“It’s never easy.”
This was a common refrain from my Dad almost every time he spun his Craftsmans in the garage, usually uttered with far more knowing expectation than frustration, especially if he was working on his MG Midget. For every instance of something going as expected or even surprisingly easily (like the time he made a piston-ring compressor out of a coffee can and then used it to slide the MG’s pistons in like butter, there were ten patience-testing trials that sprang from shoulda-been-simple jobs
Our indefatigable Stephen Walter Gossin can surely relate, as lately he’s been wrestling with a fifth-gen Mercedes SL. Even a fuse change can be an ordeal in this thing, as Stephen explained this morning in the Autopian Slack channel:
Another fun example of why the R230 can suck it: if you try to jump-start the battery, or hook up either battery in the wrong sequence, you blow a fuse under the passenger floorboard and under the subwoofer. Look at how ridiculous the process is just to change that fuse:
The fuse is under the floorboard, and under the subwoofer. A fuse that commonly blows per the ridiculous 2-battery setup in that car. I’m telling you, from an engineering perspective, this is the worst car out of the 148 cars I’ve wrenched on.
Indeed, what a hassle! Now it’s your turn, let’s talk about the cars (and trucks, and motorcycles, or anything really) that do not make it easy when a job coulda-woulda-shoulda been simple. And-or cheap, hoo boy …
To the comments!
Anything to do with the 3.0L Diesel in a FCA product.
My example would be replacing the reluctor wheel which controls the crank shaft position sensor.
From my research, these are usually put on the harmonic balancer on the front of a given engine. In this case, they stuck it between the engine and the transmission. Which means you have to drop the transmission to investigate/replace it.
The cherry on top is that when the it throws the error for the crank position being off, the tech can’t even tell you whether the sensor is bad or the reluctor wheel (which the sensor reads) is broken.
Luckily, because FCA extended the warranty on this engine due to dieselgate the repair was covered. Did it take many phone calls to Jeep (FCA) and several arguments. Yes.
As someone who just paid 4 figures to get a reluctor wheel replaced, this hits me right in the feels. Mine was well out of the extended warranty period, sadly.
Sorry to hear that! It might be worth calling Jeep about it though. Not the dealer, they are pretty useless other than passing on the diagnosis and fix to Jeep (which is a cluster all by itself)..
But, the more times they hear about this issue, which from my research isn’t terribly uncommon.
There is even a directive to the dealers what to do if they see the related codes from Jeep, which means they know its an issue.
All that to say, the more people that yell, the more likely they are to put out an actual recall which could mean reimbursement from Jeep for the work you already paid for.
The problem is they already recalled it, but the “fix” was in software so the engine didn’t immediately shut off. From a safety perspective they’ve technically done all they have to.
It is a very common issue. Mine was the third repair the very small dealer I got stranded at had done recently, which is part of why they didn’t have the necessary parts on hand. And honestly, with all the stuff that keeps going wrong with this truck I just want it gone…as soon as I fix the bad nox sensor and leaking three-way valve that popped up after I got it back from the reluctor wheel fix. I just spent three days extracting a seized sensor that the dealership wanted to “fix” by replacing the entire cat and all attached sensors. There’s no way I was throwing another $3600 into this money pit.
I didn’t do the work, but the output shaft speed sensor on the back of the F-150’s transmission went out shortly after we bought it (used, and out of warranty) at about 85,000 miles. Apparently it’s on the top of the transmission, and they said they had to drain and drop the transmission to replace the part.
The stealership’s 3 year or 30,000 mile used car warranty on anything that touched oil didn’t apply, because the sensor didn’t touch oil.
That should have been a few minute job with the truck on the lift, if the sensor was in a more serviceable location. Instead, it effectively added $950 to the purchase price of the vehicle.
