ditto: A switch to the fuel pump and one in the ignition. I also had a very simple pendulum type alarm that would sound the horn if someone tried to move the car. It's also possible to retro-fit a steering lock, but I never got that far. For the snake, they are all much of a muchness to me and I prefer to stay away from all of them. Here, it's more likely to find a Jaguar engine in a Cobra than vice versa.

The only car that I've had that I needed to work on the window winder was my old Alfa. It had a kind of fishing reel arrangement that was, in itself, fragile and made much worse by being badly supported by a very thin piece of rust. It was almost a very good design, but very poorly executed.

 

In my sons BMW Mini it was a small plastic lug that would snap and the Window winder wires then became entangled around a spool. For the sake of a couple of pence the lug could have been made of Alloy or God forbid steel and it would never break.

 

Those Mini's have some chronic weak spots & are shockingly assembled. We now send cars back to the UK that don't pass muster on fit & finish. e.g. they never get the bonnet on straight.

 

I know we are off subject but I agree. Front anti roll bar bushes on the Mini. To get to them you have to drop the whole front subframe as the bolts go in from the top and there is not enough room between the top of the hole and the underside of the car to get the bolt out. About 6 hours to change them and they cost £5 to buy. A simple change in design to get the bolt coming from below to a nut on top would have saved 5 1/2 hours of labour but then the BMW Mini franchise garage would not make any money.

 

Silly isn't it. We don't even clear them from bond. A RORO ship docks. We have a team of inspectors that check each one as it drives off. Half of them fail & drive straight back on the RORO again.

 

It seems that BMW might need to go to Toyota or Mercedes and get some lessons on quality assurance and quality control.

 

BMW and the UK police have ended their long standing relationship after several, catastrophic engine failures, one of which resulted in the death of an officer. There are also other laments of engine problems from private buyers of Beemers - not what you'd expect from a company that had the highest reputation for their engines. Years ago, I tried console a friend of mine by reminding him that at least the mechanicals were indestructible as the interior fell to pieces in his 3 series.

 

I find that too many corners are cut by the designers who have never had oil under their finger nails. They make things lighter, smaller and made of unsubstantial materials. It appears they only design a car with a life span of ten years max which is the length of time the manufacturers have by law to supply spare parts for any model. As the models change every three years or less the designers seem ignorant to the problems they are creating for older cars. My mate had a 13 year old Jaguar X Type. The fuel injectors were worn. 120k miles on the clock and the set of fuel injectors were going to cost £1500 plus they had to be programmed into the ECU. Total repair cost £1700 for a car that was worth £1500. Car was immaculate but not worth fixing. He made more than £1500 breaking the car for parts.
Have you also notices that things break just as they are no longer in warrantee. Almost as if the ECU has been programmed to show a break down of a system once it has reached a certain mileage or age. Or am I just being cynical?

 

BMW's don't make old bones well. It is our experience in SA. Whereas Mercedes are million Km cars. During road testing by our local CAR Magazine not a single BMW for years now has not broken down under their standard test regime. One performance model even suffered propshaft failure. And yet a KIA or Toyota passes unruffled.

 

I've not had contact with the car industry for a long time, but in the area of engineering where I work (or still occasionally work a little), there's been a major move away from playing around and developing an understanding to reliance on software and masses of data (including data that are clearly rubbish). Young structural engineers were amongst the first to go this way. Don't worry that the model doesn't resolve everything, don't worry that the code wanders off to a wrong answer, and don't check the results against established rules and theorems. I'm no structural engineer, so if I can see they have results that need a better explanation than "that's what the software gives so it must be right", then it's pretty bad. Examples: the Sleipner offshore platform that never made it out of the Norwegian Fjord, the Millennium "Wobbly" Bridge, ... And note that these are also the people ensuring the crash worthiness of your modern, mega horsepower car.

That way of thinking has spread across all of engineering and with AI, chatGPT, and whatever, every aspect of human activity. Throw in a general lack of pride and discounted cash flow analysis that means anything that happens more than ten years away doesn't matter and you get the rubbish that you deserve!

 

Your DCFROR comment is so right! Plus the rest!!! Sorry I started life as an accountant & then changed stream to engineering & tribology. Bean counting bored me to tears.

 

Peter I agree about the "DATA is right" theory. I can't remember which F1 team it was but a couple of years ago they were throwing millions in to their digital air tunnel and producing a car that just was not performing. Then someone realised that the coding for the digital air tunnel was wrong when they compared the results with that which came from an actual wind tunnel. They were producing a virtual brick when the data from the faulty digital air tunnel was telling them they had reinvented sliced bread.

 

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is an interesting case. Unlike the structural codes that were capable of giving good results more or less from the beginning of their development, CFD was pretty poor for anything but the simplest of problems. As a consequence, most users/customers saw it as at best indicating trends, but not giving precise answers. That situation has changed a lot over the last couple of decades and nowadays it's extremely good, if wisely applied. To be fair, physical model tests (wind tunnels, towing tanks, wave basins) also have their limitations. Good engineering requires engineers to play around and gain a good feel for what they are working on by doing lots of hands on, in-house 'paper' projects and research type projects as well as (or before) projects aimed for the market. Thinking is important.