I have learned my lesson about European cars. I've always been a Volvo fan, and I've owned two. I had a 98 S70 and a 2008 S60. I never really had any trouble with the S70. It was a great car. I bought it with about 26k miles on it, and traded it with about 95k. The problem is maintenance cost. I had gotten a good price on the car, so my payments were not that high, but by the end of year #2, the maintenance and upkeep cost worked out to be higher than the cost of the loan. (bad headlight switch..$150, power window motor...$500, routine maintenance anywhere from $50-200...timing belt change at 75k miles...$800) The 2008 S60 turned out to be a huge pain in the rear. I bought it brand-new with less than 30 miles on it. It came with a 5 year/50k mile warranty. I bought an extended warranty to go to 7 year/100k miles. I loved the car - it was great to drive, go good gas mileage, was extremely comfortable, and had an awesome audio system in it. However, it started to have all sorts of quirky electronic issues at about 30k miles. To make matters worse, the dealership in Tuscaloosa closed, so I had to drive about 40-45 minutes away to the one in Birmingham. At 55k miles (just over when the factory warranty expired/the extended on took over), all the electronics went haywire. One night, I walked outside to get something out of the car and noticed that the remote would no longer unlock the door. Hmmm...dead battery in the remote I suppose... So I went in and go the other one - same thing. I used the key to unlock the door, and the alarm did not go off. In fact, the light continued to blink that it was armed. I cranked the car, and the engine started, but there were no instruments, no exterior lights, etc... after a second the blower on the air conditioner came on. So, I turned the engine off, but the a/c blower wouldn't turn off. After several times cranking/turning it off, it finally went off. About an hour later, the alarm started going off! This was near midnight! Nothing I tried would make it stop, so I decided to unhook the battery. The battery is under the floor of the trunk in a Volvo, and on that model, the trunk lock is e lectronic and can't be opened from the outside with a key (I later found out from the dealer that there is a way to do it). So... I got in the back seat, folded down the seat, and pulled the emergency release in the trunk, emptied everything I had out of there, scrambled around for a wrench, and disconnected the battery cable. My neighbors were all outside to see what was going on by this point. The next morning, I hooked it up and took it to the dealership in Birmingham, with no lights, turn signals, brake lights, or instruments. Luckily my GPS has a speedometer on it :D When I got there, the engine would not turn off, and it took them a bit of fumbling under the hood to turn it off. After hours of troubleshooting, they narrowed down the problem, and gave me the phrases I didn't want to hear: 1. We've never seen anything like this before. 2. We think we know where the problem is, but we are going to have to call Volvo to figure out a part #. 3. Well, we figured out the part #, and there are only two of them in the U.S. We'll have to have one of those dealerships send us one. After they kept the car for ten days, it was finally repaired. The extended warranty covered over $6k worth of repairs to get that going and the rental car cost. Oh, and to add insult to injury, they put me in a Fiat 500! (I'm over 6'3" tall, and about 245lbs). So, everything worked fine for another 5k miles or so, then one headlight and the system that controls the firmness of the suspension, etc... went out. That was another $5k+ repair and another week in a rental. The KBB value of the car was only listed at about $14-15K at this point, and they had already paid well over $11k in repairs. I think the turbo was the only thing that didn't break :D That was the last straw, and I traded it in for a Jeep Compass. My string of bad luck continued, because I got rear-ended a couple of weeks after buying it! The only bright side to that was that the person who hit me was an insurance agent, so I got the first class treament there.
