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Throatwarbler posted:Yep. "I had a <GM shitpile> and it was perfectly reliable except for <all the poo poo that broke>". Unreliability is the spice of life 
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Sep 23, 2014 08:55
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BabyMauler posted:My dad was a GM mechanic in the 70s with a Formula 400 Firebird. I rode home from the hospital in a 84 Firebird and have just liked GM stuff for as long as I can remember. My dad worked for General Motors Holden for most of the 80s and the series of depressing company cars (aside from a Barina which was actually pretty awesome) in that time certainly put my family off GMH products for many years. I can assure you that local assembly and a tiny completely torque-less engine didn't do anything positive for the J body 
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Sep 23, 2014 09:18
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dissss posted:My dad worked for General Motors Holden for most of the 80s and the series of depressing company cars (aside from a Barina which was actually pretty awesome) in that time certainly put my family off GMH products for many years. BBBbbbut it was the SUPERCAR that your mum will hate!  So did most of Australia as well
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Sep 23, 2014 09:29
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SouthLAnd posted:I don't know if anyone here has had the pleasure of the Ford Powershift DCT, but my '12 Focus was borderline undrivable the last month I had it. The Focus Fanatics guys say they're on the 5th+ revision on the clutchpack. I don't know how that transmission in that car ever made it to the road, but it is terrible. We have 13. It hasn't been bad. There is a little shudder on acceleration but not bad. However, we took it in for the transmission "recall" and they found a transmission leak unrelated to the recall. Should get it back some time this week. Warranty to 100k on the related tranny stuff now too.
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Sep 23, 2014 13:11
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Mr. Wiggles posted:V8 trucks are the one area GM has never had a problem. http://ww2.justanswer.com/uploads/Bluegorilla/2008-12-05_142924_Coolant_loss_5.3.pdf Castech made a large portion of the 4.8 to 5.3L heads upto 2006. Never again GM
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Sep 23, 2014 13:13
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Throatwarbler posted:Yep. "I had a <GM shitpile> and it was perfectly reliable except for <all the poo poo that broke>". Signed, A VW Apologist
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Sep 23, 2014 14:55
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Throatwarbler posted:Yep. "I had a <GM shitpile> and it was perfectly reliable except for <all the poo poo that broke>". It's funny, I'm a BMW fanboy and this could be said about any of my favorite BMWs. My E36 always had stuff wrong with it. I think the difference is, BMW expected stuff to break and fail and in most cases, they made it replaceable, and usually easily so. My brother had a Grand Am, and to replace the serpentine belt you had to unbolt the engine because the belt went around an engine mount. The healights were a nightmare because instead of using fasteners, they used some kind of weird metal sliders that were a nightmare to use. Meanwhile, I could do either of those on my E36 pretty easily, because it was assembled in a way that made sense. I think that's the big difference between GM and other car companies. poo poo breaks on any car, but the amount of stuff that broke on GMs (ahem, window regulators were TERRIBLE) and the lovely engineering that became apparent as you tried to fix that broken stuff is just so much worse than other cars.
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Sep 23, 2014 15:04
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Tahm Bwady posted:I currently drive an 05 Cavalier and, despite having multiple electrical gremlins, the 2.2 has always worked fine. I do know why the cavalier is hated on so much though. The instrumental cluster going out and the window regulator burning out is apparently just a thing that happens to all of the cavaliers from that era. And now I'm considering an 08 Impala SS. GM masochist fo life. Apparently the reason for this is that in the GM system, the powertrain was relatively protected from management meddling, but the rest of the car was fair game in terms of shaving pennies, resulting in a car where basically everything except the running gear is a shoddy piece of poo poo but the actual car refuses to die, thus prolonging the torment of the GM owner since you can't fully justify just throwing the car away since it still technically runs. I also find it hilarious that apparently Cavaliers had a weird culty following in Japan because, hey, American car.
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Sep 23, 2014 15:07
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Cream_Filling posted:I also find it hilarious that apparently Cavaliers had a weird culty following in Japan because, hey, American car. Being sold by Toyota they also had a TRD body kit: 
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Sep 23, 2014 15:21
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Snowdens Secret posted:moves to eliminate model-specific parts (that spectacularly bit them in the rear end when one accelerator pedal sensor ended up common across half the brand), etc. Everyone does this, though, and the very small risks with part failure are tiny compared to the cost savings.
