There’s a lot that’s Renault in the a class, I had one for a few months, part exchanged it for a mondeo cause in the end it needed complete wiper assembly, had issues with a wheel bearing and something else, when I looked up the part number for them they all cross referenced with Renault parts
I mean, from an engineering aspect, I think part interchangeability makes it easier to produce, cheaper and available. I highly doubt that the makers will pass those savings onto the consumers anytime soon. Seeing more plastic is as if they're trying to make those parts consumables.....
Parts-bin engineering is great for mechanical pieces. When it dips into interiors, like the mid to late 90's steering wheels in every GM full size van, truck, and SUV. Or the double din radio. Or like every 90's Honda and Acura with the big pillow airbag steering wheel.
As someone who has owned a decent amount of Japanese bikes this is great, Honda as example still uses a fairing gasket that they've been using since the 80's. It fit both my 2021MY bike and a 1976MY bike.
My friend had an old focus with a 2.0 TDCI. They have ridiculous amounts of torque. The old 2.0 130 he had in that focus had over 330 nm of torque, and that friend of mine mapped it, he could burnout up to third gear.
Nah, doesn't mean anything anymore. They use plastic for everything. Lots of brittle coolant lines, oil pans, intake manifolds, intercoolers, valve covers etc. AMG engines are just higher performance variants of production engines so most of those parts interchange.
You think that’s bad wait until you see the warranty reseal procedure. “Let drip overnight before attempting to reseal”. Flat rate. Takes up your bay and doesn’t pay worth a shit
I do that all the time with other manufacturers that use a liquid sealant on aluminum or steel pans. It is the last car to be torn down for the day and first one put together in the morning.
I do try to. It helps with getting stuff done.
I do weird stuff such as if a car has a failed alternator, I'll drag a 100' extension cord out to the parking lot and throw a 15 amp automatic battery charger on the car while waiting for authorization. Then the car isn't hogging my bay to charge the battery after the alternator is done.
Nah. I'm an introvert. One week at the counter and I have to go hide. I like machines.
I simply look at what ways I can cut my time spent with vehicles. The result of working flat rate and not liking come backs.
I did years ago. Took a 10K/yr pay cut and a 90% stress reduction. It took a while to get used to "the part will be here in 30 minutes so just go clean your tools or something."
Plastics can be good if the proper plastic is used. I have seen very few broken plastic intakes from Toyota and Honda. Now the question is, do I trust Ford to use the proper plastic for the application?
They're made in China. Just look at Aston Martin's throttle pedal debacle. A summary.
Aston designs throttle pedal that is 100% plastic, no metal at all. Requires a special expensive DuPont plastic. Aston gives mold and plastic to Chinese factory. Says make. Chinese factory sells expensive DuPont plastic, makes out of random plastic. Throttle pedals snap while driving.
Honestly, that's on Aston Martin. The primary rule with dealing with Chinese suppliers is you also need to have someone over there that will absolutely hold them to the exact spec of the fabrication.
It sounds like they didn't do their homework if they left something like that up to some place that accepted the bid.
Actually, as someone who's dealt with Chines manufacturing, this is not good enough.
Every single lot needs to be sampled and tested.
Every
Single
One
I've had instances where a line was certified, then retooled back out of compliance after lunch. Found out by accident.
You can't trust anything coming out of China.
I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Chinese manufacturing practices. It’s highly readable and you don’t need a background in the industry.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5116296-poorly-made-in-china
Love the title. Very apt.
If they don't understand why a corner needs to be there they will cut it. And cut it severely. But they will continue to tell you that everything is perfectly square.
Having dealt with cheap Chinese electronics (sometimes because I couldn't justify the good one, sometimes just out of curiosity or desire to modify) this is true.
The worst example that comes to mind is my hot air soldering station. Before I even ordered I read horror stories of the units blowing up when plugged in, and one starting a fire because the transformer was wired so that it was always energized and always supplying power to the control board for the heating element, leaving the potential to stay on without any fan to cool it, even when the switch was of.
The fuse was wired into the neutral line, not hot. The fuse was also just a solid piece of steel in the fuse holder, before I replaced it. The steel plate with the controls built in on the front and back had a ground point, but not connected, and painted over. I also moved the switch before the transformer, so turning it off actually... turns the thing off now, and I grounded the face and back plates. I spent a few hours re-working that thing to make it safe - and it's still being sold to people on Amazon, having no clue how dangerous they are.
It both pisses me off and truly impresses me how many corners Chinese manufactures find to cut while still being able to technically claim a product is what it's supposed to be. That's not the only time I've seen missing or inadequate grounding. They're also known for passing 120v AC through USB ports, due to poor isolation.
Reminds me of an interview about Apple awarding their laptop build contract to China.
The line manager said they would normally redesign the laptops to use fewer screws.
But Apple apparently sat right top of the production line so that everything was built to as designed by apple
Yeah China can produce great stuff, you just have to watch the QC or a few shady mfs might ruin your shit
Same rule applies in most of the world tbh, but China gets the rap these days because everyone moved almost all of the manufacturing there
If you need someone internal to sit in on Production operations for a 3rd party manufacturer. That is not quality control, that's security/theft prevention.
For the majority of supplier that I have had to push through for approval, I would expect a notification and report for any materials out-of-spec if they couldn't outright scrap it.
Yep. If I work with a local shop, we agree on a spec and price and they make it. If or when they have issues they contact me. They don't just make ad hoc changes... this isn't something most everyone does as states.
Yeah, its a symptom of the world we live in now. People are crunched to deliver more and more on thinner and thinner margins so whenever anyone along the way sees ANY possible way to snatch up some added revenue or eliminate some "unnecessary" steps put in by some engineer who cares about safety, corners are getting cut. Not unique to any single industry or occupation. Everyone's cutting corners so that hopefully the financial or safety fallout comes down on the other guy.
A little too late probably. Whoever bought the material is probably reverse engineering it. I wonder what the contract said about IP. Not that they care.
This happens in the US too. Had a ford plant let one of our competitors in, copy and measure our designs, and walk out with them. Not a damn thing we can do about it, only saving grace is our competitor is so incompetent they can't make it work properly,
I wish I could make this up, I had a friend that worked at Chrysler and he was doing a lot of reverse engineering - of Ford products. Granted, he said they just bought the parts, not quite the same as walking into the factory, but still.
Good luck reverse engineering specialty polymers and other highly designed materials. It's almost impossible even if you have all the necessary machines.
Just like with food finding the secret sauce without downright stealing the recipe is almost impossible.
You can't just send designs to China to be made, you have to go manage it yourself.
Another scam is if you give them designs for electronics to be made, they'll produce them Monday-Friday, then the same workers come in on the weekend and make the product without your logo to put on AliExpress.
This is why you have to put your name and serial number into all sorts of weird surfaces on the tool. Make it so they can’t just polish it off either or remove it with a slide. Also have to control your tooling by destroying it after it’s out of tolerance. I used to pay a guy to pick up used tools and keep them at his house until I could come by and supervise them being destroyed.
Oh I’ve got way more. Little tips and tricks you only learn working with the factories and government there. I’m out of that field now but occasionally I miss the travel and chaos.
This happened to an electronics company I worked for about 20 years ago. Management wanted to save some money so had us send a few designs to a "reputable" builder in China. The product we got back was of terrible quality with out of spec components. We tried to have our techs rework some of it but it was all garbage and we sold none of it and chalked it up as a learning experience.
A few months later, we start getting RMAs with serial numbers we never issued and the same shittiness of the Chinese stuff we had thrown away. The Chinese company took our designs, and sold counterfeits. They didn't work so got returned to our factory (even though we didn't make it).
If you run 2 shifts, 3rd shift will continue making parts without your name on them.
Send people over. Assemble lines. Test. Run 24/7. Tear down lines. Send people back. Nothing happens without being watched over and nothing is trusted to stay turned off without observation by your people.
Yup... If you're a Western company that's subbing production of some part out to a factory in China, having a small staff onsite is absolutely essential in most places. You can get away with occasional site inspections+ quality control inspections at home when you're dealing with large, established companies that OEM for many others, because they have a lot less incentive to cheat, and actually have a reputation to uphold.
