Look, as a person involved with manufacturing, I’m not about to claim that some automotive engineer was trying to make my life difficult. There are so many factors in the development of products that occasionally the ease of serviceability falls down the list, and it isn’t their fault.
That isn’t going to stop me from complaining about the car brands as a whole, however. I’ve seen many design decisions that seem to defy any logic, especially when there are other cars that do the same things much better.
One complaint I have about my ancient Lexus is actually a much broader issue with modern cars: those dumb-ass engine covers. As expected, I rarely ever open the hood of my Toyota-made product, but when I do, I really, really need to access stuff. I do not want to remove half a dozen fiddly fasteners to get to the damn battery when the battery finally dies in the school pickup line. These covers are pointless, strictly for looks, and in this case, it’s on a car that absolutely no owner opens the hood of to look at anything anyway.
I hate these things, and the excuse that some say about how they “reduce noise and protect components” is total crap as well. How do I know? Well, if you had bought the same-year, nearly identical Toyota Land Cruiser version of my Lexus LX570, you can see that it has virtually none of the offending covers. Wow, the battery is right there!
I don’t think the “noise level” is any less in the “luxury” Lexus version; it’s just plastic garbage to let it “compete” with other high-end SUVs. You want to cut noise? Put padding on the bottom of the hood as they did for half a century.
A different but equally maddening part of the 2007 E61 BMW 530Xi wagon that I owned (and is now in the custody of Mercedes Streeter) had to do with the head-up display. I bought it used with this rare option, and I was able see it easily, but the primary driver (my 5-foot-2 wife) could not. As I recall, on most GM products with this feature, you simply adjusted the height with a dashboard switch; it took seconds. On the BMW? To adjust it, you need to remove the center screen, loosen a bolt, and then turn a different bolt to set the height.
That’s bad enough, but the bolts were WAY down in the dash, to the point that you needed pretty much every socket extension in my set. I probably lost a socket as well; Mercedes Streeter received at least half a dozen free, hidden 10-millimeter sockets when she got my car.
What about your nightmare design-induced wrenching experiences? Try to keep your swearing to a minimum, but I fully understand how you feel.
Top graphic image: Lexus
Optispark. On all the other cars that had LT1 and derived engines it appears that the Opti being behind/underneath the water pump was an annoying and quite dumb design oversight but whatever you could get to it easily enough so just change both whenever.
On a C4 because the engine sits so low the crank pulley you need to yank to get to it is immediately behind (and is about 40% obscured by) a major crossmember of the front of the chassis.
I changed the starter in an early Toyota Tundra V8 basically in the middle of the desert with a Harbor Freight tool kit. Yes, the infamous starter under the intake manifold.
While it was way more time consuming than it should have been, it wasn’t that hard of a job in the grand scheme of things. All of the fasteners and connectors were easy to access and logically designed.
I was going to mention the starter on the 2UZ. Great engine, and I loved it in my GX470, but that location for the starter is just frustrating.
What was even more frustrating is that the problem turned out to be a loose battery cable and I replaced the starter for no reason.
Just about any job on my ‘00 Saab 9-5. The geniuses shoved every important part in the same tight corner on top of each other. Whole rest of the bay was just about wide open, but no! It must be a seventeen step process to get at anything, with access only from the top or the wheel well. From top to bottom- MAF, motor mount, serpentine belt and pulleys, power steering pump, alternator, timing chain tensioner, water pump, front main seal. If you needed the timing cover off every bit of that was coming off first.
More and more modern cars are not designed for basic maintenance. Think:
But even older things were not immune:
…
Any time I need to bend, deform, or flex a plastic part to remove it.
Either it age-cracks when I try to bend the tab, or I find I’m doing that work in the cold and risking cracking it then. And then nothing works.
Amen! The kick panel covering a fuse box in my wife’s F150 is exactly that way and in two years is already broken.
Amen. The removal force for so many of these parts is 90% of their breaking force. When they are new. And warm.
Appropriately colored zip ties, a soldering iron with a flattened piece of copper pipe, some staples and a bit of sandpaper will fix em right up.
With experience from working on cars for decades the old American cars with power door accessories.To remove/ replace a door you would have to disconnect and fish out the whole wiring harness which was always a miserable experience not to mention the “Oh Jesus” clips on the GM door handles. The Japanese cars were so nice to just disconnect at the door. Nissan HVAC engineers must be sadists because of the way you have to replace their cabin filters. Why would Toyota of all companies design an air filter lid held on with 2 10mm bolts where you will ALWAYS lose 1 bolt because it falls off as the lid is stuck and you have to pry it off? Stupid oil filter location on 90’s T-Bird with a V8. Headlight bulbs that need the hands of a 6 year old to replace or having to remove the bumper or battery to replace. Don’t even get me started with the battery location on some Dodge and Chrysler cars. If I had a nickel every time I said that I wish I could make the engineer that designed this change it in front of me I would have a LOT of nickels.