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Sep 23, 2014 15:27
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Talk to anyone that's owned a 93-02 F-body about power window motor replacement. Particularly the first time, which requires using a holesaw to drill a rather large access hole in the internal door structure, just to get at one of the bolts.
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Sep 23, 2014 15:36
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And yeah decontenting is real, I'd say a modern Camry interior is actually no better or maybe worse than one from a decade ago. See also the Prius, which got a lot less nice inside and out once Toyota decided to actually go for a profit on them instead of playing loss-leader.
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Sep 23, 2014 15:39
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MrYenko posted:Talk to anyone that's owned a 93-02 F-body about power window motor replacement. Particularly the first time, which requires using a holesaw to drill a rather large access hole in the internal door structure, just to get at one of the bolts. That doesn't have to do with part commonality, though. In theory, you have lower risks of failure with common parts because if you have fewer parts you can devote more resources to quality assurance on the parts you ahahaha more like fire half the QA department. It's just when you have failures, they impact more units on a per-failure basis.
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Sep 23, 2014 15:51
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Where does the forum stereotype for VWs being horribly unreliable come from? Most people I know seem to be satisfied with theirs. They only dislike the higher cost of routine maintenance. As for my personal experience I think Mercedes gives the Japanese brands a run for their money as far as reliability goes. There's this really bizarre disconnect I'm seeing between Americans and Europeans when it comes to German brands. A lot of Europeans are in love with VW and think it's the pinnacle of quality. British car reviewers often praise VW as a European Toyota. Kraftwerk fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Sep 23, 2014 |
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Sep 23, 2014 16:23
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Cream_Filling posted:And yeah decontenting is real, I'd say a modern Camry interior is actually no better or maybe worse than one from a decade ago. See also the Prius, which got a lot less nice inside and out once Toyota decided to actually go for a profit on them instead of playing loss-leader. My Mazda2 has a nicer interior than a newer Camry. Kraftwerk posted:Where does the forum stereotype for VWs being horribly unreliable come from? Most people I know seem to be satisfied with theirs. They only dislike the higher cost of routine maintenance. Go look up the bastion of reliability that is the VW A4 platform. Phone fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Sep 23, 2014 |
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Sep 23, 2014 16:25
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Phone posted:My Mazda2 has a nicer interior than a newer Camry. Yep. In the year I owned my '03 GTI (before it was totaled) I spent a little over $5k on maintenance and repairs. Those cars had a shitload of cheaply-designed and cheaply-made parts that often required specialized skills/tools to fix. I enjoyed my GTI when it was rolling, and the VR6 sounded glorious, but it really turned me off to further VAG products. A real shame because the current GTI seems like a really nice car.
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Sep 23, 2014 16:37
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Everyone does this, though, and the very small risks with part failure are tiny compared to the cost savings. The point was that Toyota was, at one point, practically from scratch engineering each piece for a specific application. This made it as optimal as possible for that application but was obviously as expensive in R&D and production as possible as well. You can use common parts, but you often have to make compromises to other parts of the design to make them fit / work, and if you ever want to change that common part you have to verify / re-adapt everywhere you're using it to make sure you're not breaking something else. That latter part ends up being a poo poo ton of work and is part of what drives platform consolidation and eventually the stuff like MQB where your cars are just modular chunks of the same vehicle, but until you reach that point it also acts as a retard on innovation and advancement. Case in point that terrible AC Delco radio posted, which if GM wanted to update it would've required making sure it fit physically, was compatible electronically and wasn't too off aesthetically in the gazillion vehicles they used it in, and that was just too much bother. So yeah, there's nothing wrong with parts consolidation per se but it results in a more mediocre vehicle and perhaps more importantly means less model year changes which slows the advance of car design overall. The '90s saw three distinct platforms for the Camry alone; Toyota moved the Camry and a couple other vehicles onto the shared K platform 2000-ish and they've seen little more than cosmetic updates since then. Benefits junkyard pullers, though.
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Sep 23, 2014 16:45
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angryhampster posted:Yep. In the year I owned my '03 GTI (before it was totaled) I spent a little over $5k on maintenance and repairs. Those cars had a shitload of cheaply-designed and cheaply-made parts that often required specialized skills/tools to fix. I said I'd never buy another VW after my mk4 GTI. Coil packs, water pumps, window regulators, soft touch interior that peeled if you looked at it, etc... I did end up buying a '13 TDI that has been problem free for me so far, but they have plenty of issues. German reliability is one of the biggest bullshit myths ever.