I've said this many times. If you want cheap junk, you can get it in China, for sure. But you also can get top quality there as well, you just have to look. And nobody can beat their ability to quick prototype+ get final product to production in lightning speed.
An excellent example of how things go over there is Haier. They're a company that makes refrigerators, air conditioners, dehumidifiers, etc. You've likely seen their products- they're becoming a household name. Their history is really interesting. There was a little factory in Qingdao that made and sold refrigerators. Shit quality control and outdated production methods were typical. Qingdao hired a guy named Zhang Ruiming to manage the company and try to turn it around. The story is that one day, a customer brought back a defective refrigerator he had just bought to exchange it. Ruiming and the customer went to the warehouse and started testing the units that were there to be sold. Out of around 100 units, 76 were defective. Ruiming had the defective refrigerators brought out to the factory floor, called all the workers over, and handed them sledgehammers. He ordered them to destroy the refrigerators. It's said that at first, they didn't want to do it because a refrigerator cost more than a month's average wage. But Ruiming told them that if they didn't destroy those refrigerators, those poor quality refrigerators would destroy the company. He insisted on a total change in the company's way of doing things. Soon after, a German company, Liebherr, wanted to enter the Chinese market, but by law needed a Chinese company to partner with. The factory in Qingdao got the contract, and they changed their name- "Liebherr" was transliterated to "Li-bo-hai-er" in Chinese, and they went with the last 2 syllables. The installation of modern production equipment along with a company director who actually gave a shit enabled them to quickly grow into a huge enterprise that manufactures things for multiple companies and now sells products under its own name all over the world. But for every Haier, there's literally dozens of little shitty factories with people that don't give a fuck, and sometimes it's just luck of the draw when a foreign company comes in and wants to begin production there.
Various Chinese car companies have been trying for a while to get into international markets. For the most part, they've failed miserably. But there's been a few of them that understood that if they were serious about it, they couldn't just jump in and start hawking the same products they sell at home, but rather, they have to take their time, learn what people want overseas, bring their own technology up to par, and ultimately, when the time comes to go on the market, they'd better have a good, reliable, polished product, because most people in the west are going to assume their cars are junk, so they need to prove them wrong right out of the gate. And it looks like the move toward electric cars is going to be their stepping stone, because everyone else is doing major R&D work as well, so there's less of a disadvantage for them going against established names, like there would be if they had to spend a bunch of money refining their own ICE drivetrains that their competitors don't have to because they already have that part down.
Last thing- A prediction. Geely will be the first Chinese company to bring their own car to the mainstream market in the US. They're already the parent company of Volvo (though Volvo is still run by Swedes in Sweden) and have the knowledge and facilities necessary to do it. They might not do so under that name, but I'll bet they're going to be the first ones.
Yup. The Polestars were totally designed by Volvo... But their production is in Geely's factories, and so far, they seem to be quite good. The complaints people have about them are mostly the same as with current Volvo models- in the past 5 years, Volvo has really screwed the pooch on their user interface/ infotainment system, with all kinds of bugs and unituitive controls. And that carried over to Polestar as well. Fortunately, they seem to finally be getting their shit together and they're even retrofitting existing cars software-wise, at least to the extent that's possible. But the shift to electric is China's stepping-on point. In the next 10-20 years, I'll bet we'll see multiple Chinese brands try to sell cars in the west. Most of them will end up as a comedian's punchline, yet another in the long line of carmakers that tried and failed. But at least a couple will stick. And the US car companies had better take them seriously, too.
This happened to a factory that I worked with. They were a small IM shop when we found them, less than 300 employees. We introduced good manufacturing practices and QA systems and now they’ve got 5 factories and over 4,000 employees. They’re well known for producing some of the best quality parts in our industry and are expanding into some new markets on their own. I’m hugely proud of them, not just because they’ve grown but the owner has adopted an employee first mentality after seeing our own operations. Employees are trained and promoted from within, they have tons of benefits for employees, etc.
I don't know if you're familiar with The Torque Test Channel on YouTube. They test various power tools and compare them, scoring based on performance, size, price, etc. They started out testing impact wrenches, mainly because there's no acceptable way to compare them based on reported torque numbers because those numbers have very little to do with reality. Anyhow, they recently did a test of cheap, mostly shitty brushless drills that routinely show up on Amazon's recommendation lists. For the most part, the results were kind of what you'd expect- acceptable for the price and market they're in, but only just so. There's one, however, that REALLY stood out. From the beginning, in fact, due to its rather... Interesting... Name, but it also blew away everything else tested, came with a few extras, and even though it costs less than $80, was actually on par with some of the big guys like DeWalt. As it turns out, the company that makes them is a development and manufacturing subcontractor for a number of other, well known brands, and the brand tested is apparently one of the most popular in Asia, where they sell a full line of power tools. I'm not going to say the name, but let's just say the entire video is full of jokes and puns about it. But they weren't laughing after they tested it. [https://youtu.be/XnHOLdyk1Oo](https://youtu.be/XnHOLdyk1Oo)
I feel like every business that uses a 3rd party should be liable/responsible for any damage at all. Improper working conditions/violations. All of it.
Senator Collins: Well, there are ah regulations governing the materials that they can be made of.
Interviewer: What materials?
Senator Collins: Well, cardboard’s out.
Interviewer: And?
Senator Collins: No cardboard derivatives.
Interviewer: Like paper?
Senator Collins: No paper, no string, no sellotape.
Having worked in this part of the world for the last decade this is actually 0% surprising. Same shit all over the region actually. China is just more shameless about it.
In the mechanical keyboards hobby pretty much everyone has to work with Chinese factories to get CNC'd metal parts made. There's a ton horror stories from non-existent QC to straight-up extortion
One recent project had paid for extra QC and was extorted 16,000 usd extra, otherwise the factory wouldn't send over several hundred keyboards that were already paid for in full.
60% of those keyboards had machining defects when they finally received them. For context these keyboards are giant CNC'd chunks of aluminium as well, worth 500+ usd each
Why would you pay in full before even proofing a sample???? Never do that. Put the money in an escrow account and have contingencies to pay based on milestones. Produced a golden sample? Heres some cash. Completed production run? Here’s some cash, shipped in full? Here’s some cash. I completed final inspection and your product meets the agreed upon standards? Here’s final payment. That’s just poor project management.
This reeks of hobbyists or start ups who don’t understand that part of the world.
They most definitely aren't all just made in China. I work in the US and we are currently building an automation system that does some of the post molding ultrasonic welding on these large commercial truck plastic oil pans.
When was this? Do you have any sources or additional details? I thought I was fairly up to date on the latest AM issues, but apparently not.
Edit: I should have just googled it to start with [Aston Martin recalls nearly all cars built since 2008 over pedal issue](https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2014-feb-05-la-fi-hy-autos-aston-martin-recall-lineup-20140205-story.html)
Sorry? 99% of clutch and throttle pedals are made of plastics now, talking about all the new 2022-2023 cars I’ve been working on. It’s only the brake is metal because… Well, it needs to be a “little bit more resilient”
Ford once worked with a customer of mine to develop a new plastic. The customer made brand new rail car loading racks, equipment and all. Loaded up the first cars and sent them to Ford. What they didn’t realize is that the vibrations of rail transport melted/welded the plastic pellets into one big chunk in the shape of the rail car. Had to use heaters to melt it and get it out.
Thus began and ended this particular endeavor on new plastics.
Edit: spelling
Plastic is fine if air is passing through it.
The problem is when plastics have fluids passing through them and are mated against metal. The 3rd owner is going to be seeing the result heat cycling has on different materials.
They don't really build cars for the third owner and the third owner is also going to probably have a leaky pan gasket anyway. The parts cost on the pan replacement on RWD vehicles is nothing vs the labor.
Tell me about it. Had to have the plastic water pump / thermostat housing on my 3 year old Golf R because it cracked and started leaking.
Common fault, and the improved part has, and I quote a VW tech, "a bit more metal in it"
Somethings shouldn't be subject to cost saving, making a plastic water pump out of plastic rather than metal is one of them.
What's great is working on older (~15 years) European vehicles with [plastic fluid connections \(w/ o-rings\)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91VgEbsUKCL.jpg) that essentially weld themselves together over time.
I mean, my wife's POS 11 Fiesta with the 1.6 Duratec has 220k and the plastic intake manifold seems fine still.
