Cars, like dogs, aren’t bad by nature (usually). But it’s easy enough to make either bad – and sometimes, it seems as if it might be on purpose, as far as cars are concerned. Here are some for-instances:
Wet timing belts –
A timing belt is what it sounds like. It is a belt that pairs together the crankshaft and the camshaft(s) to time the engine’s internals so that they move in syncopation. Without a timing belt, the engine won’t run. Just like that. When the timing belt fails, that’s it – you’re not going anywhere. Major engine disassembly is required to replace a timing belt. It is a big (and so, expensive) job. That’s why it’s a good idea to design the belt – and specifically, its environment – such that the belt has a long service life and to minimize the odds of an unexpected and catastrophic failure. Wet belts assault that idea by having the belt immersed in engine oil (hence wet belt).
Usually, the idea is to keep the belt dry, which is done by positioning it on the outside of the engine block, away from the oil that’s inside the engine block.
But why is it a bad idea to immerse the timing belt in oil? Well, because hot oil tends to attack the material timing belts are made of (these include rubber/fibrous materials). The belt sloughs off bits and pieces before it fails, clogging the oil pump pickup, which can starve the engine of oil and lead to catastrophic engine faliure. 
The “solution” is special oil formulated to not disintegrate the belt. The problem is that it’s imperative to use exactly and only this special oil and to change it exactly per the specified recommendations (if not sooner). If the oil gets a little old – or some quick lube place uses not-special oil – the belt is apt to slough off material and then fail.
Even if all the protocols are followed to the letter, the belt will still likely fail right around the time the warranty runs out.
Having to “pair” headlights and other service parts to get them to work – 
In the dim old days, when a headlight burned out or the windshield wiper motor stopped working, all you had to do was remove the dead headlight (or wiper motor) and replace it with a new (or working) one and it’d work. Today, if you have a late-model car, it may not. You can buy the correct replacement headlight or wiper motor and correctly install it and it won’t work unless you “pair” the new part with the vehicle. “Pairing” means getting the car’s computer controlled nexus to recognize the new part, which is a prerequisite to getting the part to work. The problem is you can’t “pair” the part yourself. It requires a trip to an authorized dealership, where they have the proprietary equipment to “pair” the new parts. Naturally, there’s a charge for this – plus the hassle of having to take your vehicle to a dealer to do something you ought to be able to do yourself.
This “pairing” business goes deeper than just headlights (and taillights) and wiper motors. It encompasses most of the parts that make up your vehicle, including things such as power window switches and instrument clusters and audio systems, too. Gone are the days when you could easily just replace the factory stereo with a better aftermarket unit. You have to pay twice now. Once for the part and then again to have it “paired.”
Apps/features that won’t work if the vehicle is moving – 
Many new cars come with built-in GPS and some even have the ability to stream Netflix, YouTube and other such. The problem is that – for saaaaaaaaaaaaafety! – some of these systems won’t work unless the vehicle is stopped. Think on that a moment. You’re out driving somewhere and – more to the point – trying to figure out how to get somewhere. So you tap the GPS app and try to input the address so you can use the GPS to get there. But when you try, you get a pop up that says the system is closed down while the vehicle is in motion. It won’t let you enter the address unless you pull off the road and stop first. When you are on the highway this is often not easy and it is aways inconvenient. And what is the point of having a system that can stream Netflix or YouTube videos if you’re not allowed to watch them unless you’re parked? Why not just park – and go inside the house, where the screen is bigger and the sofa’s probably more comfortable?
They say it’s for “safety.” Well, then why bother? Isn’t this like saying: There’s a delicious meal on the counter, but you’re not allowed to eat it?
In-car peddlering –
It used to be we had screens in our living rooms and bedrooms. Now there are screens in all new cars and – just like the screens in our living rooms and bedrooms – the screens in our cars badger us with ads. You may have heard about BMW owners being treated to a preview ad of the latest Spider Man movie, which appeared (unbidden and unwanted) on their in-car screens. A number of brands – including BMW – also use the screen to sales-pitch apps and features that are sold as a subscription, including the seat heaters.
