New cars are less reliable - Change my mind

This debate started in the Eco F150 thread, figured Id quit stinking up his thread. Its something my friends in the auto industry always talk about, but Ive heard similar arguments in different industries. None of us have been able to find any good information or tracking of the subject, JD Power and CR seem to track new stuff, and early failures, and as someone mentioned lump in minor tech annoyances and complete drivetrain failures. So its mainly based on our personal experiences. I also understand the argument reeks of "They dont build them like they used to. get off my lawn" and I am an old man trapped in a slightly less older mans body, so maybe thats it.

My position is long term reliability on average peaked around 2000-2010. Since then vehicles have become more complex, and compromises to reliability have been made to chase fuel economy. 

Specific things Ive seen

The massive increase of oil consumption problems, can at least partly be attributed to low tension rings. 

The large jumps in complexity vehicles have seen over the last decade.

technologies like start/stop becoming wide spread. No doubt it helps economy, but from a long term perspective, Id rather my car Idle instead of constantly being turned on and off.

Shifts to thinner oils and tighter tolerances and thinner bearings, traditional knowledge would say these things are not what you want for long term durability.

Specific engines whos reliability has decreased after updates.

Original ecotec was generally considered to be very hard to kill. The later models in the small suvs, developed massive oil consumption problems and bore problems.

J series honda - initially very reliable. VCM was implemented and it became normal to have to pull 3 or 4 pistons and re ring them.

Early LS, very reliable, DOD introduced and with mileage valvetrain failures became common, then the LTx platform came out and valvetrain failures became even more prominent and instead of happening with mileage many are happening before the first oil change.

CP4 Diesel injection pump. The big 3 moved to the CP4 injection pump (and some later abandoned it), im not a diesel guy, but people in the industry have told me there were benefits to moving to the CP4, but what we found is over the long term they like to fail and send shrapnel into the fuel system, routinely requiring complete fuel system replacement, which is a MASSIVE expense.

The coyote - great performance engine, but the Ford guys I run around with say long term reliability has decreased over every generation. With the Gen 3s early catastrophic failure became relatively common.

While 4L60s arent the poster child of reliability, Ive personally seen longer life from 4L60s in stock applications over the 6 speed. Ive seen a bunch of 6 speeds that kill the torque converter and take out the whole trans. This gets worse with added power, but so does the 4L60.

These are just drivetrain specific and dont even take into account the massive increases in complexity of the vehicles wrapped around the drivetrain, with stuff like ADAS and all the convenience tech packed into them. I fully admit brand new cars perform better and are safer, Im only talking about long term reliability.

It seems like a controversial opinion on this board, so please change my mind.

Can't beat the law of entropy. THe more moving parts you have, the greater the chance of failure(everything else being equal) and today's engines have a LOT of moving parts.

I think direct injection is a long term negative too due to the build up of gunk and carbon inside the engine.  It's not the great thing everyone seems to think.  Sure it's great for power output initially.

A lot of these issues don't seem so much like an inherent problem with newer cars, but an issue of manufacturers not testing things adequately.  Many of those issues strike me as things that should have been found in testing before release to the public and then a part should have been re-designed, or a fix produced to avoid the problem. 

In reply to Wicked93gs :

Shhh don't discuss entropy!  No one is ready for that.  

In reply to AnthonyGS (Forum Supporter) :

The ND turned me into a believer in GDI, but I prefer GDI and port injection combination. All the benefits, none of the negatives, plus if I modify I can always get bigger port injectors.

You're right that it's a fight between improved reliability of components and having more components to break due to increased complexity. As for reliability being generally worse these days, I'm not so sure about that, it may be too soon to tell. You might also be remembering recent problems more clearly than older ones. In your '00s "golden era" we had Camrys blowing oil lines open or turning their oil to goo, Minis needing regular walnut shell blasting on the valves, Subaru engines in the peak of doing Subaru engine things, Nissan and Mitsubishi quality taking a big downturn, and spark plugs were firing out of Ford Triton engines.

My hunch is that component reliability is still slightly winning the fight with component count so reliability is still slightly improving overall with newer cars, but time will tell. Also consider how much more common EVs are now: they use wheel brakes very little, produce far less waste heat to deal with, and the closest thing they're likely to have to a powertrain problem is a worn battery.

Opti said:

In reply to AnthonyGS (Forum Supporter) :

The ND turned me into a believer in GDI, but I prefer GDI and port injection combination. All the benefits, none of the negatives, plus if I modify I can always get bigger port injectors.

^This. I never understood why all the manufacturers don't do this. The only downside is up-front cost, but it also improves performance over an all-DI setup.

