>They split religiously every 18 months or so...
Does one go to Avignon and the other to Rome? Infuriating would be putting it mildly! };---)
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All I know is they head west at a rapid rate of knots! ;-)
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it's very simple replace with Powerflex or similar, it's what I used to do with sierra compliance bushes!
And if you think that's rubbish try Porsche 944 ARB rubbers & wishbones! Wishbones are still £400+
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I have 2 Mk4 96/97 1.25 zetec Fiestas, both of which I drive 'vigorously', currently on 97k and 56 k respectively, both family owned from new. Only 1 set of lower arms (pattern) at about 55k so far and no arb bushes! Tyre wear pattern is still acceptable.
Altho I accept I may get some more practice in the next 12 months at changing them i wonder what you are doing to them.
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pmh (was peter)
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Neither are in current manufacture (at least I assume new audi's have decent susp. arms) but
Audi suspension arms.
subaru svx gearboxes.
volvo drop links and window switches
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Citroens - the bit between the number plates.
On a more serious note I think that some manufacturers have made a deliberate decision to pass their quality control onto the warranty systems in the hope that a percentage of vehicles will either
1. be written off before requiring repair.
2 last until the warranty period has expired.
3. be sold to customers who do not notice the fault.
Cheaper for them but extremely frustrating for the consumer.
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Any car where you have to remove the engine to replace the clutch.
Anc car where changing a lighbulb takes more than two minutes.
V
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The cast iron cam followers in a Lada 1200 engine, ohc but omigod. They must have weighed a quarter of a pound each...
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VW Sharan sun-visors.
The early ones had a flap concealing the vanity mirror. When you raised the flap a nice little light would come on to illuminate the mirror. A nice little touch ... I thought.
But the plastic hinge for the flap was so flimsy it would break without the sun-visor even being touched, and then the light would be on constantly - which wasn't healthy for the battery. So you would have to buy a new visor at £60 a pop! (and this was 10 years ago). I lost count of the number I had to buy before seling the car in disgust at this and other much more signicant failings.
And yes, I did try numerous times to do a bodge repair, but none was guaranteed to work, so there was always the risk of coming to the car and find a flat battery ...
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Any car where the air-con condenser and/or radiator is/are mounted behind a grille in which the openings are large enough to allow stones and other road debris to fly in and cause damage which then costs several hundred pounds to repair. Previous-model Honda Civic is an example that springs to mind.
When I queried this with Honda, their technical people claimed that this was necessary in order to obtain the required airflow, although my Mondeo seems to manage perfectly well with a grille with much smaller holes in it.
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Honda, their technical people claimed that this was necessary in ...................
they moved to VAG and did the same there,
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TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
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most folks just took the bulbs out, far easier to cope without the extra light than deal with flat battery and scorch marks
--
I read often, only post occasionally
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Carried over from another thread about tyres...
.... any car that can only manage 6k miles from a set of P6000s.
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Carried over from another thread about tyres... .... any car that can only manage 6k miles from a set of P6000s.
Yes, my old Pug 405 that seemed to manage to happily get 12K out a front set of Michelin Pilot Primacy tyres & 24K out the ones fitted on the back.
The P6000 is just a tired old design of tyre.
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VW Sharan sun-visors. But the plastic hinge for the flap was so flimsy it would break without the sun-visor even being touched, So you would have to buy a new visor at £60 a pop! (and this was 10 years ago).
>>
Very similar problem with my Mondeo Ghia X. IIC a replacement is about £75
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But everyone's just talking about flimsy bits of trim! What about the true engineering cockups whose results people grumble about daily on some website or other?
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Any car where the cambelt drives the water pump. (Including mine)
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Can anyone out there give me any semi logical reason why they do it?
Yeah we could use the belt that does the driving of ALL the other ancillaries...OR we could design it so a £35 part failing destroys the engine - GENIUS!
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I was thinking about this the other day, whilst having the cambelt on my Omega changed. I assume the rationale is that if the water pump was driven off the v-belt, and it broke , then the engine would still be turning, but with no coolant flow. Is that semi-logical enough? ;-)
I suppose this made a reasonable amount of sense on non interference engines where cambelt snapping was no big deal, but it does still scare me on modern 16v engines.