Allen B. ----- Original Message ----- From: Ron Frazier (TECHC) Sent: 01/21/14 10:51 PM To: Tech Chat List Subject: [tech-chat] what technology NOT to buy - a car buying experience (Everything here is just my opinion, and yours may be different.) Hi all, Not long ago, my wife was involved in an auto accident. She's fine, thank the Lord, but the car was totaled. So, we found ourselves having to go car shopping fairly quickly. Being an engineer, I made a checklist of things that we wanted to look for, features, safety, gas mileage, carfax, condition, etc. But, in the end, I found there were a number of things we discovered we DIDN'T want. It's those things that I want to talk about. -------------------- NO TIMING BELT As you probably know, an internal combustion engine works by sucking or forcing air and fuel into a cylinder, squishing it with a piston, igniting it, exploding it (actually a fast burn), then removing the exhaust. During the intake and exhaust phases, valves open and close to allow fuel and air in and exhaust out. Those valves must be precisely controlled. The rotation of the crankshaft controls the position of the pistons. The crank shaft is in the bottom of the engine usually. There are usually cam shafts in the top of the engine which control the opening and closing of the valves. The cam shafts' rotation must be exactly synchronized with the crankshaft's rotation. The typical methods of synchronizing all this stuff include a timing chain tying all this together or a timing belt. I figured out long ago that I don't want a timing belt. It's simply a question of longevity and maintenance cost. A timing chain can last 200,000 miles or more, possibly even the life of the car. A timing belt typically has to be replaced every 60,000 miles. You DON'T want to ignore it if you have a belt. You see, the engineers came up with this "brilliant" design called an Interference Engine. What the heck is that, you ask. The intake and exhaust valves extend downward from above the cylinder and piston area. In an interference engine, if the valves open at the same time as the piston is at the top of its travel, then the valves COLLIDE with the piston. This is BAD. Thus, if the timing belt or chain breaks, and the rotating components become unsynchronized, but continue rotating due to inertia, it can WRECK your entire engine and cost thousands of dollars to fix. As I understand it, you don't have to worry much about breaking a timing chain on a modern car unless it starts rattling or something, but you DO have to worry about breaking a timing belt. Think of it this way, break your timing belt, buy a new engine. When I bought my Hyundai Santa Fe small / mid sized suv, I bought it for other reasons, but I knew it did have a timing belt. The problem is, I didn't know the maintenance history of the car. So, I chose to preemptively have the belt replaced. It's buried pretty deep in the engine, that that was a $ 600 expense I had to absorb right after I bought the car. In 60,000 miles, I have to do it again. The water pump is usually right there, so they usually replace that too while they're in there. So, I don't want a timing belt. Here's a way to determine if you have a timing belt, but not with absolute certainty. Go to the link below and find parts by application. Select passenger cars and light trucks, then proceed to find your car. If Gates sells a timing belt or timing belt kit for your car, you have a timing belt. It will also note if it's an interference engine. You could try my car as an example, select passenger cars and light trucks, 2005, hyundai, suv's, santa fe, 2.7L engine. http://www.gates.com/part_locator/index.cfm?location_id=3598 If it doesn't show anything, maybe you don't have a belt or maybe they don't sell it. You'll have to do more research. You can try googling your car name and the word timing belt, for example 2011 toyota camry se timing belt. For Toyota's, I found a faq on the subject on their website. http://www.toyota.com/support/#!/app/home -------------------- NO HYBRID A hybrid drive train has an internal combustion engine and an electric motor. The electric motor gives extra torque when accelerating and becomes a generator to recover energy when decelerating. This extra energy is stored in a BIG NIMH battery pack typically and extracted when needed. We looked at Toyota Camry Hybrids and even drove one. They're beautiful cars, and they average 35 MPG for a family sedan. What's not to like? I will say that when the engine suddenly shuts down at a stop light, it feels really weird. When it wants to, it starts up again, and keeps doing that. But, the main problem is the battery pack. These are only warranted for 100,000 miles for a Toyota. They cost about $ 3000 - $ 5000 to replace. If you buy an aftermarket battery pack, you don't get the factory warranty. So, if I bought a Camry Hybrid with 80,000 miles, the pack could fail in a short amount of time after the warranty runs out, and I'd face that expense, which is about 1/3 the price of the car (used). Even if it failed within the warranty, I'd have the same problem again 5 or so years later. When I ran the numbers, and figured out the amount of gas I'd save, I figured that the savings probably would NOT offset the cost of buying a new battery pack. To make matters worse, the standard low