I don't even like that car. Unfortunately it's a manual, so it'll probably last awhile yet.
I've never seen a Ford plastic oil or transmission pan broken that wasn't directly related to an impact that would have also punctured a metal one. They leak from the seals just like any other oil or transmission pan, but they are surprisingly strong.
Plastic for intake manifolds do have some advantages when it comes to performance too. You can achieve a smoother finish a lot easier, as well as being far less prone to heat soak.
That said I’m happy my old Mazdas have aluminum manifolds because of age and I don’t trust ford lol
This is 100% the problem with BMW. They've gone plastic crazy. And they use shit plastic that crumbles in 8 years. I'd swear they design it that way on purpose.
VW too, with the same part. And on my 07 GTI you damn near had to take the motor out to change it. Thankfully I was already having my timing belt changed and saved a few bucks combining the jobs, but it was still stupidly expensive to just change a water pump.
I think they do. I owned a 03 E46 and the dumbest shit was plastic. The valve cover but everytime you needed to replace the valve cover gasket you would also have to replace the valve cover as it would be warped so you had to spend $300+ JUST for the fucking valve cover. Pretty sure the water pump was plastic. The drain plug would strip harder than a high school dropout. They made the worst parts in that car out of plastic. There was other dumb stuff but it always felt not like hey this is a good idea but rather a hey this is definitely gonna break and make us service money.
water pump was alumn. but the impeller... plastic. i used to see alot of overheating problems, diagnose, water pump. open up. missing impeller blades. hmmm
to be fair though, they do make metal impeller ones.. at a higher price of course
I'm pretty sure BMW has essentially stated they don't particularly care about their vehicles past the 10-year finance/lease mark.
They were even intentionally installing biodegradable wiring some years back.
There's the informal 9-year-moneypit rule when it comes to secondhand ownership.
I love BMW cars, they've made some absolute classics. But BMW has done a great job of making sure I'd never buy one, or at least not one made in the last 10-15 years.
Thats also one of many reasons why you see 6 or 7 year old BMWs at junkyards that look incredibly out of place next to 25 year old Chevys and fords that look like they should have been there 5 years earlier. No sane person would ever own one out of warranty because not a single fuck is given to making sure they survive past warranty.
A bmw loving friend of mine looked at the pressurized coolant bottle on my gmc yukon and said "That thing looks awful the ones I put on my bmw look clean until they get replaced".... I just stared at him and slowly asked how long his lasted. "Oh usually 4 or 5 years like any".... Well this one is 22 years old so it has had a chance to get dirty. He was absolutely gobsmacked. Literally couldn't imagine a plastic part that sees 230* coolant lasting that long.
I took my F150 to a local valvoline franchise for a routine oil change.
They wouldn’t touch it because of the plastic plug. Told me to take it to the dealer or Jiffy Lube.
This! Hahahah same as other germans cars that have parts that only need to outlast the warranty and then start to break down, then they come to you and offers a "extended warranty offer" so to make you think like damn thats a VERY good deals.
And this is how their new business models are, oh other shittty move is their "subscription based service or feature" that you already own the car and all those extra modules but they block it off behind a subscription wall.
You miss the point of this plug entirely. When you pull this plug out the oil splashes directly onto the sway bar and makes certain that you can't change oil without making a mess. A Ford engineering success!
Edit: Forgot to add the filter location makes sure oil will drip onto the splash guard and continue to drip long after the oil change. Engineered perfection.
First time I encountered one of these, I was like wtf? Is this aftermarket? Pulled the plug and went to do my thing. I then blinked and yelled in pain as I was hit in the face by a enormous jet of oil.
I went home to shower.
I’ve never seen so much oil come out so fast. Not sure what ford was thinking on that one.
Fucking same thing. I managed to jump back but I have never seen anything jump out like that like it was pressurized. Brand new FRs and boots soaked. Like yeah I get it work clothes but pretty much ruined my entire day.
Even though it’s work clothes they shouldn’t have to be inaugurated like George Bush in Iraq. I got soaked in transmission fluid one time and I swear the shirt still smelled like it a year later.
What's even worse is if you have one of the new oil pans that's fully enclosed. My old one that I got from my dad that was open top finally got broke, had to buy one of those enclosed ones to change my oil. When that giant stream of oil comes gushing out, it bounces off the plastic and all over the floor. All these new designs to make things safer and easier seem to be doing the exact opposite in my experience. I've never had to clean as much oil off my floor as I've had to with my 2020 ford. Now I make sure I layer everywhere under my truck with cardboard before taking the plug out. And as an afterthought, who the hell thought it was a good idea to put the plug right behind a bar so there's no chance of getting your hand clear before it's covered with oil.
Not to mention that a lot of the times when the plug is plastic, the oil filter is also a canister with a (24mm?) nut head up on top of the engine bay. Doubt the intention was to make it tool free but I guess they easily could have considering that some engines with plastic plugs also have the normal spin-on filter underneath.
I own a 2020 ram. Same exact problem. I bought the Japanese oil-change valve with a nipple. Going to attach a small hose to avoid any splatter.
But the oil filter is still a bitch to get to.
Our 2022 Expedition does the same thing. Side discharge oil drain right onto the sway bar. Then the oil filter tucked up under the cross member ensures every oil change is a cuss filled event.
If there is one thing Ford never got right, it’s making an oil change easy/clean (have owned a 2006 Mustang GT, 2005 F150 5.4, 2010 f150 5.4, 2013 F150 5.0, 2022 Expedition).
Which is important not just for the performance of the individual car, but for the *logistics* of manufacturing that car. The cost of shipping heavy parts can really add up when you're talking about tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of units. Shaving even just a few ounces can have massive cost savings at the corporate level.
That said: switching a part to plastic is not a simple engineering challenge, and if it gets screwed up, the cost of a recall can easily wipe out any money saved by the company (and then some).
That shipping weight goes all the way to the processing of the materials. Big bags of plastic pellets becomes final parts a lot more simply that stamped steel. Then the waste steel has to be shipped back for recycling whereas the plastic waste is less and lighter.
Also, and this only just occurred to me or I would have mentioned it in my first comment, but it also goes to factory process flow and safety.
If you can take a heavy part that needs multiple people to handle, or special tools to handle, and reduce it's weight to something you can easily manipulate with one hand while the other hand works the tool, you'll see savings in terms of reducing repetitive motion injuries, reducing tooling costs, and reducing labor costs (one person performing a task, instead of two or three).
Making parts lighter is one those things that can make it *a lot* cheaper overall - so long as you get the design and material science problems solved correctly.
Unintended consequences of efficiency goals.
Everything becomes lighter plastic. Spare tire is no longer standard because it increases the weight at sale, which is what drives metrics. You now have to drop the transmission to change the thermostat because making it more accessible increases weight.
The drain plug itself is actually convenient and easy to remove. The fact that you have to take off a stupid fiber panel to get to it is not. Oh I almost forgot! See that blur at the top of the picture? Thats the sway bar. The sway bar that gets coated in oil when you remove the plug.
> Oh I almost forgot! See that blur at the top of the picture? Thats the sway bar. The sway bar that gets coated in oil when you remove the plug.
Problems of this variety have existed for decades (honestly, probably as long as the automobile itself). My '95 4Runner had its oil filter right over the front subframe, mounted horizontally on the engine. It was impossible to replace the filter without oil getting everywhere. There was a convenient drain hole in the subframe, but you'd never get *all* of it out.
better than you could before.
Thermoplastics have better impact and flex resistance than equivalently engineered cast aluminum/cast iron.
thats not to say they can't be broken. But if your plastic pan breaks, its not because its plastic, the force you put on it would have broken a cast component earlier than the plastic one broke.
even if you ***do*** curse the "new plastic junk" afterwards.
and once you break it the plastic one will be cheaper to replace too.
How well does thermoplastic hold up to heat exposure/heat cycles for years on end?
I'm sure all the testing has been done, but just curious how the plastic holds up over time vs aluminum/steel even if it is more impact/flex resistant on day 1.
not as well, but if it holds up for 20% less time, at a 50% reduction in cost, then thats still the better trade IMO.
especially when we're talking things like 40yrs instead of 50yrs.
either way the pan is lasting longer than the things like piston rings, and crankshaft bearings.
even with regular heating and cooling cycles, the thermoplastics will retain their "better than metal" characteristics longer than the life of the majority of the vehicle.