There’s an additional obnoxiousness associated with the in-car peddlering. The screens are also peddlering you. That is to say, your “data” – basically, everything that gets touched/tapped into the screen, such as your music/talk radio preferences as well as the restaurants and gas stations you like. Basically anything the screen (and so, the car’s connected tech) has access to, which includes everything that’s on your phone, if you “pair” your phone with the screen.
Flush-mounted/electric door pulls – 
Tesla was the first to offer this gimmick, which is just what it is. There is little, if any, functional advantage (hence gimmick) to having flush-mounted door pulls that rise when you approach – and numerous actual and potential disadvantages. These include the pulls not rising when you approach, due to a glitch. This literally cannot happen with fixed door pulls, which is a big advantage if you want to be able to open the door. Especially in an emergency when there isn’t time to futz with glitching electronics. Also when it is winter and there’s a glaze of ice coating the car’s exterior. The rising pulls are not powerful enough to bust through the ice, which means you’ll have to chip off the ice to get in the car – and risk chipping the paint in the process.
Some of the rising door pulls also take a moment to fully rise. It is not a long moment, but it is longer than just being able to grab the fixed door pull and open the door. There is also the inherently greater complexity of a system that moves vs. on that does not.
Sometimes, it is better not to reinvent the wheel. Or walk around the block to cross the street.
. . .
If you like what you’ve found here please consider supporting EPautos.
We depend on you to keep the wheels turning!
Our donate button is here.
If you prefer not to use PayPal, our mailing address is: EPautos 721 Hummingbird Lane SE Copper Hill, VA 24079
My 03 Ford Escape V6 has a chain for the cams. The water pump on that motor is in back, driven by an external small belt off an extension from one of the cams, smart! Change the little belt when the serpentine belt is replaced. How they went from smart to this stupid is mind boggling. If I remember this era Ford V6 was a design collaboration with Porsche. 4 cam, 4 valve heads runs dandy no leaks no failures.
Corporate Fuckery. Neighbor botthhe had one year of subscription features for free, after which she would have to pay $1,700 per year to keep the features functional (heated seats, for example).
My wife was going to buy a new Nissan Sentra. $27,000. Checked it out, she liked it, went home to withdraw the 27 grand from our credit union account. I took the brochure home. Surprise, surprise: Nissan also has a subscription requirement. Hidden in the brochure as “Nissan Connect” $1,000 yearly. I had to search the internet to find this. My wife kept her 1999 Civic coupe. 180,000 miles, probably good for another 70,000.
Back in the time when streaming video was called “Video on Demand” and it went through your cable box, we were in charge of the servers and infrastructure that fed the set tops. We had a bunch of command line tools for diagnosing problems that included watching key presses on remotes. When I was going through training I watched my colleague select a title, hit play and then control the video. I joked “Does ad sales know about this?”
A few years later the company upgraded to the new central system. We lost direct access to the command line tools. They were replaced with a web “dashboard” that had all sorts of charts and graphs, with all the CLI tools but now instead of a realtime interactive system it was now just what happened with a timestamp. Very soon after we started seeing custom ads spliced into the stream. Then the system would lock out fast forward during the ads.
If something is possible, it will be exploited for “incremental revenue.” Not because selling advertising is the goal of the jew devils, but because every company is under orders from the investors to grow or die. Maybe a 150 year old company should die, but try telling that to the CEO who’s running it. Can’t raise prices too much or the South Koreans/Chinese will get more market share, so inappropriate spying and meddling are the rule of the day.
Lets not forget that AMC had flush door handles. I was reminded of that when I looked at a gracefully aging AMC Eagle yesterday. Looked in great shape other than the urethane bumper extensions had rotted away.
AMC showed the way but we failed to listen.
It makes you wonder how much money they thought they could save by putting a timing belt running in oil versus using a timing chain. Knowing a little about how the world works even $1 might have been enough of a saving for that decision.
Of course no one asked if someone’s car engine died 6 months after the warranty ended whether they would buy anything again from a company that sold them a poorly designed piece of junk in the first place.
“Even if all the protocols are followed to the letter, the belt will still likely fail right around the time the warranty runs out.”
Nonsense
True, it is nonsense because most new car warranties are designed to expire at about 60% of the life of the first major critical component to wear out. In cars between 1990 and 2010, that was usually the timing belt. Now, most car manufacturers have multiple components that have a planned obsolescence, meaning something else might quit before the timing belt does.