Volvo 240, Volvo XC70 AC, Blower motor. I’ve done one on the XC70 and three on various 240’s that we’ve owned. You basically dismantle the dashboard & center console, it’s a nightmare on the 240’s. All the wiring is old school, you’d better label it or you’re screwed. The XC70 involves partial dashboard removal, a special tool (of course because it’s modern!), two people-one for a blind reach through the instrument panel hole to press a latch, the other to twist the motor with the special tool in the hole where the side panel of the console was through the void where the glove box used to be. I had an OG Acura Legend couple this job took 15 minutes.
I love Volvos but Jesus what a PIA.
Super common issue on the 240… along with water pump and brake master cyl. I did dozens of blower motors, and Electrolux didn’t get around to improving the part during the production life of the 2 series.
I believe that technique is called the “Swedish Reacharound”
5-time Volvo owner here.
Valve clearance check on a Honda VFR800.
Remove all 4 cams. Replace the VTEC lifters with a special tool. Install the cams. Check clearance. Remove the cams again. Remove the valve buckets. Measure the shims. Do some math. Order new shims. Wait 2 weeks. Install the shims and buckets. Install the cams. Recheck the clearance. Remove the cams. Replace the special tools with VTEC lifters. Install the cams for the third time.
This is 10 hours shop labor every 16k miles. Over the long run, it’s cheaper to ignore valve adjustments entirely and just replace the engine if it blows.
Wow that sounds more like Ducati territory than Honda.
From what I hear, Honda bikes actually have a pretty bad reputation with mechanics. On my PCX you have to remove half of the bike to do a valve adjustment.
Pretty much anything involving the serpentine belt on my old Cruze needed the engine supported. Why? The belt was wound around the passenger side motor mount. The air box needed to be taken out to properly access it. So step 1: support engine. Step 2: Remove airbox. Step 3: Remove motor mount. I got to the point where that could all be done in 10 minutes or less. Yay replacing umpteen water pumps on that car.
I usually get off pretty easy on repairs because farm trucks tend to be pretty simple to fix but here’s a couple repairs that stand out as more annoying than most.
1. Gmt400 oil pan gasket. With the 4wd trucks you have to drop the front diff to get the pan off. Not a hateful job, but one that seems like it could been avoided with a better design.
2. Gmt400 torque converter inspection cover removal. On both my Vortec 350 trucks, the crossover pipe runs right in the way of the inspection cover, so something should be a simple removal actually requires dropping the entire exhaust.
3. F-350 6.0 FMIC removal and repair. God, what a pain in the ass. I didn’t like that truck before the repair, really didn’t like it after.
But the worst, most needlessly complex repair I’ve run across was on an otherwise very well-designed little pickup, my ‘89 Toyota pickup with the 22re. Removing the alternator on that truck requires pulling the power steering pump, lower rad hose, and one engine mount. For a freaking alternator. By comparison, replacing the valve cover gasket on the same truck took me 15 minutes tops.
The ol’ diff drop for oil pan is pretty common on 4wd rigs. My GMT 400 & my Tracker both require it at least. My ’77 Jeep does not. Maybe its an independent suspension thing.
I think our Escape requires it as well…
I think the diff thing is annoying because *just about* clears the pan without dropping it. I mean, it would have only taken maybe 1 more inch to not require that step.
Saturn Aura
I can forgive a lot of the seemingly poor placement/engineering on the Saturn Aura, but the fact that you have to remove the entire bumper and fascia to change the headlights is unforgivable.
My MkV GTI required the front bumper to come off to get the headlight housing out. That has to be removed to change the bulbs. My bulbs seem to last about 10-14 months.
This, but for many cars these days that require such efforts simply to replace a bulb. I especially hate when you can almost get your hand in without removing anything, only to realize if you could get the bulb out of the housing you’d just end up dropping it into the engine bay abyss to extricate your hand.
I’ve never had a Mk5, only Mk6 & 7, and on those bulb replacement was a breeze, nothing to remove but the bulb, unless you had HIDs, because the xenon bulbs w/ ballasts are huge.
