ACCORD CRAP

My biggest complaint (I don't argue with your points) is that many of them
are built to hold up for 3 years - after that, it isn't a warranty issue. I
personally have known 2 people who bought mid-90s Ford Escorts in which the
engine was destroyed by water pump failure (caused the timing belt to fail)
after the warranty expired and before the car was paid for. Aargh!

Mike

 

glad you brought that up! in fact, a significant proportion of euro r&d
budgets goes into life limitation. the technology to make components
almost infinitely reliable is well known. what's a really hard
technical challenge is getting something to work long enough, but no more.

can't say who, but a certain high end european car manufacturer came to
one of my old metallurgy department back in the 80's with a technical
challenge they could not solve themselves. their objective was to have
transmissions fail at about 100k - no sooner. transmissions were chosen
because it was expensive to replace, but gave no bad rap like rust or
dead engines. solving the problem required designing a fatigue life
into the tooth root of every ratio in the transmission based on usage.
these can be under 10 hours for reverse & several thousand for top - all
radically different environments from a fatigue perspective. when these
hours of operation are reached, the gears fail, and the fact that they
/all/ will fail means it's uneconomic for aftermarket repairers to come
out with a fix kit for a known problem. the irony is, it costs about
20%-30% /more/ to make these transmissions because their quality control
needs to be very much more rigorous. all i can say is don't buy a
certain brand of european luxury vehicle that advertises their
transmissions as being "maintenance free". because they really mean it!

 

euro cars are louzy too nowadays
the big three in europe: ford, vw en opel are just expensive crap.
weak electronics and other cheap parts are killing the cars lifetime en
reliability.
especially opel and vw are suffering from that kind of management.
therefore an increasing number of people buy japanese or korean cars
(kia and hyundai)
some people buy mercedes benz w124 series from mid 80s because they are
better build and more reliable then the current models.

marcel