What is with the perpetual victimhood on this site from supposed car guys.
You realize the warranty on a 70s Chevy was 12 month, 12,000 miles . . . Right?
Hello, “Betty” –
Yes, but the difference is the cars of that era were much more user-serviceable. Even today, replacing a water pump on a ’70s V8 is maybe $50 for the part and basic labor anyone who can change their own oil could do themselves. Replacing a timing chain is almost never necessary because they almost never break. Replacing a wet belt is a major job requiring skill and tools few “laymen” possess. Same goes for doing a water pump on many new vehicles. How about an in-tank fuel pump that requires dropping the tank? Or a clutch slave cylinder that you have to drop the transmission to get at?
Yes, of course – you do not have to buy into all of this. But that is beside the point, which is that we’re being systematically fleeced and enserfed by our Overlords.
I recently hit this “pairing” issue with my Cayenne, and I finally understand why it happens. My HVAC vents stopped working in the back seat, all the air went to the foot vent and the controls didn’t work. I took out all the interior of the car, tracing stuff, and found that there’s an actuator for a flap which stopped working. I got a couple of new actuators (they’re sold as a pair with an air guide), and plugged them in, and still, no change. I ended up buying a scan tool which is capable of diagnosing and programming all the modules in the Porsche, and discovered that all the HVAC actuators are on a LIN bus. It’s a really cheap, two wire connection that connects all the devices together on one wire. When you push a button, it sends a command, like “Actuator #4 move to 50% open”. Well, my new actuators had no idea what their numerical ID was. So this whole pairing process was just programming the ID’s into the actuators.
In this case, the pairing is required because of how the LIN bus works. It’s a way to run fewer wires through the body of the car. Without the LIN bus, you would need a plug for every actuator (12 of them) into the ECM. With the LIN bus, they all share one wire. I can see why they did it, but if I was the king of an auto company, I’d have the pairing functions built into the infotainment. The system can totally tell you that it can’t communicate with some part, it has that information.
Other forms of pairing are unnecessary and malicious. My headlight went out, and the new one needed “pairing”, despite having its own, separate cable to the lighting ECM. There’s no reason this thing can’t just speak a simple protocol over the wires. These lights are auto-leveling, so they communicate with the suspension to know how to raise/lower the beam, so you don’t blind someone when towing something.
Cars are more complex now. These fancy features are expensive in terms of money and time to debug.
It requires a trip to an authorized dealership, where they have the proprietary equipment to “pair” the new parts. Naturally, there’s a charge for this – plus the hassle of having to take your vehicle to a dealer to do something you ought to be able to do yourself.
Eric says you can’t do this by yourself and that you have to buy “proprietary equipment”
Someone is wrong
You can do it by yourself. There are a lot of scan tools which are reverse engineered, usually from China. The one I bought is a Launch x431. It supports pretty much everything in my 2017 Ceyenne, including programming in a new key. There are also competitors from iCarSoft, Autel, etc. it wasn’t cheap, it was about $475, but it’ll pay for itself. My dealer charges $250/hr of labor and charges 1 hour to pair something. A local independent shop does it for a flat $100. Bot the dealer and the independent use the Porsche PIWIS, the official scan tool. You can’t buy this, but it costs $20k+ per year to lease.
The same is true for other manufacturers, there’s a factory supported tool that extracts a lot of money from any shop which works on it, so it’s impractical for a shop to have all the tools for all makes and models. The tools from Launch and Autel come close, though, they will do _most_ anything that a dealer can, but they work with all brands.
Now, starting ~2025, car companies have started putting in something called a “secure gateway” or SWG, into cars. This thing is evil. Its only purpose is to shut out third party tools, via cryptography. Unless you can get your hands on the cryptographic keys used to lock this thing down, you’re stuck paying for the official tool. I have one car like this. I have to use an interface connected to my laptop, and then I pay £20 per hour, or £50 per day (or monthly/annual plans) in order to connect to the car. When I’m working on something, I pay the £50 so I can use it all day, since you typically can’t get a task done in an hour.
They sell this “SWG” as a way of protecting emissions and fuel system modules from tampering, so the government loves it. All EV’s have an SWG for example.