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Sep 23, 2014 18:02
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Kraftwerk posted:A lot of Europeans are in love with VW and think it's the pinnacle of quality. British car reviewers often praise VW as a European Toyota. It's easy to pretend German cars are reliable when you have French and Italian cars to compare them to.
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Sep 23, 2014 18:15
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PeterWeller posted:It's easy to pretend German cars are reliable when you have French and Italian cars to compare them to. Even in North America they display a much greater level of superficial quality than the competition. Sit someone down in a VW, a Chevy, and a Honda, let them check out the interior and drive it a little ways then ask which car they think is the best/highest quality. Pretty much everyone will say VW, until they've owned one and had that lovely interior begin peeling apart or have to replace the fancy DSG. Superior German adhesives, never forget.
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Sep 23, 2014 19:48
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Kraftwerk posted:Where does the forum stereotype for VWs being horribly unreliable come from? Most people I know seem to be satisfied with theirs. They only dislike the higher cost of routine maintenance. Several VAG platforms in the 90s and 00s had a number of really serious issues with either parts or design (e.g. coil packs) and that's when most people here grew up. Modern VW still isn't great from what I've heard, though they've improved. Anecdotally I just saw a 2 year old Jetta where all the button labels had peeled off spontaneously. German reliability was real... in the 70s. Old Mercedes designs were heavily overengineered and made to a high standard, and so was stuff from lesser German brands like Volkswagen (aided of course by older, simple designs) and the data from the time supports this perception. Also supposedly export models were subject to stricter inspections and such, something you see rumored even today (Japanese cars weren't known as particularly reliable in Japan, in part because it was perceived that automakers used the domestic market to work out the kinks for the first year or two before sending cars out for export).
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Sep 23, 2014 19:48
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Another thing to note is that VW in the past 5 years has decided to aggressively scrape the bottom of the barrel. The base Jetta with the 2.whydoiexist? dropped from like $17k to $12k. VW is the goto brand where it sounds loving fantastic on paper. You take a look at the specs on a GTI and you'd assume it's a great bargain, but the reality is a bit different. I have no issues driving a VAG product, but it would be gone the second the warranty was up.
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Sep 23, 2014 19:57
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Phone posted:You take a look at the specs on a GTI and you'd assume it's a great bargain, but the reality is a bit different. Guessing this kicks in when you realize you just paid $32k for a Golf? I always try to bring that up when VW fanboys talk poo poo on any other tarted up economy car.
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Sep 23, 2014 20:01
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Wheeee posted:Even in North America they display a much greater level of superficial quality than the competition. Sit someone down in a VW, a Chevy, and a Honda, let them check out the interior and drive it a little ways then ask which car they think is the best/highest quality. This isn't really true anymore with the introduction of the American Jetta and Passat, which are filled with hard plastics and often powered by rough old motors.
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Sep 23, 2014 20:02
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PeterWeller posted:This isn't really true anymore with the introduction of the American Jetta and Passat, which are filled with hard plastics and often powered by rough old motors. Yeah, this. VW certainly used to have a far more premium cabin look and feel, at least when new, than all other 'economy' cars. But ever since they deliberately took the Mk6 downmarket it feels way, way cheaper inside.
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Sep 23, 2014 20:14
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fknlo posted:Guessing this kicks in when you realize you just paid $32k for a Golf? More like struts on all four corners because it saves space, so plow through the corners and wait to gun it on anything that resembles a straight away.
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Sep 23, 2014 20:15
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Guinness posted:Yeah, this. VW certainly used to have a far more premium cabin look and feel, at least when new, than all other 'economy' cars. But ever since they deliberately took the Mk6 downmarket it feels way, way cheaper inside. My wife just turned in her leased 2011 Jetta SLE and that thing was such an utter pile. It was made of plastic, had awful steering feel, couldn't get out of its own way and the motor sounded like bees. Her 2009 before that was worlds nicer, despite sharing the lame motor.
