Dylan Smith wrote:
On 2006-09-04, Paul Tomblin wrote:
In a previous article, Larry Dighera said:
If US auto makers are to remain in business, they must cut costs, and
those fat labor contracts are a prime source of cost. So, the reason
They've also got to stop designing crap cars. My Toyota Corolla was built
in Cambridge Ontario by Canadian Auto Worker union members, and it's so
well built that they export them back to Japan. Meanwhile your average
Ford, GM or Chrysler is a gas guzzling maintenance nightmare because Ford,
GM, and Chrysler care more about keeping shareholders happy than investing
money in research and design.

You want to see unmaintainable?
Try a Jaguar XJ12 some time. Dragging things back towards an aviation
related theme, we're building a new winch for the glider club. Our old
one is a bit long in the tooth, and uses the (excellent) Jaguar XJ6 4.2
litre straight 6. A great engine that's virtually indestructable. But we
want to get a bit more power, so when an XJ12 showed up for scrap (a
garage had collapsed on it crushing the roof) we decided to go for a new
engine.

The V12 in the XJ12 is also a great engine. But in the process of
extracting it from the donor car, I had to wonder how routine services
were done. We'll have no problem maintaining it because we've got rid of
all the cruft (i.e. the car!) that surrounded the engine. But to get the
front two spark plugs out (a routine maintenance job), you have to take
the air conditioning compressor off! To get that off, in turn you have
to take off parts of the cruise control system. To get the AC compressor
off you would also have to discharge the AC system since the pipework
would all have to be disconnected - not flexible hoses. Changing the
spark plugs must have been an all day job - something on most other cars
would take fifteen minutes tops.

And with 100,000 mile spark plugs you should be doing this job every 5
or 6 years or less. In the mean time, the engineers were able to meet
other design constraints such as fitting the engine and it's accessories
into a limit space in the engine compartment. Sounds like a reasonable
trade-off to me.

John