My Car Experiments

fred246

After a few years observing people and their cars I concluded:
Cars are made by graduate engineers in fantastic factories to immense standards. OK they do engineer a few mistakes but generally a new car is in fantastic condition.
They are sold and maintained by a network of people who are generally clueless.
Taking a car for a service - it's a lottery if anything is done.
Taking a car for a repair - equals collateral damage.
So I take a new car. I look after it. Check tyre pressures and fluid levels. Service it to the schedule.
If a component needs replacement I disassemble the car carefully, replace the component and then re-assemble it to 'as new' condition.
I void the warranty because I don't want any garage messing with my car.
So early on I pay for oil, filters etc and then as time goes on brake pads, discs, cambelts, exhausts.
Very occasionally I replace an unexpected item like a sensor or a switch.
The car is just like new year after year. Why wouldn't it be?
The last one got to 17 years of faultless service before it rusted.
My current one is at 13 years and 144K miles.
I come on this forum and people are buying cars at 5 years plus and being told they've bought an old banger and they can't expect much.
What's going on?

onomatopoeia99

fred246 wrote: »

I come on this forum and people are buying cars at 5 years plus and being told they've bought an old banger and they can't expect much.
What's going on?

Don't know about five years, but when you get past about 12 years you're starting to get to potential "end-of-life / banger" territory, there's a good chance that a car won't have been properly maintained at some point during its life, services skipped etc. However, these days cars will last if looked after. Not like in the 70s / 80s where you could expect to need to do cylinder head decokes and rebores, even if it was serviced at the correct intervals and the floor and or sills would often rot, even if all the mechanical maintenance was done correctly.

The car I parked in the office car park this morning is 17 years old with 122k miles on the clock. I've owned it 13 of those years and it still drives like a new one. I have it serviced at an independent marque specialist that I trust to actually do the work they charge me for, partly because I can afford it, partly because of lack of free time, and partly because I don't have the four post lift I'd need to get access to the engine (it's mid-engined and most servicing work is done from underneath, with the car level).

These days I only work on the racing car.

arcon5

Well people don't go round telling forums their car is problem free leaving the small proportion of cars that run in to some problems... cars are just machine at the end of the day. Each one subject to different driving styles, terrains, journeys blah blah blah.

Warranties like garages because many DIYers THINK they know what they are doing when the reality is practically speaking they don't and have only watched a 5 minute YouTube video.

Johnmcl7

fred246 wrote: »

I come on this forum and people are buying cars at 5 years plus and being told they've bought an old banger and they can't expect much.
What's going on?

I wouldn't say that's the case, what I often see is people buying an older, cheap car with high mileage who then take it to a dealer who specs out lots of work needing done at high cost and people want to take the car back. Or more simply despite buying an older, high mileage car they complain about having to do repairs which are typical for a car of that age/mileage.

In that sort of price range, buyers are going to need to be careful with the purchase as while it's possible to get a decent car, there's many that aren't going to be and will need a lot of work done.

John

bigadaj

Are most car plants staffed by graduate engineers on the shop floor now?


Maybe that's just the effect of qualification inflation and the majority are graduates of media engineering.

flashg67

A bit condescending? Not everyone has the ability or time to do their own maintenance.

I know plenty of mechanics & ex-mechanics who are superb at their job and take pride in what they do. (Ok, and some that don't!)

In my job I see plenty of new cars with eg. internal engine failures that no amount of DIY over-servicing could have prevented - if this happened to you within the warranty period, would you complain when the dealer didn't help, after admitting to voiding the warranty?

AdrianC

bigadaj wrote: »

Are most car plants staffed by graduate engineers on the shop floor now?

No.
That's not to say that being on an assembly line is unskilled - it isn't. But it certainly doesn't require engineering graduates. Much of the line is robotised, of course. The human jobs are mostly those that require very specific skills, where the job is basically quality control, or where access doesn't permit robots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzCW_gAxPn0

GM's Ellesmere Port plant produces more cars now than ever before - yet has about 1/6th of the staff of the peak.

Strider590

fred246 wrote: »

Cars are made by graduate engineers in fantastic factories to immense standards.

Rose tinted glasses much?

Every graduate engineer i've ever worked with was completely useless, on the other hand I worked with a guy who dropped out of uni because he felt it was a waste of time, he was an absolute engineering genius.

If I ran my own company I wouldn't recruit engineering graduates, too many of them have no genuine interest in the subject. They just want to sit at a desk doing CAD work all day, whilst some other poor sod has to get their hands dirty bodging together their ill thought out designs.

I present to you Colin Furze, no formal engineering qualifications at all..... Has built a hover bike, a jet powered bicycle and a motorbike powered bumper car for TopGear, amongst many other things.

motorguy

fred246 wrote: »

I come on this forum and people are buying cars at 5 years plus and being told they've bought an old banger and they can't expect much.
What's going on?

Really?

Where? Any links to threads?

I've seen threads where people are buying maybe a 9 or 10 year old cars and expecting them to be perfect but not 5 year old?

FWIW older, more recent cars than yours can generate big bills, particularly diesels - for example DPF failure, DMF failure, injector failure, fuel pump failure, turbo failure, EGR valve failure.

Whilst these arent terminal per se, if you've a 10 year old car with maybe £1500-£2000 then the risk of say a £1000+ bill can be unsettling.

System

fred246 wrote: »

Taking a car for a service - it's a lottery if anything is done.
Taking a car for a repair - equals collateral damage.
So I take a new car. I look after it. Check tyre pressures and fluid levels. Service it to the schedule.
If a component needs replacement I disassemble the car carefully, replace the component and then re-assemble it to 'as new' condition.
I void the warranty because I don't want any garage messing with my car.
So early on I pay for oil, filters etc and then as time goes on brake pads, discs, cambelts, exhausts.
Very occasionally I replace an unexpected item like a sensor or a switch.
The car is just like new year after year. Why wouldn't it be?
The last one got to 17 years of faultless service before it rusted.
My current one is at 13 years and 144K miles.
I come on this forum and people are buying cars at 5 years plus and being told they've bought an old banger and they can't expect much.
What's going on?

Conversely, as a former mechanic who is disabled and can no longer maintain my own car that much I get mine serviced at the local main Ford dealer. I bought it at 2 years old and five years on it is now on 120,000 miles, over 80,000 of those covered by myself and has never missed a beat. It has had even fewer repairs than yours because has only had two suspension bushes wear.

So basically your claim that your car has only done as well as it has because you've maintained it is quite frankly rubbish.

fred246

People on this forum are always saying things like:
I bought a 10 year old car from a dealer and payed a high price. It has problems and the dealer won't fix them despite me taking it back multiple times.
The 'car experts' on this forum all then jump in and shout 'idiot' it's a 10 year old banger. what do you expect?
I wonder what a 'banger' is. Old cars used to backfire but I've never heard a car do that for ages.
My car at 10 years old is in the prime of it's life. Pretty perfect. Starts first time, runs beautifully, never breaks down.
The only difference from new it has bent sills were garages have jacked it incorrectly when I've taken it for new tyres. So my car is almost brand new except for the damage caused by garages.
So what is a banger and how is it created?