Guy that taught me wrenching had a chant he’d mumble under his breath as he was blind reaching for bolts.
“Hands of a child. Arms of a woman. Strength of a gorilla.”
I too chant it sometimes
The rear plugs on my old Coupe DeVille (transverse V8) required me to jack the car up and access two of them from the bottom, with a long and convoluted asortment of extensions and swivels. I’m pretty sure at least one of them was the original plug, too.
Oil filter locations on some cars were the bane of my existence when I worked at the garage. Looking at you, Nissan Maxima. And don’t think you can sneak out without me seeing you, 3800-equipped W-body cars.
Undoing an engine mount and jacking up the engine two inches to replace the timing belt on my old Neon had me sounding like a character in a Tarantino movie, too.
My olds 442 and Dodge Challenger (both 70’s era) where the same. Changing the starter on either was also great fun. Doing any work on my 70’s corvette was not a piece of cake either.
Ford 4.0 SOHC timing chains in a ~2002 Ranger (friends truck I’m working on). It’s an engine out job. Ford cost cut the F*** out of that engine and decided it would be cheaper to use one cylinder head casting for both sides, so on the passenger side the head is reversed and connected with a jack shaft through the engine.
Because of this, there’s less than 1″ of clearance to the back of the head, so when the plastic timing chain guides disintegrate, you have to pull the engine out to replace them. And because of that jack shaft, it’s effectively a 4-chain multi-gear mess of a timing system. Truly horrific, in classic Ford fashion.
Not to mention there’s 2 separate bell housing bolts that are genuinely blind and require the exact right ratcheting wrench to get to, bolt heads are weird sizes, and every single part attached to that engine has some weird quirk to removal or install because Ford refuses to spend a single penny on making a vehicle easily serviceable.
I did one on a 2003 explorer and that was awful. FWIW I got the timing wrong and blew the engine up. They also have NO reference marks on the timing gears, and no keys IIRC, everything done by angle from exact TDC and only held on by bolt tension using the special tool. And you sure as hell ought to make sure nothing moves when you’re torquing those TTY bolts down….
I posted about my sky water pump but you reminded me of this one. This was worse. Good luck.
Thanks for the sanity check, sometimes I worry I’m going crazy and just getting mad at Ford for no reason. To make matters worse, the engine has been out of the truck for almost a year at this point and progress is barely at a trickle due to a lack of motivation to finish. Heads have been fully off and new bearings put in, but the timing chains still aren’t on, and I don’t think he wants to pay for the specialized tools. I’m incredibly nervous about finishing this and having it blow up, but I can at least rest easy knowing it isn’t my money on the line.
100% justified on this one. I also had mine out for almost a year, worked on it in my in-laws garage over the winter and got it back in for the spring. Ran for about 3 seconds before the big bang. I actually don’t know what went wrong on it, I assume I either got the timing off just a smidge or the TTY bolts didn’t do their job. It was a loud enough noise to know it needed to go to the scrapyard.
I’ve owned a bunch of vehicles, mostly second gen Explorers and Sport Tracks, with the SOHC 4.0L, and that idiotic timing chain setup has become an engine-out affair for me – I’d rather disassemble the front end and pull the engine to do it so I have full access to that stupidity. I’ve actually be considering picking up yet another Explorer, but have been looking for an older 2nd gen or a late 1st gen with the OHV 4.0L that doesn’t have that nonsense (nor the power the nonsense brought with it).
“Truly horrific, in classic
FordGerman fashion.” Fixed it for you.Germans add serviceability pain because they try to push the envelope on technology, Ford does it because they want to save money and screw over owners. At least with German cars you get a nice product for your suffering.
When it runs in my experience.
The thing I was referring to is the fact that the 4.0 SOHC engine as well as the OHV version it replaced are German engines, built and designed there. Meanwhile the British designed and built engines also found in some Ford products actually aren’t that bad to work on, though more difficult than the US designed and built engines.
Like other modern cars, replacing the headlight bulb in a Tesla Model S requires removing the corresponding front wheel and wheel arch lining.