I think any discussion like this is useless without hard numbers. This is just too much of a "it feels like" or "i think that" morass. It is literally impossible to discuss your way into an answer for it. The only way to prove or disprove it is to measure it, a lot, which would be expensive and difficult. 

In reply to GameboyRMH :

I guess I should have specified I wasnt referring to EVs. I think they are still too new (i know they are actually old, I mean adoption) and they dont seem to be the poster children of LONG TERM reliability at this point. Im sure it will get better with time, but its not just the battery, its the cooling system, and the drive units.

I have only two 'new car' data points: a 2014 Mazda CX-5 and a 2017 Sienna.  Both made it past 120k miles with ZERO unscheduled maintenance or issues.  My 2006 Tundra is at 220k, and the only non-maintenance issue was a secondary air injection pump.  It's still on it's original suspension components, even.  They're known quantities, so I'll keep using them even if I want something newer.  Driving an old car is better for the environment, and if you're handy and don't live in the rust belt, you can keep them going almost indefinitely. 

My hunch is that any excess reliability engineered into a vehicle is a cost center, and attention spans of the general public are getting shorter and shorter.  There is probably a corollary to other 'durable goods,' like household appliances these days.

In reply to dculberson :

I  posted a couple links in the other thread, and JD power and CR have said repeatedly over the last 6 or 7 years that vehicles are becoming less reliable year over year. The problem with that is they are focusing on new cars and early problems, not necessarily long term reliability, plus they lump things like infotainment problems and total engine failures together. I havent been able to find more precise tracking or numbers. 

I figured this is a relatively active group that pay attention to automotive more than the average consumer and many members actively work in the automotive field, so their insights are valuable in the absence of hard numbers. I havent found the data, but I hope its out there or someone can present something.

dculberson said:

I think any discussion like this is useless without hard numbers. This is just too much of a "it feels like" or "i think that" morass. It is literally impossible to discuss your way into an answer for it. The only way to prove or disprove it is to measure it, a lot, which would be expensive and difficult. 

everyone has an opinion.  And there are clearly a lot of touchy feely engineers out there.  And they discount the reasons why cars have 100k spark plugs or 10k oil changes, or why hardware pretty much has to make it to 150k miles with no chronic failures.  Let alone the requirement that there be no remote possibility of fires.

People look at "stuff" and think it's worse.

And without data to support the theory that cars are worse, there's no realistic way to point out the opposite- since it's all about conjecture and opinion.  Make the "change my mind" rather impossible and therefore pointless.

Our '15 Cayenne diesel has almost 100k miles on it with really no significant issues.  We've had some problems with the def heater but it was all under warranty.  My '18 Land Cruiser is a baby with 33k miles on it but I don't expect any issues from it for a long time.  The '11 Xterra threw some hissy fits, but a lot of my frustration with it was due to not being able to find a proper diagnostician.  Now that I have, and it's been ironed out, hopefully it'll be ok going forward.

In reply to dculberson :

The OP said exactly that in his opening salvo. 

I think there's arguments to be made on both sides.  I bought a new car in 2018, and Mrs VCH just got a new car earlier this year. In both cases we went for the simplest, least amount of tech and options we could find in the particular vehicle class we were shopping in. I recently upgraded my truck to a newer model, and there, too, I went for the simplest one I could find (it even has roll up windows!). 

I was in a coffee shop this morning listening to the old men chat about their cars, and all the idiot lights they're throwing. One fellow quipped that his Mercedes has features he doesn't even know about, he's pretty sure, and of the ones he does know about, he uses almost none of them. 

I've long felt there was a transition that happened about 1970 or so, when "luxury" went from "how well something was built" to "how many gadgets does it have"?  My 1966 Jaguar has roll up windows and no AC, but it was clearly a luxury car compared to, say, a '66 Chevelle that might have had power windows and AC.  Today you can't buy a new car without those features. 

Electric vehicles, assuming they continue to evolve, will become more reliable than ICE cars, which will probably lead to greater adoption of them. Hybrids, too, even though on paper they should be more complex and less reliable. We're seeing it now with diesels- older diesels used to be the gold standard in unkillable cras, but modern diesels have become such complex clusterberkeleys they are becoming less reliable. And it's not the rotating assemblies, its all the ancillary crap bolted around that. We can make a dumb old piston go up and down and turn a dumb old crank, reliably, for a quarter million miles, no problem. 

I strongly disagree, at least as far as simple cars go. My last three new car: 

Fiat 500 hit 140,000 miles needing only brakes, rear wheel bearings. 
 

Buick Verano: 240,000 miles needed a high pressure fuel pump, brakes, and a cam timing solenoid.