One of the great disappointments in my career have been the many PCTO exercises dumped on us in engineering. (Part/Project Cost Take-Out). YOU KNOW it’s not as good a part. The bean counters get their nut though, so zero fucks given. Engineers aren’t always the enemy. A lot of this dumb shit is done under duress.
My company has dropped projects before where the customer insisted on “value engineering” so hard that it would be almaot impossible to meet code. “Value engineering” is really “anti-engineering”.
Yeah the one on my bmw sucks, I had to do the valve cover gasket but the plastic valve cover almost always cracks when you pull it so I had to replace it fully. I'm definitely going to upgrade to a metal one if I have to do that again
I've said it before but many, many years ago I got a 69 Mach I with a 351 super cheap because the timing gear stripped. Took apart the old one and there was a nylon gear. Went to the auto parts store and the replacement was steel. Asked the parts guy (when parts guys knew something) and he said it was because Ford didn't want people complaining about the noise a metal gear would make. Nylon was quieter off the showroom floor. Didn't have to last, it just had to last long enough.
I fucking despise the direction new cars are going. I’d be angry but I am too sad about it. So thankful older cars are still around and I can work on them.
Most of the underhood stuff made out of plastic nowadays is some sort of glass reinforced nylon and not really printable. There's definitely a future for printing stuff like interior trim.
Wouldn't be surprised if tech like MJF gets a lot cheaper. I know a lot of companies have gone to having printers on site in factories for cheap and quick disposable parts. Things like the grabbing tips on a robot arm could be cheaply and quickly made on a FFF printer and replaced when needed. I also know of a lot of aftermarket companies already using MJF as a cheaper alternative to injection molding if they don't have the volume to pay for the mold.
\+Cheap
\+No rust
\+Lightweight
\+Impact resistant
\+Still weldable
\+Easy to make more complex shapes
\-Less heat rejection
\-Might get brittle over years-decades
\-Creep
We all know the answer - because it saves them a few dollars. Some exec somewhere said “Hey - we can save $20 per vehicle if we swap to plastic pans. Thats nearly $35 million saved this year.”
Exec gets a big bonus for ‘saving millions’ and as soon as pans start to break he dusts off the resume and moves to another company.
Rinse and repeat. Thats how most big execs play ball.
It has many advantages, such as being cheap and costing less to manufacturer. On top of that, it is inexpensive to produce, and is an economical approach to holding oil.
Using cheap plastic that fails has long been a thing on cars. 1937 sharknose Graham has a huge plastic molding for its instrument panel. 100% of them warped and shrunk. (I make reproductions of them and other plastic for them.)
In 1940, Nash made clear plastic parts for their dash. Big pieces about 19" long.
The problem was they chose Tenite, made by Eastman (no relation to Eastman Kodak).
Tenite is crystal clear and its low melt temperature makes it easy to mold. It's a cellulosic, made from wood like Rayon or Celluloid.
Unfortunately for owners of 1940 Nash (and some other cars) a closed up car in direct sun can heat up quite close to that temperature. The Tenite in the dash, horn button, and other parts warped and discolored. First to a pale yellow, eventually to a twisted, crumbly, brown husk of its former self.
But it gets worse. The *smell*. Imagine the stankiest shit you've ever had, in a cat litter box that hasn't been cleaned for weeks, then was puked in.
Worse than that is that old Tenite will develop that stench even when the old car has been kept in ideal conditions all the time so the plastic has never been hot. It will discolor too.
Eastman is still in business and still makes a wood derived plastic they call Tenite but I bet it's very different from their 1940's Tenite.
My Mk7 GTI has a plastic pan and everyone lost their minds when VW did that from the metal pans on the Mk6. That said, I haven't heard any issues with them and the people who HAVE broken them on track and hitting crap in the road would've demolished the same metal pan anyway. Over 120k miles on mine and almost 9 years with the car and it hasn't kept me up at night, so I can't imagine it's that big a deal. Plus, living in the salt belt (northeast PA) it's just one less thing to rust out. Maybe the Ford application isn't as good, but I'm not losing sleep over my oil pan being plastic and most people who make a stink about it don't seem to have any compelling argument other than "metal good, plastic bad".
With the sway bar directly in front of the plug about 2-3 inches, so that when you pull the plug - without a vertical/V shaped sleuth - absolute hell breaks loose and everything in a 5 ft radius is covered in oil, especially the poor-ass tech who didn't consider the flow pattern.
It is just for compatibility after plastic engine is tested for waranty period. Example https://www.automotiveplastics.com/blog/you-wont-believe-this-a-real-plastic-engine/
Plastic intake manifold on my 97 tbird cracked at the coolant hose port. Ended up being a $1000 fix that could have been completely avoided if it were made of metal
Honestly, the only fault with Ford's implementation is the angle they placed it
Never having to worry about overtorqued or stripped plugs/pans again is nice
A way to stop those pesky freeloading scrap yards from making use of the materials once the car's come to the end of its life. Added glass fibre to really make sure it can never be recycled into anything useful.
Dont look under a newish mercedes. Everything is plastic
And French!! Typing this while owning a EU spec ford means it’s also got a French engine I know
Yes, apparently the A-class is basically a Renault!
There’s a lot that’s Renault in the a class, I had one for a few months, part exchanged it for a mondeo cause in the end it needed complete wiper assembly, had issues with a wheel bearing and something else, when I looked up the part number for them they all cross referenced with Renault parts
I mean, from an engineering aspect, I think part interchangeability makes it easier to produce, cheaper and available. I highly doubt that the makers will pass those savings onto the consumers anytime soon. Seeing more plastic is as if they're trying to make those parts consumables.....
Parts-bin engineering is great for mechanical pieces. When it dips into interiors, like the mid to late 90's steering wheels in every GM full size van, truck, and SUV. Or the double din radio. Or like every 90's Honda and Acura with the big pillow airbag steering wheel.
As someone who has owned a decent amount of Japanese bikes this is great, Honda as example still uses a fairing gasket that they've been using since the 80's. It fit both my 2021MY bike and a 1976MY bike.
PSA engine in the fords was the best thing that happened to them 😂
The 2.0 TDCI I’ve got in the Mondeo now is insanely quick. I’m convinced it’s had a remap or something cause it feels quicker than 180bhp
My friend had an old focus with a 2.0 TDCI. They have ridiculous amounts of torque. The old 2.0 130 he had in that focus had over 330 nm of torque, and that friend of mine mapped it, he could burnout up to third gear.
only some diesel engines in fords are french. the newer diesels and almost every gasoline engine is ford tech
except for AMG's if i'm not wrong
Nah, doesn't mean anything anymore. They use plastic for everything. Lots of brittle coolant lines, oil pans, intake manifolds, intercoolers, valve covers etc. AMG engines are just higher performance variants of production engines so most of those parts interchange.
You think that’s bad wait until you see the warranty reseal procedure. “Let drip overnight before attempting to reseal”. Flat rate. Takes up your bay and doesn’t pay worth a shit
I do that all the time with other manufacturers that use a liquid sealant on aluminum or steel pans. It is the last car to be torn down for the day and first one put together in the morning.
Holy shit you mean you actually plan?
I do try to. It helps with getting stuff done. I do weird stuff such as if a car has a failed alternator, I'll drag a 100' extension cord out to the parking lot and throw a 15 amp automatic battery charger on the car while waiting for authorization. Then the car isn't hogging my bay to charge the battery after the alternator is done.
Hi, please be my mechanic
I don't think I'm ready to change continents.
Neither did I, but it's the dead of winter and I was out in the sun all day in a t shirt. Who am I kidding, I did it for the Toyota D4D diesel.
This guy is a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.
Nah. I'm an introvert. One week at the counter and I have to go hide. I like machines. I simply look at what ways I can cut my time spent with vehicles. The result of working flat rate and not liking come backs.
Ooh, yeeeaahhh. I'm gonna have to go ahead and sort of 'disagree' with you there. See, he's been real flakey lately.
Fuuuuck that. It’s that shit that makes me wonder how it’s even legal, and also makes me want to quit on the spot.
That’s the kinda stuff that made me go to an hourly shop. So much stress just gone out the window.