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I suppose this made a reasonable amount of sense on non interference engines where cambelt snapping was no big deal, but it does still scare me on modern 16v engines.
Interference engines as a concept always seemed daft to me. I'm no engineer, so perhaps someone here can explain to me why it is necessary for the valves and the pistons to occupy the same space at different times. OK, it's quite clever use of a fourth dimension in engine design, but I'd prefer it if my car simply stopped after a cambelt failure, rather than tearing itself to pieces. Does it offer some other massive benefit which warrants using a rubber strap as the only mechanism stopping your hi-tech engine from turning into a few hundred pounds of scrap metal? Why not at least use a cam-chain, if you must design an interference engine?
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>>What about the true engineering cockups whose results people grumble about daily on some website or other?
>>
Not a modern cockup but one but like my 1600E Cortina ! Lets put some wider wheels on the standard model.
Result - the steering box suffered so it needed replacing and it also ripped the bolts out holding it to the chassis. A "standard" modification was to weld on a thick reinforcing plate to take the strain.
Another 1600E gem.
A plastic pipe for the hydraulic fluid from the clutch pedal to the slave cylinder.
Lets route it so that it crosses the nice hot four branch exhaust manifold.
Just a small movement of the pipe caused lots of white smoke but no progress.
Pierberg carbs and auto chokes on Fords. Years and years of complaints
Lancia ?
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the rear suspension on the mark #1 Citroen C5
the self adjusting clutch mechanism on most 1980's fords
the Ford 'V V' carbs
cable operated window winders on the vauxhall chevette
Comm 2000 switchgear on Citroens and Peugeots
Ford Pinto camshafts
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As you might guess, I look at this a bit differently!
To me, the inadequacy isn't usually in the design stage, it's more a case of inadequate development and testing, which doesn't weed out the weaker aspects of designs which go on to give trouble.
Put yourself in the role of a head of engineering - you have a team of analysts and designers working for you, and you have to set the tone. Do you;
a) Rule with an iron grip and come down hard on engineers, designers and analysts who produce designs which later fail during development testing, or, even in service.
b) Create and foster a culture to enable your designers to push the boundaries, producing good inexpensive lightweight innovative designs, and accept that by pushing the boundaries, you will see some failures.
I have given two polar opposites here, and, of course there is also option b,c, d, ..... etc.
Obviously, this assumes that you are going to test and develop your ideas properly, rather than trying to go straight from CAD screen to CNC machine, and hope for the best! Test & development isn't cheap, and so, can suffer cuts. Many engineering software vendors are pushing the idea that their system represents a virtual development environment, where engineers can design and analyse a part in one software package. This approach relies on the skill of the engineer to provide sensible loadings and boundary conditions for the modelling - and also to interpret the output of the model correctly. On more than one occaison, I've seen a completely inappropriate load, boundary condition, and output stress post-processing all combined in one model which was being put forward as a demonstration that all is well with the design!!
Most of the items mentioned so far in this thread could, and perhaps should have been picked up during development. There's a stark contrast between automotive behaviour and aircraft / aerospace practice. For automotive design, the design standards,the material traceability and the component testing standards are all governed by company specific rules and guidelines, while before you can have a new type of aircraft even move down the runway under its own power, you need to have passed a comprehensive set of qualification tests which are industry wide, and hence really represent worst case conditions - as you pass further tests, and demonstrate further fatigue life, you can obtain further clearance leading towards take off, and limited operation, and then to full commercial operation.
Number_Cruncher
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Umbrella handle hand brakes, foot released hand brakes and electronic hand brakes. Any design team that goes out of their way to achieve perfect triangulation of square wheel in their project, just for the sake of it, should be forced to drive off with their invention out of my driveway. 34 degree up hill onto a very narrow road. Try your button operated hand brake on that morons!
Cars with bad visibility through back windows. Suddenly everyone is so focused on achieving five NCAP stars that they don't even notice people can't see jack es while reversing. It's all about safety, isn't it?