Even so, removing the headlight only required undoing one bumper corner screw and pushing it out the way enough to get a torx onto the headlight mounting screw behind it.
Must be a VW thing. My 99 new beetle was the same. All the little niggly shit breaking all the time, terrible dealer, and having to buy ‘overpriced vw specific parts’ like coolant etc soured my ownership experience.
Our 06 CRV required owners to have 3 wrists to get the bulb swapped out.
My 1956 lincoln needed 4 screws to remove the outside trim ring and then you popped out the sealed beam and popped in another $5.99 sealed beam. They lasted more then 10 months too.
Ugh, modern Volvos. I have a ’16 S60. Like many modern cars, it has an electrically operated parking brake. The e-brake actuator is a motor that screws down to clamp the rear brakes to the rotor. When released, they must be programed to only rotate so many turns, thereby taking up slack as the pads wear. To swap the rear pads, there is no maintenance mode you can access without Volvo’s $1K service s/w to back the e-brake motors all the way to allow room for new, thicker pads. So you have to pull the rotors off, remove a cover to get access to a hex bolt attached to the e-brake motor, and get an extra-long allen bit for your electric screwdriver (it takes 30-40 revolutions to back the pistons all the way out, so you don’t want to do that by hand) to fully release the piston. Annoying as hell when all it would take is a sub-menu item in the service menu to due this automatically.
Also, changing the cabin air filter is way more hassle than it should be. You have to remove a footwell panel (not unusual), and remove the glove box, and remove the fuse box behind that, to get access to the filter, which is rather high up behind the dash. Somehow I managed to damage a ligament in my thumb that still bothers me to this day, several years later. In comparison, I just did this on my Mini and it took about 20 mins, one bolt, pull one panel, open an access hatch, pull the two filters out and replace.
Fascinating. That air filter sounds terrible!
For comparison of what can be done, I think I could change the cabin filter on my Mazda with no tools, in about 60 seconds.
Volvo wants owners to take their cars to the dealer service center for every little thing. While I like their cars, I will not be buying another one again.
In fact, PSA to the Autopian community, before buying a new car, look up how to do the basic DIY stuff on the cars you are interested in before buying.
I paged through ‘70s Citroen shop manual once:
Page 1: tools you will need
Page 2: tools you will need to make
My Suzuki manual has a few moments like that. “You can acquire this tool at your local dealer or you can produce it yourself by taking a piece of metal and shaping it to the following specifications…”
Now were did I leave my drill press, lathe, mill and welder.
The pop-up headlights on my 1989 Firebird really made it easier for me to part with it when it came time to sell it. Everything was hard to access and I could see no logical reason that so many parts were impossible to take apart. Even the black plastic lining between the body-colored top and the bottom was a pain. It looked like it should have been easy to remove thanks to the exposed Torx screws, but it was bigger than it needed to be and had to be twisted and bent around a bunch to come out.
The motors were also hard to get to, which was annoying because they were prone to failure. The driver’s side headlight motor had a plug that was hidden underneath everything in a place where it was nearly impossible to get to, so you couldn’t easily unplug an non-functional motor to fix the headlight up until it was repaired.
All of this made anything with those headlights a pain in the ass – even just changing a bulb. Every other pop-up headlight car I had before had been a good experience – NA Miatas, 4th Gen Trans Am, C4 Corvette…
And I love 3rd Gen Camaro/Firebirds. This was just terrible.
I don’t know what it is about CamaroBirds. Everything on the third/fourth gens is just a PITA to do.
I rarely ever try to wrench on newer cars anymore. Open the hood and it’s like looking into wristwatch, the old kind you had to wind. There’s barely any room to work or even see what’s what. One little spring gets popped out and you’ll never get it running again. Then it’s off to the old guy with the 50x jeweler’s loupe, tiny screwdrivers, and an ”I can retire after this job” smirk. That’s what wrenching on new cars feels like. My old Volvo, hell, if I got tired during a repair I could crawl in between the block and the fender walls and take a nap.
