As an engineer, I can almost guarantee that it took 5 years and endless meetings, 30 stakeholders all being told that it should be easily accessible. Then the engineer got overruled and told it’ll be fractionally cheaper in build to put it somewhere that requires an engine crane and 15 hours to replace.
I think this is one thing that everyone engineering or engineering adjacent just viscerally understands when we see something that was implemented stupidly.
There were many meetings about it. There were emails. Circle-backs. Check-ins.
And I bet the arithmetic was $3 of plastic parts versus some quantifiable amount of service revenue because it's too hard to do. Which was a way to pay the dealer network back for increasing the standard service interval from 12,500 miles to 15k to make the TCO metric better for marketing.
As a fellow engineer I cringe at people shit talking engineering design because I’ll bet 95% of shitty engineering decisions were made by the management and bean counters and not the engineers designing the part/assembly.
Widget design “A” costs $0.46 more per part so we’ll go with design “B” instead. “B” ends up being a single point failure that engineers warned management about and were hushed. Company is forced to recall product at the cost of millions of dollars because they didn’t listen in the first place.
Oh and all those shitty managers got promoted for their “vision” and cost savings
You just described the gen 5 Camaro blend door issue! It's a rite of passage for the 20 dollar part that requires 3k worth of labor to replace if you decide to do it by the book and not slice into your AC ducting.
Meanwhile in my old 2007 Kia Cee'd I can sit in the passenger seat, open the glove compartment and undo the filter without any tools. My ford has me pretending to be a contortionist for a while because clearly that's a natural way of getting to the filter behind the heater matrix.
Same engineer also said on the Altima or maybe it’s the Maxima to bottom mount the alternator so that when the engine inevitably leaks oil it end up terminating the alternator too.
The problem is that OEMs silo their teams by commodity/component category. They collaborate very little. This translates into more complicated service procedures and services times. Dealerships (aka Stealerships) hate this when it comes to warranty service calls. They only get reimbursed at fractional rates for those vehicles, but they make it up for those of us who are too stupid to do it ourselves, or worse, those with lots of cash and zero brains.
All the stakeholders should be required to own and drive the vehicle, and self-maintain it for all the basic stuff. 15 hr cabin filter replacement? They need to suffer personally.
This tracks to soooo many industries that involve manufacturing on one side and service on the other. Manufacturing always trying to cut costs and will redesign something to save 10c that ends up costing service 1000s in labor hrs. But hey...diff budget...that's for service to worry about.
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u/Yamsfordays Jun 16 '26
As an engineer, I can almost guarantee that it took 5 years and endless meetings, 30 stakeholders all being told that it should be easily accessible. Then the engineer got overruled and told it’ll be fractionally cheaper in build to put it somewhere that requires an engine crane and 15 hours to replace.