Had to request a Tesla technician to come and do it. Guess what? He just took apart the entire front trim rather than having to deal with removing the tire.
These thing still have bulbs?
Wow, they are getting long in the teeth.
Rear main seals, heater cores and Evaps are the bane of every wrencher’s existence but I’m not that’s a “curse the designer” thing as much as “this component logically makes sense where it is” or a factor of general packaging.
I think the most annoying design decision is in my Sky, the water pump (which fails between 75-100k on most engines) is driven off the timing chain and sits in the block behind the turbo. It’s possible to do without the chains but its better just to replace the tensioners and chains while you’re in there. Oh and it requires a special tool too, because why not.
You mentioned heater core, and I had a bad flashback.
I’m not a mechanic, but I worked as a service writer.
I would still love to slap the Ford engineer that decided to bury the original Taurus/Sable heater core 8 hours under the dash.
A lot of mechanics found short cuts to get the job done quicker, but it was still a 5 hour ordeal of ripping apart the dashboard.
My guy… where the hell else are you gonna put a heater core? It has to be buried under the dash. Thats, unfortunately, the nature of all heater cores.
It sucks, but I don’t know that there’s any better place.
I have seen heater cores that have covers that screw onto the HVAC housing. Simply remove four screws and two hose clamps. Can’t remember which car that was on.
Years ago, I made my own access panel in the side of the housing of a VW Rabbit. Made the job much faster.
Early Ford Foxes were like that which is what makes the Taurus so maddening.
As Studmuffin mentioned, there are ways to get access to a heater core that doesn’t involve hours of labor.
Some of the old ’70s and ’80s GM cars had them under the hood at the firewall. A few bolts and you have access.
And some of the 70s and 80s cars had fuel injection. Things change.
Now if that was the process you’d have to remove half of the evap emissions system at a minimum. You’ve got a clusterfuck no matter where you put it *cause its a heater core*
Heater core in a 80s to mid 90s F-series truck is a 15 minute job.
And that is my point. If they put even a modicum of effort into this, they could make them easy to change. A modern car has a pollen filter. You don’t have to take the dash out to change it; because they designed it to be replaceable. Heater cores seem to need replacement way more frequently than they should be.
At the heart of this discussion, that phrase is what I have issue with “seems to need.”
Everyone I know that works on cars has a heater core story at some point. I’ve had to do one in my 20+ years of wrenching and 18ish vehicles that have been under my care in some way. I did another that I didn’t have to do but wanted to for a project car that honestly didn’t need heat. Excepting actual factory failures, I don’t know that I remember any of my friends and family that required one to be changed.
Heater cores stick in people’s minds.
And the really sad thing it that came after the Foxes which with the original dashes was accessible through the glove box opening. Seriously open the box, release the stops and dump the contents on the floor. Then 6 bolts if I remember right and once that cover is off slide it out like an 8 track tape. The drain and refill took longer than actually replacing the core and stuffing all their junk back in the glove box.
“One complaint I have about my ancient Lexus is actually a much broader issue with modern cars: those dumb-ass engine covers.”
I’m confused.
I see both vehicles have the exact same engine covers.
However one has a large shroud over the ancillaries – and the other does not.
Meanwhile your complaint about accessing the battery makes no sense in three respects:
1: Neither engine cover obscures the battery, dipsticks, oil, or other fluid reservoirs (for that matter, neither does the ancillary shroud)
2: If you’re in the school pickup line, your motor is running, so you have no issue with the battery dying – as it’s being charged when the motor is running.
3: For the LS you have shown in the first pic, and ever since the 2007 model year – the battery is located in the trunk.
As far as the BMW – it’s not a wonder the HUD was a rare option.
to address your points:
It’s the ancillaries one that are the problem. They totally obscure the battery.
Car was turned off because waiting in the pickup line is twenty minutes of sitting so she turned the car off. Would not restart.
Picture is of an LS. Great. I have an LX.
Just last night I had to change a headlight bulb on my wife’s Kia Seltos. The official procedure is to remove the frigging wheel well liner because there isn’t enough room to access it from above. And even then it was still a bitch and a half causing me to cut my hand up real good.
E91 headlamp bulb change (can’t remember which one) requiring front wheels to be on full lock, flap in the wheel arch trim opened and Mr Tickle arm to be used to extract bulb. I was half-expecting legs to appear and a grateful farmer thanking me for delivering Daisy’s calf.
That comment was a whole journey, in a good way.
gen 4 outback is the exact same. diabolical stuff
My ’91 Talon TSi AWD with its transverse engine had the oil pan drain close enough to the frame rail that when you drained the oil it would hit that rail and run down about 3′ dripping all along. It was impossible to catch in the oil bucket and made a mess every time.
