In his biweekly rant, PM’s senior automotive editor and Saturday Mechanic wonders out loud why car engineers don’t think like car mechanics—and how that’s making for more everyday headaches on the road than you deserve.
By Mike Allen
Published on: November 6, 2007
Too much of what we design and manufacture today is broken from the get-go. I can finesse or work around a lot of improperly designed user interfaces and hardware, but I shouldn’t have to—and neither should you. On more occasions than I care to remember, I’ve had to make or modify a lot of tools in my shop to take something apart and/or put it back together, often in the wee hours of the morning. A lot of people without the skills or time to make tools and parts are totally adrift when confronted with mechanical tasks like these. Too many people have abandoned working on their own cars, and I’d bet a lot of that comes from seeing the way things are engineered. Tasks that should be simple are instead very complicated because someone didn’t think through the consequences of their design.
Let’s take something as simple as spark-plug access.