This is why I say Triumph Spitfires are the perfect 1st project car. To work on the engine, flip the latches on each side of the hood, flip it forward, grab your tools, take a seat on a front tire and wrench away.
My Saab 900 was a forward flipper, too, but not nearly as revealing as the Spitfire. You can practically lift the engine out with the hood tilted forward on the old Spits.
I’ve found that some of my most recently useful tools are a collection of laparoscopic forceps, hemostats, and skinny clampy things, plus a video borescope. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve used them to retrieve some tiny dropped thingamawhatsit into a narrow crevice between the turbonator and the capacitron on my newer cars
Amen. A magnet on a wand doesn’t hurt either.
A boroscope is right up there with a breaker bar in terms of tools I should have bought years before I actually did.
Most of my cars have been pretty easy to work on (italian, german, french), but probably the worst one was my Mitsu 3000GT with its transverse V6 twin-turbo AWD, there was so little room in that engine bay you couldn’t even fit a finger in there.
I remember replacing the clutch slave cylinder took me a few days of work (afternoons into the night, after coming home from my day job).
Ages ago my family had a Chevy Malibu Classic – one of the small-ish boxy sedans. It had a longitudinally-mounted 229cid V-6 (RWD) and an insane amount of emissions stuff covering the entire engine. One day I was tasked with changing the spark plugs.
Apparently the factory procedure is to jack up the front end of the car, pull both wheels, and access the spark plugs through the front fenderwells. 😐
Actually wait I have a worse one: The diverter flap on the 996 HVAC system is about 5mm too large to remove from inside the car from behind the radio from the comfort of the interior seats; and instead requires you to pull the heater core out of the front of the car to access it (which, granted, is extremely accessible by typical cars standards at least) from deep behind the frunk; and because Porsche used the cheap ass foam lining on a piece of metal with holes on it if you will need to do the job at one point because it eventually starts spraying foam that stains everything all over the interior every time you turn the fan on.
And if you just ignore that eventually the foam is completely gone from that that door and hot/cold air goes though the holes in the blend door and neither the heater nor the air con functionally works anymore.
Pretty sure most of your dad’s woes all stemmed from working on an MG.
One of my best friends is a Land Rover mechanic & enthusiast (he owns close to a dozen of them, out of which he’s lucky to have one working at any given time, even though most of his free time is spent on them). Since he’s well acquainted with my unhealthy love for Alfas, there were times when he said he wished he was working on old italian cars instead 🙂
I installed one of those auto stop start memory modules before I ECU tuned it. It required disassembly of pretty much the whole lower dashboard and all the trim. On my other car it’s as easy as using a quick release tool to pull the whole bank of buttons out, then plugging it in. For some reason on the Q7 you gotta take the whole dash apart. That’s about as close as I can get because they’re otherwise pretty easy to work on.
My most recent unnecessarily complex repair was replacing my mailbox, believe it or not. I dug, and dug, and dug, and dug for hours trying to find the end of the concrete they stuck it in, but it must’ve been a 6 foot diameter circle and 2 feet deep. I gave up and cut the post off about 12″ below ground, and put the new mailbox in next to it. I have no idea why they needed enough concrete to hold a 50ft flagpole for a wooden mailbox, but it was a big PITA.
Maybe they had trouble with people running into / vandalizing the mailbox
It’s gotta be the one that came with the house because multiple neighbors have the same one. I think it’s a case of the builders saying “we’ve got a buttload of concrete left here, use it”.
My parents had issues with their mailboxes being vandalized when we moved out to the country, typically either being hit with a baseball bat or likely some old shitbox. My dad ended up building a 1/8 inch thick stainless steel post, put that into a concrete footing and filled the post with concrete. He then also lined the inside of the mailbox with stainless steel. There was one shattered bat found near it (must have hurt like hell hitting it from a moving vehicle!) and after that it wasn’t touched again. Eventually it got sheared off at the ground by the snowplow and my folks decided to just get a PO box in town instead of rebuilding it again.
