Hacker News Reader

Comment by jliptzin | Hacker News Reader

Maybe that’s balanced by requiring less repairs? In 4 years in my tesla all I had to do was change the tires. By that time in my ICE vehicle I had been to the mechanic and/or jiffy lube at least 15 times

View on HN

I have an eleven year old Ford Focus and it's had an oil change twice a year and apart from tires, that has been the extent of the maintenance it has required.

Given the price of new cars, there's no way I can justify getting rid of my Focus.

That was back when a former Boeing engineer was running Ford after Boeing promoted a bean counter over him.

I think those smaller cars are also more durable. Heavy SUVs just have higher loads and need more complexity to support them ... which leads to a higher failure rate.

Yep, _some_ ICE cars are crazy reliable. Oil and air filter changes according to schedule and you're good for a decade.

But _all_ EVs are crazy reliable too. The engine has one moving part and it either works or doesn't.

> But _all_ EVs are crazy reliable too.

The presenter in the linked video argues that all cars - EV or ICE - are getting both better and worse. Better in purely mechanical terms where technological marvels enable them to achieve great durability... worse in overall terms where some electronics is going to fail somewhere and suddenly the entire car won't start.

So i don't think you're wrong to say in specific benchmarks EVs are crazy reliable. But from what i've seen and understood of modern cars, complexity and interdependence of secondary subsystems make them super brittle and very highly likely to end up in a landfill under a decade after leaving the factory.

In fact we already have stats on that where car recalls keep on increasing (more than x4 in a decade), and EVs are not exempt from that as they seem to have ~2x more probability to be recalled (on average) than an ICE car.

Are you counting “recalls” that are remedied by an over the air software update?

I'm not making the stats, and i have no idea why OTA update would be counted as a recall. See for example:

https://www.stout.com/en/news/stouts-2020-automotive-defect-...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/541703/united-states-veh...

When's the cambelt due?

Never heard the term cambelt - is that UKish for timing belt? Most cars use chains these days which don't require replacement.

Yep, although people would use both terms in the UK to be fair.

An older Focus would be on a belt I'm pretty sure. Even the newer Ecoboost-engined ones have a notoriously time-consuming wet belt to replace.

Probably never because the industry almost completely transitioned away from belts to chains over the '00s because consumers hated having to do a multi thousand dollar service as preventative maintenance every 100k or so.

This must be unique to the US, many vehicles in Europe still have a belt. Even with a chain you'll probably still have auxiliary belts which need replacing, water pump, etc.

For small engines, a manufacturer will use the same one everywhere in the world with very little difference. Only when you get to large engines do you see things unique to the US.

The issue with belts/chains is if the engine is designed for interference or not. If the belt/chain breaks do the valves and pistons come in contact with each other or not? That's a design decision with costs and benefits.

With an interference engine, a broken belt means a destroyed engine - preventative maintenance is mandatory. Or you go with a timing chain.

If you don't have an interference engine, you replace the broken belt and drive away. Preventive maintenance is a good idea but not quite so critical.

Interference engines can run with much higher compression ratios and get better performance for their size. So you see more timing chains with higher performance engines. If your car doesn't have a turbo and isn't aimed at the speed racer crowd, chances are better that it has a timing belt.

They'll use the same engine, but quite often different engines are available in different territories. I know that the VAG 1.5 TSI (used in lots of cars here) still uses a belt for example, but the 2.0 TSI is chain. Perhaps in America only the 2.0 is available.

VAG sells the 1.8 TSI in the US in addition to many variations of the 2.0 TSI.

That 1.5 TSI is not really a performance engine and it needs to be as inexpensive as possible. Chains are more expensive than belts.

Same here. It is the european version, don't know if it is comparable with the US one. Maybe it also has another name in the US. Ford was one of the few manufacturers that did build specifically new cars for the european market. They became the most successful US manufacturer here. Or even the only one since I don't know any others. Focus was a model that just never had any issues aside from maybe a 20 year old lambda probe that lets makes starting an already hot engine an issue some times. They are ridiculously dependable cars.

I like that car too and getting parts is ridiculously cheap and you can exchange almost everything yourself. Although Teslas will perhaps one day have the same advantage because older cars that were numerous once are significantly cheaper to repair.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com