As an example, you can’t replace rear brake rotors or rear parking brake shoes in a Cayenne without a scan tool capable of running a calibration routine on the system. You can’t replace the battery without recalibrating the BMS. These complex systems have marginal benefits over simple systems, but IMO, not worth the hassle for the marginal gain. BMS, for example, will keep a battery healthy for a longer time. I’d rather just replace batteries more often.
Thanks for outlining that OL. I get tired of reading here how you can’t work on your own cars anymore. It’s a not true.
I do the same with 3rd party diagnostic tools and occasionally have to resort to ISTA for BMW or FORScan for Ford. It sucks to have to pay the day access fee but it gets you access to factory diagnostics.
Are there things to leaned about new technology? Sure but it’s no harder to lean than it is to truly understand how a carburetor works and how to tune carbs.
“Betty” – or is it “Pebbles”? –
A rebuild kit for a Rochester Quadrajet is about $75. Once rebuilt, the carb is functionally new and will provide a decade-plus of daily driver service before it needs another rebuild. It can be rebuilt multiple times. Which you can do for the same $75. That plus a $40 fuel pump that is held in place by two bolts that can easily be reached – constitutes the entirety of the fuel delivery system. No wires. No “codes.” No sensors. No “pairing.” You can physically see and measure everything. No ghosts in the machine. If my TA”s power windows go out, it’s either the switch, the electric motor or the wiring. Simple, easy to figure out and fix. No god-damned body control modules. No scanners or fees to access “data” needed.
Yes, I’m a Lo Tek. Because you know what? It works. It’s simple. It’s inexpensive.
New cars boast marginal improvements in function (if any) at the cost of extreme complexity and cost.
China’s $8,000 BYD EV Is On US Roads
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD3Pg41pcrI
One more example of a bad new idea…
With my old Subaru with the flat six, it had a chain. The WRX I had before that had a belt, which I had changed, along with the idlers and water pump, when I took it in for the famous head gasket recall. The dealer I took it to thankfully only charged me for the belt, idlers, and water pump, because labor was the same for the head gaskets in that you had to disassemble the front of the engine as part of the job, and since they were already in there, replacing those parts would not cost extra. I guess I got lucky for once…
Timing belts on many engines isn’t that simple of a job. Easier in some ways than doing chains or wet belts. Some of pretty easy, though. What I find is that it’s as much a corporate philosophy that dictates this. Some cars are designed to be repaired and some are not.
So the procedures on Toyota are usually thought out and logical regardless of what you’re doing and is true of all their timing types and has been true for decades for most of the jobs you have to do. You can almost do a timing belt as quickly as you can a serpentine drive belt on most of their engines.
VWs on the other hand have convoluted procedures and even should-be-simple dry belts can be a real pain. You have to support the engine with a cradle because motor mounts have to come off, you have to partially disassemble suspension because something’s in the way. It takes you 8 hours of tear-down and replacement to do the 5 minutes of actual work replacing the belt. You also do the “might as wells” on them more often because that same 8 hours would have to repeated to do a water pump so the jobs just tend to creep up in scope because spending the money on the part is small compared to future labor.
Wet belts vs timing chains is more complex that it sounds. Small block pushrod V8 chains are simple and last the lifetime but overhead cams changed all that. Those go back to the 60s and 70s. So in comparison those chains have long histories of failures on many brands including reliable ones like Toyota. Wet belts don’t have to be any worse than a chain in an overhead cam engine.
This also seems to fall into companies who historically cut corners tend to do them with serious flaws, like specifying belt material that require specific oil. The fundamental stupidity (mostly to achieve a marginal gain in efficiency, on the order of 5% less friction than a dry belt, which are themselves a slight improvement over chains) they can be done in a way they are no worse in life than a dry belt or repair labor than a chain.
Hi Anon,
Yup. I find this incredibly obnoxious. Call me a Luddite. I embrace the title. I can get to the 455’s timing chain (not that I’ll ever need to) in the time it takes to remove the alternator, power steering pump and water pump and crank pulley. Now just take off the timing case/cover, a simple matter of loosening the bolts. Lo! There it is. The gears and the chain.
There is no good reason for making this sort of thing as complicated as they make it. Ergo, I deduce there are bad reasons for it.
