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Expensive houses are one thing... expensive cars are another.
2011 Oct 17, 1:14am 13,559 views 56 comments
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Buying all those imported cars isn't helping the US economy either.
Yup. Good think my Toyota was made in Fremont, California.
Cook County resident
2011 Oct 20, 5:23am
have never done a heater core on an air conditioned car where you didn't have to pull the dash. It's pretty common
GM J cars are (were) pretty easy. Pull the side panels off the center stack, drop a bottom panel and remove the core. Minor disassembly, no AC or other complications.
have never done a heater core on an air conditioned car where you didn't have to pull the dash. It's pretty common
GM J cars are (were) pretty easy. Pull the side panels off the center stack, drop a bottom panel and remove the core. Minor disassembly, no AC or other complications.
Hooray for GM, I've never owned a gm car but it's good to see at least one car company that admits heater cores fail. I've owned fords, vw's, honda's, toyota's, jaguar (owning a jag is like zipping your dick up in the zipper, it's so painful you only do it once in a lifetime), and bmw's. At some point of ownership all of them had coolant show up on the carpet requiring that I've pull the dash and heater box. Bmw, oddly enough, is the least of a PIA to do. Plus the bmw heater box is designed so the coolant goes out the ac drain if the core fails. A partial victory for common sense that is so rare in car design.
CreatE some jobs, at least buy a new civic for $%%# sake!
Buying all those imported cars isn't helping the US economy either.
Man, are you still talking your nonsense?
Honda Manufacturing of Indiana is honored to produce the Civic Sedan, the car that helped establish the Honda reputation for quality and efficiency.
Seriously dude, give up on your stupid talking point. It has been debunked several times now:
http://patrick.net/?p=1081559#comment-770542
http://patrick.net/?p=1090587#comment-770944
http://patrick.net/?p=1089822#comment-771207
Still haven't told us what you drive, purity man.
I don't think any other cars at the time had more durable drive trains than the AMCs. i know I was still seeing the occasional AMC daily driver until about 15 years ago. I doubt the owners were putting any money into these cars.
You still see some OG Jeep Cherokees from when Jeep was still owned by AMC. Some of them had other problems, but some of the drivetrains are still good.
Air conditioning goes out again I'm just going to put in a free-spinning pulley and delete the compressor, fixing the silly thing is too expensive.
Why? The compressor is a free spinning pulley until the clutch engages. Just pull the wire to the clutch. Even if the compressor locks up, if the clutch isn't energized it should spin free.
When the A/C went out on my old American car made in America :), eventually the pulley on the A/C unit seized (which is when I finally replaced it), so good call on putting in a free-spinning pulley, if it makes financial sense. However, the problem with not having a functional A/C unit is not just in the summer when it's hot, but also in the winter for defogging purposes. When my A/C unit was out, it was actually a bigger hassle in the winter, because I also lived somewhere where it got very cold.
jaguar (owning a jag is like zipping your dick up in the zipper, it's so painful you only do it once in a lifetime)
Everyone I know who had one told me you needed to own two -- so you had a spare when it inevitably went to the shop. You could just trade them out.
Cook County resident
2011 Oct 20, 3:29pm
Hooray for GM, I've never owned a gm car but it's good to see at least one car company that admits heater cores fail.
Essentially it's a trap door in the heater/AC box. The big Fords of the late 60s and 70s had the core under a simple access plate under the hood or behind the glove box.
I don't know but it wouldn't surprise me if current model GM cars are now just as difficult to service. I doubt the bean counters give a damn about repairs that are almost always out of warranty.
Vicente
2011 Oct 20, 4:22pm
They don't really drop gas mileage when running like the older units used to so there really isn't much penalty for having the air on any more.
Maybe not on your vehicle, but on my 4-banger I can see it plain as day on my UltraGauge when I turn on the AC. At my usual highway speed Inst MPG figure drops from ~32 to ~28.
Maybe it's just a matter of being fed up with the damn thing if it breaks again.
zzyzzx
2011 Oct 21, 12:23am
zzyzzx says
Wouldn't it be cheaper to remove the A/C and get a smaller serpentine belt? Plus less weight too.
