Bad car designs it’s best to avoid/overengineering

[Michael Sackstein]

Greetings Eric,

not sure if this topic has ever come up at any point in time but as a mechanic everybody faces it at some point where you’re working on a vehicle and basically everything about it seems to be built for obsolescence. This is mostly true it seems with European cars as well as English cars. Again, I know you’ve dealt with these cars at some point in your career as an automotive technician and you know how frustrating they can be to work on. I’m sure you’ve seen Scotty Kilmer’s videos where he vents about the complexity of these designs and has now even gone so far as to create a playlist of YouTube videos entitled “bad car designs it’s best to avoid”. I noticed in most situations when it comes to controversial topics like this you often tend to be neutral to these sorts of topics, where as Scotty’s position is a lot more straight forward and a bit exasperating if you will, and rather humorous I must say. Not saying that’s a bad thing because I can certainly understand why you wouldn’t want to create controversy with your viewers. But I was wondering if maybe you’d be willing to talk more about this topic in depth of over engineered vehicles? I know you’ve talked a little bit about the theory behind all of this and why these engineers do what they do, but I haven’t really seen you shed much light in the way of a mechanics point of view. so that’s why I was wondering if you think this might be a good topic to do an ETCG1 video about or if you think it might be too controversial? I look forward to hearing your response.

Michael

Topic

[Michael Sackstein]

Land Rovers are one of the biggest endless money pits of all time in the words of Scotty Kilmer. Those things are basically meant to be owned under warranty only. VWs aren’t much better these days I agree. As for the Volvo heater cores that’s actually one of the easiest heater cores ever to replace, since you actually don’t have to remove the dash. It used to be many years ago that you only had to remove the dash to change a heater core if the car had a/c, but Volvo was nice enough to make it so that you could just swap it out from underneath the drivers floor panel.

[Author]

Replies