Well, yes and no. As easy as it might be most of the time it isn’t intentional malice or conspiracy. Most things on cars have been someone tinkering or just solving a problem, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes a beautiful solution is figured out and it works forever. The cam and pushrods is great in some aspects but the rods, lifters, tappets and 2-valve heads have performance limits.
In fact the small block chain was originally thought to be a compromise because the really reliable engines used timing gears meshing directly, no chain at all. The chain itself was done to make things a little quieter, smoother, quicker to rev. Workhorse diesel engines are often built like this, no chains.
Performance is why they kept trying to put the cams on top and get multiple valves, those things date to the turn of the 20th century trying to figure it out 120 years ago.
It wasn’t regulation at all. It was really that the Allies saw the aircraft engines that adopted the early French single and double OHC engines originally from their grand prix races cars of the 1910s outperform the Germans in WWI and the technology arms race trickled down to automobiles eventually after the war. It was fits and starts until the 1950s when they could really focus on OHC engines.
True, Anon!
But note also that “they” have also been pushing anvil reliable OHC/DOHC V6 engines (eg., the Toyota 3.5) off he market via compliance pressures; also anvil reliable, large displacement non-turbo fours (in favor of tiny turbo fours).It all sees to be part of a . . . plan.
Re: the in-car peddlering:
I’m not old enough to remember when there was one screen in the entire town — the movie theater — but I am old enough to remember when there was one screen in the house: the living room family TV.
We had to endure some peddlering by watching ads, but aside from 4 to 6 minutes of your life per show-hour, it was effectively free, especially compared to the current cost for an internet connection and streaming subscriptions.
Today people pay through the nose for the privilege of watching ads while their “smart” devices monitor everything they do and say.
As a kid, the public spaces used to be safe spaces.
You could eat a meal anywhere in peace.
Those days are long-gone.
Yesterday, I kid you not, The Screen in the restaurant was showing a Fear Factor re-run where the participants are shown vomiting. Yes, throwing up, on the screen, IN A RESTAURANT!
WTF?!?!
Today everyone carries The Screen with them.
You get on a plane, The Screen is in your face.
You jump into your newer “private” automobile, there it is again: The Screen.
Screens, Screens, everywhere.
This is the space-age Utopia we were promised in The Jetsons?
George once got home from work and complained that he was exhausted because “I had to push the button five times!” And Jane didn’t have dishpan hands, she suffered from push-button finger. People complaining in their cars videos seem to be at least that silly when it comes to how hard they work today.
So there’s that.
I remember that Jetsons episode! I used that line at home after a long day at the Seattle Airplane Ranch.
“You look exhausted!”
“I tell ya’ they’re slave drivers there. I must have pushed five buttons today, almost lost count!”
Another from The Simpsons, Homer eating doughnuts and drinking coffee all day at the nuke plant. Daughter turns to me “I bet that’s you at work huh Dad!” “No, no no, busy ALL day!” “Uhh huh, sure.”
She calls me at work the next Friday, I mumble hello.
“Are you eating something?”
“A doughnut, just a sec let me wash it down with some coffee”
“I knew it, I just knew it! Busy all day, really Dad?”
the worst outnumber the good
At the other extreme of timing an engine: https://youtube.com/shorts/49XuoSxh_4Y?is=MpuKouLtnVBKUWLL
Having a timing belt vs. a chain is an evil thing in the first place, ask me how I know 😆. At the very least it should be accessible external to the engine block, like the serpentine belt, which is also a pita to change for my scraped knuckles but at least doable.
Wet timing belts are not the only issue with modern engines — interference engines with dry belts can and will fail catastrophically. I did a few timing belts on the old Ford 2.3 and 2.5 single-cam Ranger engines. Couple hours of work, and no problemo, back in business. But those were non-interference engines. Today, practically all engines are interference engines, so even if you have a dry belt and it fails, it’s toast.
With Toyota the rule of thumb is that they use chains on interference engines and belts on non-interference engines.
I had a timing chain fail on a 22R. There was no doubt it was an interference engines – bent valves and a cracked piston.
Anyone who says timing chains are so perfect hasn’t owned an overhead cam engine. Mine was a 1987, so wouldn’t fall into the “modern” category anymore but relative to a small block Chevy it is a modern and complex engine.