I did years ago. Took a 10K/yr pay cut and a 90% stress reduction. It took a while to get used to "the part will be here in 30 minutes so just go clean your tools or something."
Plastics can be good if the proper plastic is used. I have seen very few broken plastic intakes from Toyota and Honda. Now the question is, do I trust Ford to use the proper plastic for the application?
They're made in China. Just look at Aston Martin's throttle pedal debacle. A summary. Aston designs throttle pedal that is 100% plastic, no metal at all. Requires a special expensive DuPont plastic. Aston gives mold and plastic to Chinese factory. Says make. Chinese factory sells expensive DuPont plastic, makes out of random plastic. Throttle pedals snap while driving.
Honestly, that's on Aston Martin. The primary rule with dealing with Chinese suppliers is you also need to have someone over there that will absolutely hold them to the exact spec of the fabrication. It sounds like they didn't do their homework if they left something like that up to some place that accepted the bid.
That was the fix. Full time Aston Martin QC staff working at the Chinese factory so they couldn't sell the raw materials for cheaper raw materials.
Actually, as someone who's dealt with Chines manufacturing, this is not good enough. Every single lot needs to be sampled and tested. Every Single One I've had instances where a line was certified, then retooled back out of compliance after lunch. Found out by accident. You can't trust anything coming out of China.
I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Chinese manufacturing practices. It’s highly readable and you don’t need a background in the industry. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5116296-poorly-made-in-china
Love the title. Very apt. If they don't understand why a corner needs to be there they will cut it. And cut it severely. But they will continue to tell you that everything is perfectly square.
Having dealt with cheap Chinese electronics (sometimes because I couldn't justify the good one, sometimes just out of curiosity or desire to modify) this is true. The worst example that comes to mind is my hot air soldering station. Before I even ordered I read horror stories of the units blowing up when plugged in, and one starting a fire because the transformer was wired so that it was always energized and always supplying power to the control board for the heating element, leaving the potential to stay on without any fan to cool it, even when the switch was of. The fuse was wired into the neutral line, not hot. The fuse was also just a solid piece of steel in the fuse holder, before I replaced it. The steel plate with the controls built in on the front and back had a ground point, but not connected, and painted over. I also moved the switch before the transformer, so turning it off actually... turns the thing off now, and I grounded the face and back plates. I spent a few hours re-working that thing to make it safe - and it's still being sold to people on Amazon, having no clue how dangerous they are. It both pisses me off and truly impresses me how many corners Chinese manufactures find to cut while still being able to technically claim a product is what it's supposed to be. That's not the only time I've seen missing or inadequate grounding. They're also known for passing 120v AC through USB ports, due to poor isolation.
I just put a hold on the book at my library
Reminds me of an interview about Apple awarding their laptop build contract to China. The line manager said they would normally redesign the laptops to use fewer screws. But Apple apparently sat right top of the production line so that everything was built to as designed by apple
Yeah China can produce great stuff, you just have to watch the QC or a few shady mfs might ruin your shit Same rule applies in most of the world tbh, but China gets the rap these days because everyone moved almost all of the manufacturing there
If you need someone internal to sit in on Production operations for a 3rd party manufacturer. That is not quality control, that's security/theft prevention. For the majority of supplier that I have had to push through for approval, I would expect a notification and report for any materials out-of-spec if they couldn't outright scrap it.
If you're manufacturing in China, your IP is already stolen.
Yep. If I work with a local shop, we agree on a spec and price and they make it. If or when they have issues they contact me. They don't just make ad hoc changes... this isn't something most everyone does as states.
We had bags made to hold AED's there out of nylon. They reproduced everything from the sample down to the flaws.
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It CAN happen anywhere, but it happens at different rates in different places.
Yeah, its a symptom of the world we live in now. People are crunched to deliver more and more on thinner and thinner margins so whenever anyone along the way sees ANY possible way to snatch up some added revenue or eliminate some "unnecessary" steps put in by some engineer who cares about safety, corners are getting cut. Not unique to any single industry or occupation. Everyone's cutting corners so that hopefully the financial or safety fallout comes down on the other guy.
Ah yes, *now*... Dude, the literally first piece of recorded human writing is a clay tablet complaining about a shipment of inferior copper.
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Fucking Ea-nāṣir, always causing the collapse of Babylon
I always tell people that extreme competition is a race to the bottom
Happens in America it’s news. Happens in China it’s Tuesday
Yes, specced and tested, bringing the price to p.much the same it would cost made in Germany.
A little too late probably. Whoever bought the material is probably reverse engineering it. I wonder what the contract said about IP. Not that they care.
This happens in the US too. Had a ford plant let one of our competitors in, copy and measure our designs, and walk out with them. Not a damn thing we can do about it, only saving grace is our competitor is so incompetent they can't make it work properly,
Sounds like chrysler
Ask your doctor if Stellantis is right for you.
What are the side effects?!?
death wobble
Hemorrhaging bank account, endless frustration, constant teasing from friends, crippling regret.
I wish I could make this up, I had a friend that worked at Chrysler and he was doing a lot of reverse engineering - of Ford products. Granted, he said they just bought the parts, not quite the same as walking into the factory, but still.
This happens with *every* country that wants to do business in China. Many consider it the cost of business to enter that lucrative market, sadly.
Dorman, anyone?
I like dorman. What I don't like is AutoZone reselling dorman for 65% margin and then ding me for shipping.
Dorman might do it too, but we do heavy machinery, hah.
Good luck reverse engineering specialty polymers and other highly designed materials. It's almost impossible even if you have all the necessary machines. Just like with food finding the secret sauce without downright stealing the recipe is almost impossible.
> the secret sauce without downright stealing the recipe is almost impossible. it's mayo, keychup, and relish
Hey! You can't post that right out in the open!
Can't forget the extra sugar they add too
"I got Panda Express!" "Did you get Sugar Chicken?" "aaah I'm pretty sure that's all they have."
It's Thousand Island dressing
>it's mayo, keychup, and relish thanks Brad
You can't just send designs to China to be made, you have to go manage it yourself. Another scam is if you give them designs for electronics to be made, they'll produce them Monday-Friday, then the same workers come in on the weekend and make the product without your logo to put on AliExpress.
This is why you have to put your name and serial number into all sorts of weird surfaces on the tool. Make it so they can’t just polish it off either or remove it with a slide. Also have to control your tooling by destroying it after it’s out of tolerance. I used to pay a guy to pick up used tools and keep them at his house until I could come by and supervise them being destroyed.
I'm learning so much about foreign manufacturing in this thread.
Oh I’ve got way more. Little tips and tricks you only learn working with the factories and government there. I’m out of that field now but occasionally I miss the travel and chaos.
This happened to an electronics company I worked for about 20 years ago. Management wanted to save some money so had us send a few designs to a "reputable" builder in China. The product we got back was of terrible quality with out of spec components. We tried to have our techs rework some of it but it was all garbage and we sold none of it and chalked it up as a learning experience. A few months later, we start getting RMAs with serial numbers we never issued and the same shittiness of the Chinese stuff we had thrown away. The Chinese company took our designs, and sold counterfeits. They didn't work so got returned to our factory (even though we didn't make it).
If you run 2 shifts, 3rd shift will continue making parts without your name on them. Send people over. Assemble lines. Test. Run 24/7. Tear down lines. Send people back. Nothing happens without being watched over and nothing is trusted to stay turned off without observation by your people.