Jeep Renegade: 104,000 miles has needed front brakes. I haven't put more than $100 into a car at a time in probably ten years except for the Corvette which led a bit of a life before it got here.   

Hmm... modern cars do seem to be better "appliances" where you can just put gas in it and get the oil changed when the computer tells you to.  Older cars could be reliable, but also tended to have more extensive maintenance needs to be so. 

I haven' owned anything newer than a 2013 until last month, but I;ll let you know.

I think you are focusing on the bad of the 2010s, but there is plenty of bad in the 2000s.  Gameboy mentioned some highlights but there are others.  I think its just not as fresh in our minds as the bad from the 2000s is all dead & gone, while we are living the bad of the 2010s right now.  In 10 years we will look back at the remaining reliable 2010 vehicles on the road and think "2010 cars were pretty good, wtf is wrong with this 2020 garbage".

Im not talking about a hundred thousand miles, Im talking about beyond that. Long term reliability. 

Prodarwin you might be right maybe its just focusing on whats happening now but it sure does seem like problems are becoming more catastrophic and more complex.

Alfa -  I dont buy your argument, that because emission warranty requirements are longer that these things HAVE to be more reliable. Things get recalled ALL THE TIME. The manufacturers might want them to be more reliable to reduce warranty costs, doesnt mean they are. It also doesnt explain why the number of recalls has been trending upwards over the last 15 years. 

In reply to Ian F (Forum Supporter) :

I dont think late 2000s car where maintenance hogs. The 100K plug interval has been around longer than and most maintenance intervals havent changed that much over that time period. The outliers seem to be longer OCI, which seems to be a net negative to long term reliability, and no longer recommending servicing transmission in many cases, which also seems to be a net negative to long term reliability.

I think manufactures are extending maintenance intervals to win awards like lowest cost of ownership, at the expense of long term reliability. My local GM foreman says there is a noticeable difference in lifter failures on the DOD LSs (not LTs) based on maintenance. A failure at 80-120K is on average someone who use the dexos syn blend and followed the idiot light (normally 7-8K miles) and guys that go beyond that are normally a shorter interval and a full synthetic. I also thoroughly enjoy the manufacturers that tell you a trans is lubed for life, and when it dies at 120K, they say well the thats life.

In reply to Opti :

Yeah I find it funny when consumer reports does a "long term test" and it's 25-30k miles. That's not long term that's barely broken in!

dculberson said:

In reply to Opti :

Yeah I find it funny when consumer reports does a "long term test" and it's 25-30k miles. That's not long term that's barely broken in!

Yeah, thats absurd.  I know its difficult to do a long term test quick enough to be relevant to a given model.

I expect no failures before 100k.  I hope for minimal failures before 200k, but nothing crazy.  An alternator.  A slave cylinder.  Maybe an engine mount.  Etc.  Ideally the engine and trans should never encounter a catastrophic failure because the rest of the car will fall apart before that.

But there are very few 2010s cars that have even had the opportunity to do that.  I'm sure in 10 years there will be some standouts.  We know what cars probably will not stand out as reliable, but the reliable ones havent had the chance to prove themselves yet.

Mechanical bits aside, there's one area where new cars are indisputably better than old ones: Corrosion protection. I've lived in the heart of the rust belt lo these 52 years and counting. It used to be common to see visible surface rust on cars that were 2 or 3 years old. Nowadays, most cars can go 10 years or more before that happens. And rust, around here, is what really kills cars. You can keep any pile of crap going mechanically if you're willing to keep throwing money at it. But structural rust is pretty tough to come back from. So, from a long-term durability standpoint, there's no doubt in my mind that modern cars have a big advantage in this area.

ProDarwin said:

Yeah, thats absurd.  I know its difficult to do a long term test quick enough to be relevant to a given model.

I expect no failures before 100k.  I hope for minimal failures before 200k, but nothing crazy.  An alternator.  A slave cylinder.  Maybe an engine mount.  Etc.  Ideally the engine and trans should never encounter a catastrophic failure because the rest of the car will fall apart before that.

But there are very few 2010s cars that have even had the opportunity to do that.  I'm sure in 10 years there will be some standouts.  We know what cars probably will not stand out as reliable, but the reliable ones havent had the chance to prove themselves yet.

 

I agree it would be great to have that data, but how do you do it? After that many years and miles, maintenance and use start to become bigger factors than the initial build quality. How did the vehicle get the miles, mostly freeway or start-stop? What climate did it live in? Was it parked outside or in a garage? Who maintained it? Was it washed frequently? Did someone spill coffee on the electronics inside the cabin 5 years ago? Has it been in any accidents, even minor ones, that could knock something loose? There are too many variables, IMO.