Well yeah you could do it that way sure. I haven't researched price actually, I would think a bracket and pulley should be cheap but I could be wrong. From my lurking on ToyotaNation swapping for a pulley is the usual way to do AC delete operation. Then all replacements are just walk into any store and ask for the standard belt for that year model. If you want to start removing weight, there's a lot you could do without worrying about a few pounds for a pulley.
There were cars like mine made without air conditioning, so it would be easy enough for me to just remove enough parts and get the standard belt for one without air conditioning. That and less clutter in the engine bay would be nice.
zzyzzx
2011 Oct 21, 12:26am
zzyzzx says
PockyClipsNow says
CreatE some jobs, at least buy a new civic for $%%# sake!
Buying all those imported cars isn't helping the US economy either.
Man, are you still talking your nonsense?
Is the Civic's engine and transmission designed and built in the US as well? How about the procurement, accounting, and other back office type jobs, are those also in the US? I don't think so.
zzyzzx
2011 Oct 21, 12:32am
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Davis, CA
Thu, 20 Oct 2011 at 10:53 am Quote Like Share Permalink Flag Take It Outsidezzyzzx says
Wouldn't it be cheaper to remove the A/C and get a smaller serpentine belt? Plus less weight too.
Well yeah you could do it that way sure. I haven't researched price actually, I would think a bracket and pulley should be cheap but I could be wrong.
For my car, removing parts and buying a shorter serpentine belt is cheaper than the dummy pulley.
bmwman91
2011 Oct 21, 1:58am
I agree with those that are saying that how "reliable" a car is, can be significantly influenced by how reliably the owner services it and how it is driven. A lot of German sports cars (BMW M/Merc AMG/Audi S) get dinged badly for reliability, but a lot of them have a very aggressive service schedules that, if adhered to, will provide well over a decade of trouble-free service. I think that a lot of people buy the cars and drive the dog shit out of them, but somehow expect to service them like they are econo-boxes. Huh? Those sorts of cars don't exist for practical purposes, and the owners that understand that buying one means paying for regular service have a good ownership experience. I know a few people that understand this, and a lot more that don't. Buy a fast car, enjoy it and pay for proper upkeep...you can't go wrong.
As far as the quality of new vs. old cars, I don't think that blanket statements can be made. In the case of BMWs, older ones were put together more sturdily, even though older ones do require more maintenance if you want them running at 100%. The interior in my 21 year old BMW is in better condition than many I have been in that are maybe 5 years old. There's a reason I am still driving this car, and it goes well beyond money.
Older Audis and Mercs seem to be similar. New VWs seem like they are better constructed and take less maintenance, so kudos to that product line. Japanese economy cars seem to be better now than they were in the early-mid 1990's. In all cases, the newer cars all seem to come packed with lots of electronic bells & whistles unless one goes for the sub-$20k range.
My fiancee drives a 2003 Civic LX that she paid something like $15k for in 2003. While the interior feels cheap, I have to respect the thing. She has 155k miles on it, and the only actual maintenance she has needed has been a $600 timing belt change around 110k miles, and it can pull 40+ MPG on the highway. The shocks are blown and a lot of the bushings seem to be shot (which drives me NUTS and I nag her daily about it), but the car is the definition of "cheap & easy to own." I do all of the maintenance on my old BMW (and I definitely spend more than $600 per year on it lol) and some of it on her Civic. I have gotten broken/defective parts from the Honda dealer in the past, which has NEVER happened with a BMW part, and I'd say that for 75% of things the price is the same. German car parts are only ridiculously expensive if a)you buy them at a dealer, b)it is some sort of medium/large interior or body trim piece or c)it is an electronic control module. Engine and suspension parts are on-par with Japanese car part prices.
I will never buy a new car. I am a cheap-ass and the whole depreciation-the-second-you-leave-the-lot thing bugs the hell out of me. Hell, I don't think I will ever buy a car newer than 1995 (after which OBD-II was implemented)!