When we first moved to the country, every few years one of the snowplow drivers would clip ours knocking it over. I spent a day digging, hammering and cementing in a 6 foot x 1 1/2″ piece of pipe. Bored out a 4×4, halved it and bolted it to the pipe, then attached the mailbox to that structure. The wood takes any impact from the plow, just replace that part and move on.
I’ll add to the Pentastar shit from the last few days.
My Promaster didn’t have the oil filter housing leak issue, but it did have the oil pressure sensor go bad. Guess where the oil pressure sensor is? Hidden under the intake manifold in the oil filter housing. All the labor of a broken filter housing to replace a $15 sensor. It’s fine, I didn’t need that $800 for anything.
Oh, and it did have the Pentastar tick. But unlike the example given in that article with a longitudinal engine, the Promaster has one of the cylinder heads buried against the firewall. So good luck with that.
It also ate a power steering pump and an AC compressor (and I do mean ate, not just that the AC stopped working). Was a really good van to build a camper on if it wasn’t for that shitty engine.
The procedure to drop the motor to do plugs on the FRS (recommended at 60k miles, no less) may have topped the Promaster issues, but the dealer did the plugs when the motor was out for the valve spring recall and only charged me for parts.
Doing coils and plugs on my buddies M6 Grand Coupe Competition was a mess, had to remove both intakes, two ECUs with brackets, several braces, and a few other things I’m forgetting. Not ultimately too hard, just a lot of bolts to turn and a few in unfortunate places for what’s usually easy maintenance, even for a V8.
I’m thankful my GX 470 hasn’t killed a starter since those are under the intake manifold, which just sounds painful and tedious.
Yeah that starter placement always made me mad and grateful that my crown never needed one. I love the UZ engine family, but come on!
I’m generalizing here, but pretty much anything inside a dashboard is the bane of my existence. More specifically, a Corrado heater core, an F-Series evaporator temperature sensor, or Silverado blend doors requiring dash removal drive me crazy. It seems like every plastic part is secured with plastic clips that require X amount of force to unclip, and if you apply 105% of X to remove that part, the plastic clip breaks.
A secondary item (one that I try to avoid doing myself at all costs) would be windshield replacements. Get a windshield replaced at a shop and 5 years later the next shop will tell you that you have rust in the frame because the first shop cut through the paint. The cowl trim is cracked 75% if the time, and shops will try to hide it with electrician’s putty. All the trim around an ND Miata windshield is one-time use only.
You have to disassemble most of the left side of the engine bay to get the battery out of a C4.
Bomb tech’s worst nightmare.
There is way to get the battery out by loosening the side fender and prying it out a little. Take all fender fasteners out that you can find (most in the wheel well). There will be a couple fasteners in the bottom of the fender that you can’t reach so you just pry the top out enough to get the batter out and be careful not to break it.
But yes, the official non-scary method sucks.
This one is pretty common I bet, but replacing a burnt-out headlight on my Focus requires a surprising amount of things on the front clip to be removed first.
In my older Mustang, I could just open the hood, reach in, and do it blindfolded if I had to.
I think you’re just supposed to buy another Focus when that happens.
It’s especially amusing when there’s generational changes but the underlying car is clearly the same thing as its predecessor.
To wit: On a C5 you raise the headlights and remove a couple of bolts. On a C6 you completely disassemble the front of the car. On a DeVille or Seville you undo a couple of bolts and on a ball joint. On a DTS you completely disassemble the front of the car.
I was going to post about my old Malibu, but this sounds like the same issue with replacing the headlight bulb.
Step 1 for the Malibu: Jack up the car and remove both front wheels.
Of all car brands, the early-mid 00s era Mercedes is quite possibly the most complex cars you can possibly work on. Probably only a quad-turbo W16 is more daunting. Maybe.