But my pet hate among design inadequacies is belt driven engine. Especially when manufacturers offer "because it's more quiet" as an answer to the obvious question "why?". I'm sorry but that's just bullpoop. If they can't design something as simple as that then how can anyone trust them to design properly working car? After Pug 306 wrecking its engine in cam belt 70 mph mishap I owned 6 cars with chain driven engines in a row and there is nothing loud about cam chains. It's 21st century. Belts as form of penny pinching surely should be dead by now. Call me conspiracy theorist but I can not see it as anything else than manufacturer hoping for a failure outside warranty and high repair costs.
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[Nissan 2.2 dCi are NOT Renault engines. Grrr...]
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VW Golf rear bushes -- clapped out at 43k. That was on my Mk III VR6, but my mechanic says its a general problem that persists through more recent models.
Audi (100) front wheel bearings -- clapped out at 55k. Not an impressive design life.
MB M103 and M104 straight-six engines (1980s, 1990s) -- head-gasket failure (usually not catastrophic) almost certain from 70k onwards on both (usually in the same position, OS rear); also timing-chain cover leakage on the M104.
MBs in general from August 1995 onwards -- catastrophic paintwork quality, primarily in the W210 E-class but affecting almost all models (right up to now, although E-class quality seems to have recovered); from 2000 onwards unreliable electronics; and lately the 320CDi diesel engine seems to be the conspicuous liability.
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the rear suspension on the mark #1 Citroen C5
Have they actually sorted it out on the latest C5?
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Rover 1.8 engines - for obvious reasons.
Xantia RHD conversion for brake pedal (inaccessible nuts on clutch pedal)
Peugeot 106 front calipers : slides rust solid.
All Fiat 5 cyclinder engines - engine out job to change cambelt every 30k miles.
Rover 16: mechanical fuel pump under exhaust manifold = vapour lock at high ambient temperatures.
A series bypass hose.
Ford CVH engine/1.1Endura for sludge.
madf
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IMHO, one of the daftest and most persistant inadequacies is the placement of the rear seat release catches in hatchbacks INSIDE the cabin so that scrotes can smash a window, get into the cabin, then rifle round inside the boot.
Even in SWMBO's old Metro, the release catches were INSIDE the boot and the seat-backs couldn't be released from inside the cabin.
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In a hatchback surely you can access the boot area from the cabin without moving the rear seat anyway?
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In a hatchback surely you can access the boot area from the cabin without moving the rear seat anyway?>>
In SWMBO's old Metro, you'd have to smash your way through the parcel shelf to get into the boot from the cabin.
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>> In a hatchback surely you can access the boot area from the cabin without moving the rear seat anyway?>> In SWMBO's old Metro, you'd have to smash your way through the parcel shelf to get into the boot from the cabin.
If it was an Austin Metro then no, they are dead easy to open the tailgate without leaving any mark or damage, the Rover version was a bit harder as the tailgate catch was improved.
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Yes....the new C5 is fully sorted
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Altho I accept I may get some more practice in the next 12 months at changing them i wonder what you are doing to them.
I have no idea. I've only done them once, but the service history shows near annual replacements, and the lower arms changed only a year ago (pattern parts, but a very well known make rather than the peanut cheap Ebay items) have visible cracks in the bush surfaces. No play yet, but I expect an advisory come MOT time.
ARB bushes are just starting to knock over sharp bumps.
We have a lot of speed ramps in our area - I suspect this might have something to do with it. However, the Mondeo has been in service twice as long, and done three times the mileage in our hands, and hasn't suffered the same way.
Cheers
DP
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Early Focus hatchback folding rear seat.
You had to move the drivers seat forward to be able to lift the (one piece) squab, before folding down the split rear seat back.
Not a good driving position if you're over six foot.
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rover petrol engines that blew head gaskets all the time, apparently a rover technician admitted after rover ceased production that they found the cause of the the head gasket failures and it would of been relatively simple to rectify permanently but they werent allowed to do it for financial reasons.
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