voltage battery for the Camry Hybrid is not a standard 12 V battery. It's proprietary and costs about $ 400 to replace. Furthermore, if the high voltage battery pack fails, since the motor / generator is what starts the car when you pull away from the traffic light, you cannot run without it. You cannot just run the car in gasoline mode after the battery pack fails. So, I don't want a hybrid. -------------------- NO TURBOCHARGER A turbocharger wrings more power out of an engine by stuffing more air into the combustion chamber. It's driven by exhaust gasses. We drove a turbocharged Hyundai Sonata. The feeling of power and acceleration was great. Even if you don't use it all the time, which would generate terrible gas mileage, it's good to know it's there. However, in reading around on forums and blogs, we found that a number of Hyundai owners were having problems with turbos malfunctioning. The car would abruptly lose power. Since the cars usually have a 20% smaller engine, losing the turbo function cripples the car. Not only that, even the engine's remaining power is not usable since the engine cannot breathe properly. Many owners reported problems with the turbo's wastegate, or other ancillary systems related to the turbo. However, since these ancillary systems are often not in the "powertrain" they're more likely to be out of warranty. Some customers reported spending thousands to restore their car to functionality, particularly when the dealer couldn't figure out what's wrong. So, I don't want a turbo. -------------------- NO DARK PAINT Just a matter of preference. But, it's my feeling that dark cars are harder to see and more likely to be in accidents. So, I don't want dark paint. -------------------- NO ELECTRIC STEERING For years, cars have had "power steering". This is more accurately power assisted steering. In the conventional system, a hydraulic system, an engine driven pump provides pressure which goes to the steering rack and reduces the force that you have to turn on the steering wheel to twist the tires. That's why it's much easier to turn the steering wheel in such a car than it would be if you had an old military Jeep, for example, with manual steering. According to Wikipedia, hydraulic power steering was first commercialized in 1951, so it has 63 years of development and proof of operational capabilities. It can certainly have its problems, but it works well. The latest thing being adopted rapidly is electric steering. Wikipedia describes it thusly. "Electric power steering (EPS or EPAS) uses an electric motor to assist the driver of a vehicle. Sensors detect the position and torque of the steering column, and a computer module applies assistive torque via the motor, which connects to either the steering gear or steering column. This allows varying amounts of assistance to be applied depending on driving conditions. Engineers can therefore tailor steering-gear response to variable-rate and variable-damping suspension systems, optimizing ride, handling, and steering for each vehicle." Electric steering can, theoretically, be better than hydraulic, and allow the automated stability system in the vehicle to function better. However, when doing research on the Hyundais, some users reported difficulty keeping cars in the lane, wandering behavior, fatiguing operation requiring constant attention, and pulling to one side. Even more of a concern is a couple of reports I read that said the car suddenly veered off course on its own without the driver asking for the change or being able to control it. In one case, this caused a fatal accident. I am a big Hyundai fan, and the car that we're replacing was a Hyundai Sonata which we really liked. I didn't want to cross Hyundai off my list, but I did because of these concerns. I think all the newer models have electric steering. And, the older ones are not available in the dealer certified preowned programs which offer an extended warranty. It's getting harder and harder to find any newer cars without electric steering. I don't know if the other brands have had problems with their systems. If you want to know if a car you're looking at has electric steering, look under the hood and find the hydraulic power steering fluid reservoir. If you can't find it, you almost certainly have electric steering. Some users reported substantially higher diagnostic and repair costs for electric steering versus the old hydraulic systems. So, I don't want electric steering. -------------------- OTHER THINGS Other things I don't want, which are self explanatory, are excessive road noise AT FREEWAY SPEED, odors, stains, scratches, dents, too many owners, and recalls. For a certified preowned car from a dealer, all recalls should have been handled. -------------------- In the end, we bought a 2011 Toyota Camry SE which meets all these criteria. I'll certainly be considering all these things when I next buy a car. Hope you found this info useful. Sincerely, Ron -- (PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to call on the phone. I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy mailing lists and such. I don't always see new email messages very quickly.) Ron Frazier 770-205-9422 (O) Leave a message. linuxdude AT techstarship.com -- Allen Beddingfield [email protected]
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