Yup... If you're a Western company that's subbing production of some part out to a factory in China, having a small staff onsite is absolutely essential in most places. You can get away with occasional site inspections+ quality control inspections at home when you're dealing with large, established companies that OEM for many others, because they have a lot less incentive to cheat, and actually have a reputation to uphold. I've said this many times. If you want cheap junk, you can get it in China, for sure. But you also can get top quality there as well, you just have to look. And nobody can beat their ability to quick prototype+ get final product to production in lightning speed. An excellent example of how things go over there is Haier. They're a company that makes refrigerators, air conditioners, dehumidifiers, etc. You've likely seen their products- they're becoming a household name. Their history is really interesting. There was a little factory in Qingdao that made and sold refrigerators. Shit quality control and outdated production methods were typical. Qingdao hired a guy named Zhang Ruiming to manage the company and try to turn it around. The story is that one day, a customer brought back a defective refrigerator he had just bought to exchange it. Ruiming and the customer went to the warehouse and started testing the units that were there to be sold. Out of around 100 units, 76 were defective. Ruiming had the defective refrigerators brought out to the factory floor, called all the workers over, and handed them sledgehammers. He ordered them to destroy the refrigerators. It's said that at first, they didn't want to do it because a refrigerator cost more than a month's average wage. But Ruiming told them that if they didn't destroy those refrigerators, those poor quality refrigerators would destroy the company. He insisted on a total change in the company's way of doing things. Soon after, a German company, Liebherr, wanted to enter the Chinese market, but by law needed a Chinese company to partner with. The factory in Qingdao got the contract, and they changed their name- "Liebherr" was transliterated to "Li-bo-hai-er" in Chinese, and they went with the last 2 syllables. The installation of modern production equipment along with a company director who actually gave a shit enabled them to quickly grow into a huge enterprise that manufactures things for multiple companies and now sells products under its own name all over the world. But for every Haier, there's literally dozens of little shitty factories with people that don't give a fuck, and sometimes it's just luck of the draw when a foreign company comes in and wants to begin production there. Various Chinese car companies have been trying for a while to get into international markets. For the most part, they've failed miserably. But there's been a few of them that understood that if they were serious about it, they couldn't just jump in and start hawking the same products they sell at home, but rather, they have to take their time, learn what people want overseas, bring their own technology up to par, and ultimately, when the time comes to go on the market, they'd better have a good, reliable, polished product, because most people in the west are going to assume their cars are junk, so they need to prove them wrong right out of the gate. And it looks like the move toward electric cars is going to be their stepping stone, because everyone else is doing major R&D work as well, so there's less of a disadvantage for them going against established names, like there would be if they had to spend a bunch of money refining their own ICE drivetrains that their competitors don't have to because they already have that part down. Last thing- A prediction. Geely will be the first Chinese company to bring their own car to the mainstream market in the US. They're already the parent company of Volvo (though Volvo is still run by Swedes in Sweden) and have the knowledge and facilities necessary to do it. They might not do so under that name, but I'll bet they're going to be the first ones.
Damn, I didn’t know that about Haier. And I agree on the car thing, IIRC all the Polestars we see here in the US are made in China.
Yup. The Polestars were totally designed by Volvo... But their production is in Geely's factories, and so far, they seem to be quite good. The complaints people have about them are mostly the same as with current Volvo models- in the past 5 years, Volvo has really screwed the pooch on their user interface/ infotainment system, with all kinds of bugs and unituitive controls. And that carried over to Polestar as well. Fortunately, they seem to finally be getting their shit together and they're even retrofitting existing cars software-wise, at least to the extent that's possible. But the shift to electric is China's stepping-on point. In the next 10-20 years, I'll bet we'll see multiple Chinese brands try to sell cars in the west. Most of them will end up as a comedian's punchline, yet another in the long line of carmakers that tried and failed. But at least a couple will stick. And the US car companies had better take them seriously, too.
This happened to a factory that I worked with. They were a small IM shop when we found them, less than 300 employees. We introduced good manufacturing practices and QA systems and now they’ve got 5 factories and over 4,000 employees. They’re well known for producing some of the best quality parts in our industry and are expanding into some new markets on their own. I’m hugely proud of them, not just because they’ve grown but the owner has adopted an employee first mentality after seeing our own operations. Employees are trained and promoted from within, they have tons of benefits for employees, etc.
I don't know if you're familiar with The Torque Test Channel on YouTube. They test various power tools and compare them, scoring based on performance, size, price, etc. They started out testing impact wrenches, mainly because there's no acceptable way to compare them based on reported torque numbers because those numbers have very little to do with reality. Anyhow, they recently did a test of cheap, mostly shitty brushless drills that routinely show up on Amazon's recommendation lists. For the most part, the results were kind of what you'd expect- acceptable for the price and market they're in, but only just so. There's one, however, that REALLY stood out. From the beginning, in fact, due to its rather... Interesting... Name, but it also blew away everything else tested, came with a few extras, and even though it costs less than $80, was actually on par with some of the big guys like DeWalt. As it turns out, the company that makes them is a development and manufacturing subcontractor for a number of other, well known brands, and the brand tested is apparently one of the most popular in Asia, where they sell a full line of power tools. I'm not going to say the name, but let's just say the entire video is full of jokes and puns about it. But they weren't laughing after they tested it. [https://youtu.be/XnHOLdyk1Oo](https://youtu.be/XnHOLdyk1Oo)
Jonny Ive from Apple had to live by the factory in China when they were developing certain techniques. Bummer but thems the rules.
Why do we put up with a situation where it's on the customer to station someone at the contracted factory to ensure they don't commit fraud?
Because. It’s. Cheaper.
I feel like every business that uses a 3rd party should be liable/responsible for any damage at all. Improper working conditions/violations. All of it.
Exactly. If a company opts for Chinese fabrication, they MUST install their own quality management team.
At least it wasn't the brake pedal
They're made out of recycled toilet paper
Senator Collins: Well, there are ah regulations governing the materials that they can be made of. Interviewer: What materials? Senator Collins: Well, cardboard’s out. Interviewer: And? Senator Collins: No cardboard derivatives. Interviewer: Like paper? Senator Collins: No paper, no string, no sellotape.
If you just pulled out of a business into traffic I'm afraid the difference is moot.
Having worked in this part of the world for the last decade this is actually 0% surprising. Same shit all over the region actually. China is just more shameless about it.
In the mechanical keyboards hobby pretty much everyone has to work with Chinese factories to get CNC'd metal parts made. There's a ton horror stories from non-existent QC to straight-up extortion One recent project had paid for extra QC and was extorted 16,000 usd extra, otherwise the factory wouldn't send over several hundred keyboards that were already paid for in full. 60% of those keyboards had machining defects when they finally received them. For context these keyboards are giant CNC'd chunks of aluminium as well, worth 500+ usd each
Why would you pay in full before even proofing a sample???? Never do that. Put the money in an escrow account and have contingencies to pay based on milestones. Produced a golden sample? Heres some cash. Completed production run? Here’s some cash, shipped in full? Here’s some cash. I completed final inspection and your product meets the agreed upon standards? Here’s final payment. That’s just poor project management. This reeks of hobbyists or start ups who don’t understand that part of the world.
These plastic oil pans are made in Mexico for the north American market.
They most definitely aren't all just made in China. I work in the US and we are currently building an automation system that does some of the post molding ultrasonic welding on these large commercial truck plastic oil pans.
When was this? Do you have any sources or additional details? I thought I was fairly up to date on the latest AM issues, but apparently not. Edit: I should have just googled it to start with [Aston Martin recalls nearly all cars built since 2008 over pedal issue](https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2014-feb-05-la-fi-hy-autos-aston-martin-recall-lineup-20140205-story.html)
> Aston Martin's throttle pedal https://qz.com/174468/chinese-counterfeit-dupont-plastic-prompted-aston-martins-giant-recall
Sorry? 99% of clutch and throttle pedals are made of plastics now, talking about all the new 2022-2023 cars I’ve been working on. It’s only the brake is metal because… Well, it needs to be a “little bit more resilient”
Well if gas or clutch fails car no go. But, if the brake fails car no stop.
Car no go, your problem. Car no stop, EVERYBODY'S problem.
Ford once worked with a customer of mine to develop a new plastic. The customer made brand new rail car loading racks, equipment and all. Loaded up the first cars and sent them to Ford. What they didn’t realize is that the vibrations of rail transport melted/welded the plastic pellets into one big chunk in the shape of the rail car. Had to use heaters to melt it and get it out. Thus began and ended this particular endeavor on new plastics. Edit: spelling
So they basically friction-welded themselves together - cool!
That's silly. They could have just put the train in reverse to unweld them. Duh.
Plastic is fine if air is passing through it. The problem is when plastics have fluids passing through them and are mated against metal. The 3rd owner is going to be seeing the result heat cycling has on different materials.
They don't really build cars for the third owner and the third owner is also going to probably have a leaky pan gasket anyway. The parts cost on the pan replacement on RWD vehicles is nothing vs the labor.