Oh, and I will never buy ANY Toyota product. My fiancee worked for one of their suppliers (around 2009) that provided large injection molded parts. Toyota would send them simple/crappy hand drawings for quotes, the company would quote them at some price, Toyota would then send them full production CAD drawings of the same part that required a bunch of slides & multi-shot features and demand the same price. When her company told them that they couldn't meet the new specs at that price, Toyota told them that they didn't want to know about it and to make the parts anyway at that price. An aunt of mine used to be an engineer for Toyota, and she said that the exact same shit went on in the production of ECMs (electronic control modules). I am sure that this isn't exclusive to Toyota, but since I know about it, and it seems that they were having some real issues with throttle control modules recently, I am not buying one simply in protest of this BS.
bob2356 says
Hooray for GM, I've never owned a gm car but it's good to see at least one car company that admits heater cores fail.
Essentially it's a trap door in the heater/AC box. The big Fords of the late 60s and 70s had the core under a simple access plate under the hood or behind the glove box.
I wish my 69 torino had one of those. It was a 2 day job to get the heater core replaced if I remember right.
A lot of German sports cars (BMW M/Merc AMG/Audi S) get dinged badly for reliability, but a lot of them have a very aggressive service schedules that, if adhered to, will provide well over a decade of trouble-free service.
These cars are several orders of magnitude more complex then economy cars also. There are a lot of things to go wrong that don't exist on civic's or corrolla's.
Do you use pelicanparts for your bmw parts? They are the best I've found so far.
bmwman91
2011 Oct 21, 6:19am
Yeah, Pelican is my go-to source. They have gotten considerably more expensive over the last 3 years, unfortunately. Still, they are a lot cheaper than the stealer...err, I mean dealer. Pelican also carries some Chinese OE replacement parts, which are SHIT and that displeases me. Having vacuum lines crack after 1 month sucks. Watch our for rubber products by CRP industries (China Rubber Products...the acronym is one vowel short of a true description).
Anyway, between Pelican and RealOEM, it is at least easy to find anything I need for maintenance. I've been an E30 owner (2 different 318iS's) for 11 years now, and knowing the size of basically every bolt on the car also helps. The electrical systems are also really simple.
Oh yeah, another thing you run into with cheaper Japanese cars is shitty wiring harnesses. The harnesses are nice and neat on BMWs because they will spend the extra money to run the wires a little further to go around things & to their destination. The ones in economy cars look like damn spider webs with wires branching out of the middle of a big loom and making a giant mess for someone trying to get their hand someplace like under the dash.
Truthplease
2011 Oct 21, 6:33am
You know what I like about driving an old car? I can bully the nice new cars around. You see they paid a lot for their nice new car, and God forbid they scratch it. I can swerve around, jump out in the four way stop, and park way to close to them at Target. Ding my door, sure, no problem, but it is going to cost your pretty little car some paint.
I bought a new car once. It was dinged at Wal-mart that first month. Never again will I buy a new car. Lessoned learned the hard way.
You know what I like about driving an old car? I can bully the nice new cars around.
For years I had a 76 maxivan. More pop riveted patches than original sheet metal, painted with a roller and house paint. No one ever challenged me. I got respect even in Manhattan.
Is the Civic's engine and transmission designed and built in the US as well? How about the procurement, accounting, and other back office type jobs, are those also in the US? I don't think so.
In some cases, yes, and some cases no, just like so-called "American" cars. As I mentioned in prior threads, many of the "foreign" manufacturers have design teams here in the US because we have unique design requirements in some cases. In general, all the "foreign" manufacturers have North American or US subsidiaries, so yes, of course they have procurement, accounting, and back office here. These questions suggest that you don't know much about how these businesses work.
You know what -- prove to me that 100% of Fords, GMs, and Chryslers are 100% made here. You will fail miserably, as I stated in the other threads for many many reasons. End of story.
A lot of German sports cars (BMW M/Merc AMG/Audi S) get dinged badly for reliability, but a lot of them have a very aggressive service schedules that, if adhered to, will provide well over a decade of trouble-free service. I think that a lot of people buy the cars and drive the dog shit out of them, but somehow expect to service them like they are econo-boxes.