This is ridiculous. The M113/M113 are excellent, easy to service engines, as is the 722.6 transmission. As long as the car has either conventional or air suspension, pretty much everything is designed to be easy to work on.
Source: I have owned four Mercedes from this era.
Source: I currently have 6 from this era (G55, CL600, S500, SL55, ML550, E500).
My comment was in jest and hyperbole, because mechanically they are brilliant. It’s the aging electronics that throw random codes or draw the battery or makes the car not start. My favorite era of Benz but they do come with glitchy quirks. The contemporary 7-Series is far worse.
I definitely did not get the hyperbole in your initial post, lol. I’ve also owned three (technically four) BMWs from the same era and yeah, the Mercedes equivalents are a lot easier to work on.
I also think Mercedes electronics from this era are generally better than BMWs, but really any car brand can be susceptible to electronic faults that are difficult to trace. High-end German luxury cars just have more modules and systems and therefore are a bit more likely to suffer from faults.
You are a brave man owning a CL 600. Did you keep the ABC suspension? Those V12s definitely buck the “Mercedes engine reliability” trend!
Yea the BMWs were far worse electronically and mechanically. The M113 and 722.7 are so robust, not even a failing conductor plate could slow down my old 2001 S430. I owned a 2007 750Li and E53 X5 4.6 and 4.8is and in a stint of madness a 2004 760Li. All were crippled by either horrible and never ending failing electronic modules or leaky gaskets/ valves. Only the 6.0L V12 fared well mechanically, but they were all driven like they should have been.
Oddly enough the 5.5L V12 has been chugging along. My younger cousin has her this month and she drives cars HARD. The 600 starts up every time without issue, just keep spare oil in the trunk because she loves to burn the black gold. The CL600 still has her ABC system and occasionally flashes a white (thank God it’s not RED) ABC VISIT WORKSHOP message for a split second (but not even the STAR diagnostic can source the issue; no leaks, no sagging after 2 weeks, and rodeo test performed flawlessly, and rises within 7 seconds). It’s a complicated system to learn, but once you study the diagrams and see how it all comes together, like a big puzzle, you learn to love those pesky Germans. These temperamental German mistresses are complex, but they look, smell, drive, perform so well it is worth it. Maybe LOL.
I want to tackle V10 M6 ownership next!
I’m in the process if diagnosing a poor running condition on my Peugeot 505, and I’ve gotten to the point where I need to look inside the distributor cap….. except the distributor cap is on the side of the engine…. The driver’s side, above the column, under the intake manifold, and behind the alternator. The “easy” way to access the cap is to pull the alternator and battery and work with your forearm alongside the block while looking down through the intake runners to see what you’re doing.
You picked the right brand for the lede photo. My w124 MB was the most needlessly complex car I’ve ever owned/worked on.
In what way? Mine was a joy to work on. It’s a very simple car, for the most part. However I never did like the vacuum operated door locks/HVAC controls, or trunk releases from that era of Mercedes. Those could be genuinely annoying.
Just the belt was a pain the change. The layout of the engine in the bay, the sunroof, etc. One key might be the year, I think the earlier ones were easier to work on, I had one with the biodegradable wiring. Oh, another fun one – I couldn’t get it aligned anywhere within 100 miles of where I live. A couple of places said they could do it, and then when I got there and waited an hour they came back and said they couldn’t do it.
Honestly I somehow completely forgot about the biodegradable wiring fiasco. Such stupidity. At lease Mercedes learned from their mistakes, unlike Hella who keeps using that shitty wiring in headlights for decades.
The alignment problem isn’t specific to Mercedes – it’s all German cars, basically. It’s the one thing for which I use the dealer. I’m lucky to have a BMW and Mercedes dealer close to me, and the BMW one is actually cheaper than Jack Williams!
I’m able to get the front end aligned on my 3 series cars nearly anywhere at least. Did have to take my 7 series in, but there is a BMW dealer fairly close to me (used to by 20 miles, now it’s 40 since I moved.)