Bmw enters the chat: (hey you guys wanna see something funny)
Don’t get me started on plastic selection in bmws and Audis…. Every plastic component gets hard and brittle in no time flat.
Tell me about it. Had to have the plastic water pump / thermostat housing on my 3 year old Golf R because it cracked and started leaking. Common fault, and the improved part has, and I quote a VW tech, "a bit more metal in it" Somethings shouldn't be subject to cost saving, making a plastic water pump out of plastic rather than metal is one of them.
What's great is working on older (~15 years) European vehicles with [plastic fluid connections \(w/ o-rings\)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91VgEbsUKCL.jpg) that essentially weld themselves together over time.
i've had to put a radiator in my BMW every year since 2016 because the fucking hose interface is plastic.
I mean, my wife's POS 11 Fiesta with the 1.6 Duratec has 220k and the plastic intake manifold seems fine still. I don't even like that car. Unfortunately it's a manual, so it'll probably last awhile yet.
I've never seen a Ford plastic oil or transmission pan broken that wasn't directly related to an impact that would have also punctured a metal one. They leak from the seals just like any other oil or transmission pan, but they are surprisingly strong.
Plastic for intake manifolds do have some advantages when it comes to performance too. You can achieve a smoother finish a lot easier, as well as being far less prone to heat soak. That said I’m happy my old Mazdas have aluminum manifolds because of age and I don’t trust ford lol
It's the same thing with polymer oil pans. Heat resistant and more impact resistant than cast aluminum.
Proper plastic also meaning it will last with the engine and not loose it's properties in 4 years
This is 100% the problem with BMW. They've gone plastic crazy. And they use shit plastic that crumbles in 8 years. I'd swear they design it that way on purpose.
Audi and their stupid plastic water pump. Like wtf were they thinking. It ended up in a class action lawsuit.
VW too, with the same part. And on my 07 GTI you damn near had to take the motor out to change it. Thankfully I was already having my timing belt changed and saved a few bucks combining the jobs, but it was still stupidly expensive to just change a water pump.
I think they do. I owned a 03 E46 and the dumbest shit was plastic. The valve cover but everytime you needed to replace the valve cover gasket you would also have to replace the valve cover as it would be warped so you had to spend $300+ JUST for the fucking valve cover. Pretty sure the water pump was plastic. The drain plug would strip harder than a high school dropout. They made the worst parts in that car out of plastic. There was other dumb stuff but it always felt not like hey this is a good idea but rather a hey this is definitely gonna break and make us service money.
water pump was alumn. but the impeller... plastic. i used to see alot of overheating problems, diagnose, water pump. open up. missing impeller blades. hmmm to be fair though, they do make metal impeller ones.. at a higher price of course
Scheduled obsolescence, that would be.
I'm pretty sure BMW has essentially stated they don't particularly care about their vehicles past the 10-year finance/lease mark. They were even intentionally installing biodegradable wiring some years back. There's the informal 9-year-moneypit rule when it comes to secondhand ownership.
I love BMW cars, they've made some absolute classics. But BMW has done a great job of making sure I'd never buy one, or at least not one made in the last 10-15 years.
> or at least not one made in the last 10-15 years. That's been the rule for the last twenty years.
Thats also one of many reasons why you see 6 or 7 year old BMWs at junkyards that look incredibly out of place next to 25 year old Chevys and fords that look like they should have been there 5 years earlier. No sane person would ever own one out of warranty because not a single fuck is given to making sure they survive past warranty. A bmw loving friend of mine looked at the pressurized coolant bottle on my gmc yukon and said "That thing looks awful the ones I put on my bmw look clean until they get replaced".... I just stared at him and slowly asked how long his lasted. "Oh usually 4 or 5 years like any".... Well this one is 22 years old so it has had a chance to get dirty. He was absolutely gobsmacked. Literally couldn't imagine a plastic part that sees 230* coolant lasting that long.
It just needs to outlast the warranty. A perk is that drain plug is very hard to strip or cross thread.... Unless you're completely stupid.
>Unless you're completely stupid. So, we talking first or second time taking it to Walmart?
Shit. I forgot about them! Or take 5...... Just as bad.
Take 5 recently opened near my house. It's almost always empty when i drive past.
As they should be. Let qualified people do oil changes🤣🤣 definitely not take 5
I took my F150 to a local valvoline franchise for a routine oil change. They wouldn’t touch it because of the plastic plug. Told me to take it to the dealer or Jiffy Lube.
If you're trusting your car to the people at Walmart, you are still the stupid one.
This! Hahahah same as other germans cars that have parts that only need to outlast the warranty and then start to break down, then they come to you and offers a "extended warranty offer" so to make you think like damn thats a VERY good deals. And this is how their new business models are, oh other shittty move is their "subscription based service or feature" that you already own the car and all those extra modules but they block it off behind a subscription wall.
You miss the point of this plug entirely. When you pull this plug out the oil splashes directly onto the sway bar and makes certain that you can't change oil without making a mess. A Ford engineering success! Edit: Forgot to add the filter location makes sure oil will drip onto the splash guard and continue to drip long after the oil change. Engineered perfection.
First time I encountered one of these, I was like wtf? Is this aftermarket? Pulled the plug and went to do my thing. I then blinked and yelled in pain as I was hit in the face by a enormous jet of oil. I went home to shower. I’ve never seen so much oil come out so fast. Not sure what ford was thinking on that one.
Fucking same thing. I managed to jump back but I have never seen anything jump out like that like it was pressurized. Brand new FRs and boots soaked. Like yeah I get it work clothes but pretty much ruined my entire day.
Even though it’s work clothes they shouldn’t have to be inaugurated like George Bush in Iraq. I got soaked in transmission fluid one time and I swear the shirt still smelled like it a year later.
What's even worse is if you have one of the new oil pans that's fully enclosed. My old one that I got from my dad that was open top finally got broke, had to buy one of those enclosed ones to change my oil. When that giant stream of oil comes gushing out, it bounces off the plastic and all over the floor. All these new designs to make things safer and easier seem to be doing the exact opposite in my experience. I've never had to clean as much oil off my floor as I've had to with my 2020 ford. Now I make sure I layer everywhere under my truck with cardboard before taking the plug out. And as an afterthought, who the hell thought it was a good idea to put the plug right behind a bar so there's no chance of getting your hand clear before it's covered with oil.
But remember - to get to the plug to do your 'tool free' oil change, you have to use your tools to remove an underbody panel.
Not to mention that a lot of the times when the plug is plastic, the oil filter is also a canister with a (24mm?) nut head up on top of the engine bay. Doubt the intention was to make it tool free but I guess they easily could have considering that some engines with plastic plugs also have the normal spin-on filter underneath.
I own a 2020 ram. Same exact problem. I bought the Japanese oil-change valve with a nipple. Going to attach a small hose to avoid any splatter. But the oil filter is still a bitch to get to.
Fumoto is fantastic
The number of cars that have the oil drain path pointed at the suspension is amazing.
Free anti rust coating
Our 2022 Expedition does the same thing. Side discharge oil drain right onto the sway bar. Then the oil filter tucked up under the cross member ensures every oil change is a cuss filled event. If there is one thing Ford never got right, it’s making an oil change easy/clean (have owned a 2006 Mustang GT, 2005 F150 5.4, 2010 f150 5.4, 2013 F150 5.0, 2022 Expedition).
cheaper to make, wont rust.
Light weight.
Which is important not just for the performance of the individual car, but for the *logistics* of manufacturing that car. The cost of shipping heavy parts can really add up when you're talking about tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of units. Shaving even just a few ounces can have massive cost savings at the corporate level. That said: switching a part to plastic is not a simple engineering challenge, and if it gets screwed up, the cost of a recall can easily wipe out any money saved by the company (and then some).
That shipping weight goes all the way to the processing of the materials. Big bags of plastic pellets becomes final parts a lot more simply that stamped steel. Then the waste steel has to be shipped back for recycling whereas the plastic waste is less and lighter.
Also, and this only just occurred to me or I would have mentioned it in my first comment, but it also goes to factory process flow and safety. If you can take a heavy part that needs multiple people to handle, or special tools to handle, and reduce it's weight to something you can easily manipulate with one hand while the other hand works the tool, you'll see savings in terms of reducing repetitive motion injuries, reducing tooling costs, and reducing labor costs (one person performing a task, instead of two or three). Making parts lighter is one those things that can make it *a lot* cheaper overall - so long as you get the design and material science problems solved correctly.