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Sep 23, 2014 20:40
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Mr. Wiggles posted:V8 trucks are the one area GM has never had a problem. Tell that to my parents, whose '96 Silverado 2500 was on it's third transmission by the time they sold it. Traded it in for a brand new 2009 3500 duallie which has already eaten a wheel bearing and had to have the trans dropped to fix something with the clutch pack. And the AC compressor poo poo itself about two years into ownership. It currently has but 15,000 miles and has never towed anything heavier than a ~1000 lb aluminum boat. Throatwarbler posted:Yep. "I had a <GM shitpile> and it was perfectly reliable except for <all the poo poo that broke>". My parents are the perfect GM apologists. Absolutely refuse to buy anything but Chevys. Meanwhile, having grown up surrounded by these constantly breaking piles (I still get paranoid on long trips about breaking down by the side of the road just due to how often it happened in my mom's cars as a child) instead of being brainwashed into drinking the flavor-aid, I have been perceptive enough to realize I should avoid any GM product made between ~1972 and ~2010ish. And as the barrage of recalls has shown, even 2010+ GMs aren't in the clear.
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Sep 23, 2014 20:51
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Phone posted:More like struts on all four corners because it saves space, so plow through the corners and wait to gun it on anything that resembles a straight away. I don't get this. Which VW has struts at all four corners? Who still thinks struts are some terrible suspension compromise that ruins handling in a world where the Boxster and Cayman exist?
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Sep 23, 2014 21:42
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VW also badge engineers the gently caress out of everything like GM. The Golf has at various times been used as the basis for the Golf Estate, Golf Plus, Jetta/Bora, Cabrio, Caddy, Touran, A3, TT, Octavia, Leon, Eos, New Beetle and I'm sure I missed a couple.
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Sep 23, 2014 21:47
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PeterWeller posted:I don't get this. Which VW has struts at all four corners? Who still thinks struts are some terrible suspension compromise that ruins handling in a world where the Boxster and Cayman exist? Mk4 Golf's had struts up front and a torsion beam in the back. Stuff like the Focus poo poo all over it.
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Sep 23, 2014 22:02
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Phone posted:Mk4 Golf's had struts up front and a torsion beam in the back. Stuff like the Focus poo poo all over it. Oh okay. Yeah, I totally agree. I had a Mk4 VR6 and it wasn't some amazing handler. The one thing it was good at was fast cruising. And the VR6 sounded great. And it broke all the loving time, and I will never buy another VW again. 
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Sep 23, 2014 22:13
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PeterWeller posted:Oh okay. Yeah, I totally agree. I had a Mk4 VR6 and it wasn't some amazing handler. The one thing it was good at was fast cruising. And the VR6 sounded great. But struts are awful and the Germans in particular have a history of engineering holes they get to engineer themselves out of.
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Sep 23, 2014 22:36
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Kraftwerk posted:Where does the forum stereotype for VWs being horribly unreliable come from? Most people I know seem to be satisfied with theirs. They only dislike the higher cost of routine maintenance. quote:Coolant migration is a bizarre problem on a few VW or Audi where the coolant leaks into the wiring harness. This article shows how to prevent/fix it.
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Sep 23, 2014 22:39
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Phone posted:But struts are awful and the Germans in particular have a history of engineering holes they get to engineer themselves out of. No, a rear-engine layout sort of working well in one platform after decades of continuous development and refinement is proof that it's not a lovely design with no intrinsic value! Struts are a compromise, a good one for most cars that can work well enough, but they are still a compromise.
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Sep 23, 2014 22:45
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Oh come on it's just some blinker fluid.
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Sep 23, 2014 22:45
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Phone posted:But struts are awful and the Germans in particular have a history of engineering holes they get to engineer themselves out of. See: basically every Audi except I guess the R8.
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Sep 23, 2014 22:50
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PeterWeller posted:Kudos for getting the 442 reference on page 442, but Buick and Olds weren't "known for making ballbustingly powerful sporty cars." They were always the boring middle rung between the cheap and sporty brands and the luxury brand. The 442 and GN were cool flukes, not representative of their brands as a whole. It wasn't a coincidence that James Taylor and Dennis Wilson drove the '55 while Warren Oates was in the GTO. Pontiac, Buick and Olds have always skewed older than Chevrolet, by design.
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Sep 23, 2014 22:50
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atomicthumbs posted:Coolant Migration What in the loving gently caress?! 
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Sep 23, 2014 22:54
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Wheeee posted:Struts are a compromise, a good one for most cars that can work well enough, but they are still a compromise. Yeah, they're a compromise, but they don't seem to be that big of one when handling is concerned. The list of great driver's cars using struts is pretty long.
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Sep 23, 2014 23:27
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