2003 Tacoma with the 4cyl had its oil filter right above the upper A-arm , you could snake your hand in there to replace it but couldn’t get any tools on it and also couldn’t get a funnel or anything up there to catch the oil. So every time you changed the filter oil would spill down all over the suspension and make a mess. Didn’t have to worry about it rusting I guess.
My mom’s old Isuzu Rodeo had a known issue where the intake manifold gasket would start to leak which lead to idle surging. Typical V6 with the intake manifold in the valley of the V and really wouldn’t be all that bad to take out except there’s a bracket on the back of the engine for some cable or something. That bracket bolted to the head and the manifold so you had to remove it to remove the manifold. It was right up against the firewall with maybe a centimeter to get in and get at its bolts…only they used friggin Allen bolts instead of hex head. It was impossible to get an Allen wrench in there with the clearance. I had to take my dremel and cut down the short L on one of my Allen wrenches just to have enough clearance to get it between the firewall and into the bolt head. I still have that mutilated Allen wrench to remind me of that nonsense. Anyways, when it came time to put everything back together I went by Ace Hardware and picked up some normal hex head bolts to hold that bracket back on.
My ’84 Honda CB700SC has a small oil leak on the left side near the shifter. There’s a switch there to tell the bike what gear it’s in with a shaft that turns that switch. The shaft comes out from the engine case through an O-ring. After several decades that O-ring does what O-rings do and starts to leak. There’s a cover around that shaft with 4-5 bolts that you have to remove to replace the O-ring. The 5th bolt hits the frame of the bike and refuses to come out. It only needs 2-3mm of clearance to come out. If it were a smidge shorter or placed half a smidge to the upper-left it’d come out easily. Otherwise you’re lifting the engine out of the frame or cutting the bolt.
Engineers :-/
Engineer 1: You know, there’s not a a lot of clearance on this bolt for maintenance.
Engineer 2: That O-ring is good for 30-40 years. Nobody is going to be riding this thing around in 40 years. Everyone will be driving flying cars and hover bikes.
Engineer 1: I guess you’re right. Beer?
That’s exactly how I imagine it. When I reached that bolt I cursed those engineers, their families, the Honda corporation, and all of the people of Japan in general. I’m sorry for the last three, that was too far, but not the first one because seriously, screw those engineers.
I have embarrassingly little wrenching skill or experience, but I have given much blood replacing headlight bulbs hidden behind washer fluid reservoirs, overflow tanks, intakes, etc.
The windshield washer fluid reservoir pump on the BMW E8x/E9x’s. Put RainX style washer fluid in there? Coats the sensor with the water repellant, so it constantly yells at you that you’re out of fluid.
Oh and they will all develop a leak, so how do you replace it? Jack up the car, remove the right front wheel, then remove the inner fender liner, then you can get to the reservoir, which will definitely still have fluid in it. And because they’re all old plastic parts, shit will break!
Somehow RainX is still allowed to call their fluid universal. Even though it’s well known it bricks most German cars. I also learned the hard way
Trying to find non RainX (or similar) fluid is almost impossible anymore
My ’01 Jetta TDI used the same annunciator tone for when you hit low fuel OR low washer fluid. And it was very loud in either case. When it went off, check the fuel gauge first and then make a mental note to top off the washer fluid. That was a pretty noisome car. When the door locks shut once you reached 5 mph or so, it sounded like a gunshot had gone off in the cabin. I actually did manage to starve the engine of fuel going up a steep hill. Fortunately, there was nobody behind me and I coasted down to a sloped side street and was able to go back down hill and engine brake the fuel pump back into supplying fuel and stopped at the nearest station that sold diesel. I’d have been screwed with an automatic.
Bought a 2010 Crown Vic Police Interceptor a couple years back.
Mechanically, it is the easiest thing I’ve ever worked on. Even the heater core, arguably the worst job on it, wasn’t horrible.
However, Ford didn’t do the changes required to turn it into a police car. Nor did they remove the pokice equipment. The electrical system is a horror show. Scotch locks everywhere. Randomly wrapped wires. Randomly cut wires. Just random wires.
I’m slowly purging the gremlins, but lord it’s getting old.
Ran into similar odd issues with my 2004 Impala cop car. Someone clearly cut the wires going to the Evap system vent valve that is tucked up behind the fuel filler door. There’s a wiring mess where the wig wag flasher was. A front headlight or turn signal bulb randomly stops working and then fixes itself.