But do such engines as the R motors in older Celicas and Hilux count as old or new? Why did Toyota develop them? Mileage? Emissions? Driveability? Yes, yes, yes. Some government nanny nudging but also some genuine consumer demand.
Why are you the lone voice of reason here?
It’s like these guys just want to live in a world where a V8 SBC is the default engine for everything and we can never move beyond that technology.
I’m not against V8’s and SBC but come on – if you want one get one. If you don’t like engines with timing belts (dry or wet) then don’t buy one.
Variety is the spice of life. There is no shortage of all sorts of cars and all sorts of engines out there for sale.
A friend of mine who is a mechanic was telling me about a job he recently did on an early ’20s F series with a V6. Water pump was leaking and needed to be replaced. Ford decided to locate it behind the timing chain, so he had to remove the whole timing system. That’s a crap ton of labor. Truck only had 75k miles on it too.
Even worse is the Ford 3.5 Explorer engines with an INTERNAL water pump that pisses anti-freeze into the oil when it fails.
Ford has always managed to fuck up some truly excellent vehicles with one or two stupid engineering decisions like that.
On vehicles where they DIDN’T do dumb shit like that (1990s F-series with 300 CID straight six, for example, or 1990s 2.5 Rangers) they were practically indestructible.
Yeah. An F series with the 4.9 and three pedals was a great vehicle. Rust being its greatest enemy.
Wet timing belts aren’t just a worst idea…they’re literally evil personified in how a car maker can & does intentionally create planned obsolescence and functional destruction of a vehicles usefulness.
Imagine the amount of engineering & planning it must have taken to ntentionally create a system that limits the duration of time and milage an engine can run, before literally self-destructing, because a slowly disintegrating wet belt fails at a four to eight year interval, ruining the entire engine, from the crankshaft, bearings, pistons and valves, all through oil starvation.
And this premature engine death is designed to occur shortly after, or even before, the car is paid off, and will require an entire engine replacement, not a rebuild, most likely the most expensive option.
It seems most cars with these engines are also the least expensive cars on the market.
It’s done purposely so that poor folks who can only afford these cars will be kept in perpetual indentured servitude to the auto industry.
Imagine life with an eternal monthly car note/repair bill, for as long as they will own a vehicle, either for the purchase of the car or the replacement engines!
Oy Vey!!!
All our shekels are (((theirs)))!!!
YMMV….
And yes kids, its fd up on purpose to steal your money. Very very few vehicles escape their corporate incubator without obvious stealership vectors.
Speaking of timing belts … the 2.0-liter 3S-FE inline-four engine in my first-gen (1997) RAV4 is approaching 200,000 miles. The timing belt has been changed once before, and is due again for a change.
Does it make sense to change the timing belt on an engine with 200,000 miles? Or should I pay up for a remanufactured engine? What to do, what to do …
Hi Jim,
Is the engine in good running order otherwise? Can you do ths job yourself? If it is – and you can – I’d change the belt. A new/remanufactured engine is prolly going to be at least $5k.
Eric,
Also relevant, the body has no rust and can go another 200,000 miles. Whereas the 200,000-mile engine, like most 3S-FE fours, weeps oil through its gaskets and loses about a quart every 3,000 miles. Not a showstopper, but annoying nonetheless.
That’s why I’m considering biting the bullet and starting with a freshly remanufactured engine. In either case, I’m not doing the wrenching myself.
Roger that, Jim –
Well, even if you have to spend $5k, if the rest of the RAV is ok, you will likely get at least another 10-15 years of service out of it – so money well-spent!
Toyota engines should be good for 500k or more if the oil is changed on a regular basis. Doing the timing belt on a transverse engine is a royal pita. You may want to bite the bullet and have it done unless you have a good variety of tight area wrenches.
Keep that ’97 going until parts become no longer available…imho…
I’d do the belt, 3sfe is a ridiculously good engine, as you note it will ooze some lube oil. Also note if you opt for a reman, the RAV4 uses a different block and a standard,common 3sfe from a camry wont work. The block has different motor mount pads, the crank has different flywheel mounting, and the rods are different.
Ask me how I know, and if anyone needs a 3sfe from a car, I’ve had one sitting in a crate for about 18 years. The 3sfe never dies, the car rots away and attrits around it, and so there is no market for a good used engine.