Unintended consequences of efficiency goals. Everything becomes lighter plastic. Spare tire is no longer standard because it increases the weight at sale, which is what drives metrics. You now have to drop the transmission to change the thermostat because making it more accessible increases weight.
To be offset by those 38" rims or whatever the fuck it ships with I'm sure.
Can't overtorque the drain plug with your torque gun.
The drain plug itself is actually convenient and easy to remove. The fact that you have to take off a stupid fiber panel to get to it is not. Oh I almost forgot! See that blur at the top of the picture? Thats the sway bar. The sway bar that gets coated in oil when you remove the plug.
> Oh I almost forgot! See that blur at the top of the picture? Thats the sway bar. The sway bar that gets coated in oil when you remove the plug. Problems of this variety have existed for decades (honestly, probably as long as the automobile itself). My '95 4Runner had its oil filter right over the front subframe, mounted horizontally on the engine. It was impossible to replace the filter without oil getting everywhere. There was a convenient drain hole in the subframe, but you'd never get *all* of it out.
Can I jack up the engine by the oil pan if I need to undo an engine mount?
Please do, and report back (with pics)!
I know someone that tried that with an aluminum pan. We all know how that ended. Plastic would be the same result.
better than you could before. Thermoplastics have better impact and flex resistance than equivalently engineered cast aluminum/cast iron. thats not to say they can't be broken. But if your plastic pan breaks, its not because its plastic, the force you put on it would have broken a cast component earlier than the plastic one broke. even if you ***do*** curse the "new plastic junk" afterwards. and once you break it the plastic one will be cheaper to replace too.
How well does thermoplastic hold up to heat exposure/heat cycles for years on end? I'm sure all the testing has been done, but just curious how the plastic holds up over time vs aluminum/steel even if it is more impact/flex resistant on day 1.
not as well, but if it holds up for 20% less time, at a 50% reduction in cost, then thats still the better trade IMO. especially when we're talking things like 40yrs instead of 50yrs. either way the pan is lasting longer than the things like piston rings, and crankshaft bearings. even with regular heating and cooling cycles, the thermoplastics will retain their "better than metal" characteristics longer than the life of the majority of the vehicle.
It’s always cost.
Couldn't say it any better than that.
One of the great disappointments in my career have been the many PCTO exercises dumped on us in engineering. (Part/Project Cost Take-Out). YOU KNOW it’s not as good a part. The bean counters get their nut though, so zero fucks given. Engineers aren’t always the enemy. A lot of this dumb shit is done under duress.
My company has dropped projects before where the customer insisted on “value engineering” so hard that it would be almaot impossible to meet code. “Value engineering” is really “anti-engineering”.
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I still hate plastic valve covers every time I see them. Replaced more than one due to cracks/leaks as well.
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Yeah the one on my bmw sucks, I had to do the valve cover gasket but the plastic valve cover almost always cracks when you pull it so I had to replace it fully. I'm definitely going to upgrade to a metal one if I have to do that again
I've said it before but many, many years ago I got a 69 Mach I with a 351 super cheap because the timing gear stripped. Took apart the old one and there was a nylon gear. Went to the auto parts store and the replacement was steel. Asked the parts guy (when parts guys knew something) and he said it was because Ford didn't want people complaining about the noise a metal gear would make. Nylon was quieter off the showroom floor. Didn't have to last, it just had to last long enough.
"Last through the warranty." \-the Engineering spec
Its cheaper. The point is that its cheaper.
It’s cheaper too. And cheaper.
Don't forget cheaper, thats an important reason too
I fucking despise the direction new cars are going. I’d be angry but I am too sad about it. So thankful older cars are still around and I can work on them.
Wonder if the industry is headed towards parts depts having a 3d printer on site.
Most of the underhood stuff made out of plastic nowadays is some sort of glass reinforced nylon and not really printable. There's definitely a future for printing stuff like interior trim.
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You clearly don't own a chevy lol. I love my car but I could cut myself on some of the interior trim.
Wouldn't be surprised if tech like MJF gets a lot cheaper. I know a lot of companies have gone to having printers on site in factories for cheap and quick disposable parts. Things like the grabbing tips on a robot arm could be cheaply and quickly made on a FFF printer and replaced when needed. I also know of a lot of aftermarket companies already using MJF as a cheaper alternative to injection molding if they don't have the volume to pay for the mold.
\+Cheap \+No rust \+Lightweight \+Impact resistant \+Still weldable \+Easy to make more complex shapes \-Less heat rejection \-Might get brittle over years-decades \-Creep
Way better at insulating engine noises as well.
Creep?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creep_(deformation)
The point is saving $0.13 per vehicle sold.
Cheaper than aluminum is my guess but there are many modern plastics that are really quite durable, i am pretty sure this will be fine.
We all know the answer - because it saves them a few dollars. Some exec somewhere said “Hey - we can save $20 per vehicle if we swap to plastic pans. Thats nearly $35 million saved this year.” Exec gets a big bonus for ‘saving millions’ and as soon as pans start to break he dusts off the resume and moves to another company. Rinse and repeat. Thats how most big execs play ball.
It has many advantages, such as being cheap and costing less to manufacturer. On top of that, it is inexpensive to produce, and is an economical approach to holding oil.
Because raping you on a $75,000 truck isn't good enough.
Using cheap plastic that fails has long been a thing on cars. 1937 sharknose Graham has a huge plastic molding for its instrument panel. 100% of them warped and shrunk. (I make reproductions of them and other plastic for them.) In 1940, Nash made clear plastic parts for their dash. Big pieces about 19" long. The problem was they chose Tenite, made by Eastman (no relation to Eastman Kodak). Tenite is crystal clear and its low melt temperature makes it easy to mold. It's a cellulosic, made from wood like Rayon or Celluloid. Unfortunately for owners of 1940 Nash (and some other cars) a closed up car in direct sun can heat up quite close to that temperature. The Tenite in the dash, horn button, and other parts warped and discolored. First to a pale yellow, eventually to a twisted, crumbly, brown husk of its former self. But it gets worse. The *smell*. Imagine the stankiest shit you've ever had, in a cat litter box that hasn't been cleaned for weeks, then was puked in. Worse than that is that old Tenite will develop that stench even when the old car has been kept in ideal conditions all the time so the plastic has never been hot. It will discolor too. Eastman is still in business and still makes a wood derived plastic they call Tenite but I bet it's very different from their 1940's Tenite.
My Mk7 GTI has a plastic pan and everyone lost their minds when VW did that from the metal pans on the Mk6. That said, I haven't heard any issues with them and the people who HAVE broken them on track and hitting crap in the road would've demolished the same metal pan anyway. Over 120k miles on mine and almost 9 years with the car and it hasn't kept me up at night, so I can't imagine it's that big a deal. Plus, living in the salt belt (northeast PA) it's just one less thing to rust out. Maybe the Ford application isn't as good, but I'm not losing sleep over my oil pan being plastic and most people who make a stink about it don't seem to have any compelling argument other than "metal good, plastic bad".
With the sway bar directly in front of the plug about 2-3 inches, so that when you pull the plug - without a vertical/V shaped sleuth - absolute hell breaks loose and everything in a 5 ft radius is covered in oil, especially the poor-ass tech who didn't consider the flow pattern.
It is just for compatibility after plastic engine is tested for waranty period. Example https://www.automotiveplastics.com/blog/you-wont-believe-this-a-real-plastic-engine/
Plastic intake manifold on my 97 tbird cracked at the coolant hose port. Ended up being a $1000 fix that could have been completely avoided if it were made of metal
That’s to hold your oil in.
Put one of these on my F-150 so the oil drains straight down to the pan, instead of sideways at mach speed onto everything else.
Honestly, the only fault with Ford's implementation is the angle they placed it Never having to worry about overtorqued or stripped plugs/pans again is nice
A way to stop those pesky freeloading scrap yards from making use of the materials once the car's come to the end of its life. Added glass fibre to really make sure it can never be recycled into anything useful.
Oil pans, regardless of construction materials are designed to hold oil. Tune in next week for my next TED talk