Yes, this is very true. Look at something like TireRack.com for reviews. I saw some reviews for the same tires my car has by someone who drove an AMG Mercedes. He complained that the tires didn't last long enough. Well no shit, if you keep doing burnouts in your AMG.
These cars are several orders of magnitude more complex then economy cars also. There are a lot of things to go wrong that don't exist on civic's or corrolla's.
Is that really true though? Most of the concepts are similar. Maybe if you have an automated manual transmission, it's more complicated than either a manual transmission or an automatic transmission, but some econoboxes have automated manuals (e.g. new Ford Fiesta, and it's more common in Europe).
I don't think having an extra computer or sensor here or there adds up to "orders of magnitude" (which implies 100X or greater more complicated).
Oh yeah, another thing you run into with cheaper Japanese cars is shitty wiring harnesses. The harnesses are nice and neat on BMWs because they will spend the extra money to run the wires a little further to go around things & to their destination. The ones in economy cars look like damn spider webs with wires branching out of the middle of a big loom and making a giant mess for someone trying to get their hand someplace like under the dash.
Yeah, I've noticed this too. There is some degree of meticulousness that occurs by the Germans that reduces the maximum efficiency of the Japanese in manufacturing, but increases efficiency in repair.
I bought a new car once. It was dinged at Wal-mart that first month. Never again will I buy a new car. Lessoned learned the hard way.
Umm, if your biggest problem with buying a new car is some cosmetic paint issue, that's probably misguided. There are many good reasons to not buy a new car -- e.g. expense, high depreciation, etc. However, there are many good reasons to buy a new car -- e.g. additional safety features, lower maintenance, additional modern conveniences, etc. The risk that you might get a ding seems quite trivial relative to the benefits, whereas the substantive good reasons not to buy a new car at least have the possibility of outweighing the benefits depending on your own personal calculation.
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Something that I think about a lot on the way to work is to what extent do people place importance on "what" they drive. I say this because living in the Bay Area its clear that either there is a lot of well-off people or maybe a lot of people spending a lot of their incomes on their cars. Prior to moving here from NC you'd be lucky if you saw a new Bimmer or even a new VW in a day. Yet on my way to work I must see at least 100+ brand-new luxury cars speeding down the freeway. We're talking $60,000-$90,000 cars.
Now- don't get me wrong. If someone wants to spend that kind of money on a car then that's great. We all have definitions of what's important to us and there's nothing wrong with a shiny new car with heated leather seats. But when you stop and think about just how much people spend on cars its sort of insane. I'm going to guess that some of these folks must buy a new car every 5-6 years. If that's the case then assuming they spend $50k-$60k per car that works out to $100k+ every 10 years... for cars! Double that if the spouse drives the same type of car.
The thing is that cars massively depreciate almost instantly. Once they age and start to become mechanically less sound their value plummets. This is also partially due to such cars losing their prestige because part of the allure of exotic/luxury cars is their "new-ness". So unlike an old house, unless your car happens to be extremely desirable/collectible you will never see any return on that purchase. Instead the money spent is gone forever.
My Wife and I are at the stark opposite end of this equation. Both of our vehicles are well over 10 years old. They're both Toyotas and both have way over 200,000 miles. I work on and service them myself hence their maintenance is minimal. They are both the bottom-of-the-barrel models with "power-nothing" and no real luxurious amenities. They are easy to fix and since I've had them for so long I know them inside and out. We could very easily afford to buy a brand-new, top-of-the-line luxury car. I could walk into any showroom, take a test drive and hand the salesperson the cash and drive home. But I would never do that because in my opinion spending 50k on a car seems like a waste. While our cars are not worth hardly anything they have in turn served as an "investment" in that they save us money by preventing us from having a car payment. They've been paid for forever. Now I will admit that I'm bragging here which is about the same as bragging about a nice new car. I will also not deny that sure- I wouldn't mind having a nice new luxury car in the garage. Heck- even some of the rental cars we've used on vacations are wayyyy nicer than what we own and I am somewhat tempted to buy something new. But at the end of the day it comes down to dollars and sense.
Anyway, not sure where I'm going with this. But I'm sure others have some interesting opinions as always.