The interior trunk release button didn’t work because the little plastic gear that turns the trunk lock was broken. It was also broken on the cop parts car I got so I started to think that was done on purpose. I guess you wouldn’t want to accidently pop the trunk when it’s full of rifles. Oh, and no key fob…
Bummer you got it from an agency that was too cheap to order one of the road ready wiring packages. The 3 I had over the years, all purchased from the same agency, came with the optional wiring and fuse boxes and it was a simple to unplug and fish them out saving probably 30 or more lbs and freeing up some trunk space in the process. Plus I’ve got some nice factory grade fuse boxes should the need arise.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the hackery was due to the incompetence of the young man that owned it between the BPD and myself.
“Enthusastic but rubbish” wormed its way into my common phrases due to Clarkson and this kid.
The good old “did you buy it like this or F-it up yourself.
Headlight bulbs on my Mazda6 required going in through the wheel well.
The alternator on the V6 Ford Contours had a bole that was impossible to get to unless you went in through the wheel well on the other side of the car with about four feet of socket extensions.
The Ford Thunderbird Super Coupe called for the engine to come out to replace the spark plugs. Most people were able to do it without.
Then there’s the Toyota Sienna. My understanding is that Toyota calls for the engine to come out to replace the front control arms. For obvious reasons, no one does it that way. Same for the head gasket, and you have no choice but to do it that way. A 23.5-hour book rate. The dealership quoted it at five figures CAD.
And I think any company that installs a fuel tank with no access to the fuel sender and fuel pump from inside the car oughta have their head office TP-ed.
I discovered the Mazda6 headlight bulb access issue when a friend asked for help fixing her headlight. I arrogantly told her it should only take a minute or two, which I quickly discovered wasn’t the case. Her (justifiable) mockery of me was just icing on the cake.
I literally crawled under my dashboard after removing a bunch of crap because my heat wasn’t working. There’s an electric actuator that moves the blending door that I probably put in the wrong way last time I replaced the heater core (by hacking the new one into pieces and tying it together with hose and clamps) because the actuator doesn’t indicate which way is up. I… probably put it in wrong again, but now I at least have heat. Fixing it again is a Spring me problem.
I installed a dash cam in my BMW E70 X5. I hardwired it in at the rear view mirror. I messed something up because I blew a fuse. The offending fuse is tucked really high in the passenger well and controls the locks for the passenger door. I had to remove the passenger seat, but it in the back and finally find the right fuse. If anything should be accessible… it’s a fuse box.
Volvo AC blower motor. I’ve done the switch on 240 (3x), xc90 (x2), XC70 once. We tend to drive our cars forever, so it’s worth it. But JEEZ each one of those vehicles is a different lesson in torture.
My daughter had a 2013 Fiat 500. To get the oil filter out required practically every extension I owned plus a universal joint. Then the oily filter had to be dragged out across the engine. It was annoying every time.
My father changed the oil on our vehicles back in the 1980’s. Then he bought my mom a 1986 Toyota MR2. Per him, it was worth $20 to have someone else deal with it.
Replacing the shocks in my Wrangler. The top pin of the front shocks are very hard to get the nuts onto and tightened down.
Past cars: heater cores are impossible to get to.
It’s joked that you design a Land Rover by taking the heater core, and building the car entirely around it.
That statement can be extended to many other vehicles.
or the old cars with rivets or tamper resistant screws to get to the heater core.
Heater cores. On my late 80s Bronco II it was super easy, just right there hanging out on the passenger side below the dash. On my 98 Ranger, you had to take the entire dash and steering wheel out, absolute nightmare.
It could be worse. The official procedure to remove the heater core in a 5th generation Camaro involves removal of the windshield in order to remove the screws in the top of the dash. Owners have apparently come up with some hack method to avoid that step.
It sure as heck would have been a lot easier with the windshield out, but I wasn’t doing that in my garage. I imagine it was only possible because of the fairly upright windshield.
Yeah Ford was on a roll in the late 70’s and early 80’s of designing their cars for easy heater core removal, but that all went away starting with the Taurus and then eventually spreading to all their vehicle as they did redesigns or put a new dash in the old body.
Oil change on a 2014 Subaru WRX.
On my 2003 WRX, the undertray was two bolts and five poppets. On my 2011 Forester XT, it was five poppets to get to the oil filter access panel.
On a 2014 WRX, it’s like four bolts and ten poppets, some of which are in the wheel wells. No oil filter access panel like on the FXT.