Consider our two biggest (so far) local employers. Boeing, being an aerospace company, tends to over-engineer everything. Do the wings on an airplane really need to be capable of bending this far? By contrast, how stable does your consumer OS really need to be?
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The cost of designing and building redundant systems is not the overiding consideration in this case. If you should ever have the ultimate misfortune of being aboard a damaged 747, I'll bet you will forever be thankful for redundant (overengineered?) systems.
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Windows 7 is really stable. In 3 months I have rebooted once for a component upgrade.
DJO-
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Thanks for posting those graphs. I had an '85 Accord hatchback. It was fun to drive and the most practical / economical car I have ever owned. (note that gas mileage for the Accord peaked in '85). We drove it for eight years until it got T-Boned on the driver side and totaled. (Driver walked away with no injuries.)
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The thing that was most remarkable about that car was that I got 80,000 miles on the OEM Bridgestone tires. I have never gotten more than about half of that with any other car / tires that I have owned before or since. I attribute the high gas mileage and low tire wear to the fact that it was pretty light car, compared to today's Accord.
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I actually remember that Honda was once sued for making very light cars that were presumably less safe. I don't know what happened with respect to that lawsuit. Other than the fact that mandatory safety features have been added over the years making cars heavier and less fuel efficient, maybe Honda (and other small car manufacturers) were "encouraged" to make their cars more hefty to avoid litigation?
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That's great, but when a MS (or Apple or Linux or Google eventually) product crashes it's only annoying and when a Boeing (or Airbus) product crashes it makes the front page of the news for days.
Besides, there's nothing really wrong with the fact that most OSes are less stable than most aircraft. One reason why aircraft designs change so slowly is due to the safety requirements. That a software maker can push out a moderately unstable product and patch it a week later allows experimentation and radical progress. Even the much maligned Vista or just about any Linux distro are VASTLY superior to Win95.
Basically this dude took his 1992 Honda Civic CX and added a bunch of homemade body parts ($400 in cost) to minimize the coefficient of drag. He got it down to 0.17, and now frequently gets over 70mpg.
What drives me mad is the fact that we had production cars 20 years ago that got 40-50mpg (1990 Geo Metro XFI was rated 43/51), and now someone comes out with an overcomplicated hybrid drive system that gets only marginally better mileage (2010 Toyota Prius is rated 51/48) and we're supposed to be impressed.
Big fat whoop. So you came up with a way to achieve 1990 fuel economy at twice the price!
Congratulations. You get a star.