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points by Scubabear68 2 days ago | 0 comments

I learned this lesson with my Kia Telluride. Rave reviews, but it was a new model without years of data behind it.

At 70,000 miles very expensive parts began to break down like clockwork, like the very complicated alternator, and even small accidents racked up $10,000-$20,000 repair bills. Insurance paid for it, but the car was out of commission for a month each time.

I can’t fault the reviewers exactly, but I learned a lesson that there may be something to longer, proven designs that have been battle tested over millions of collective miles.

[–] gwbas1c 2 days ago

That is why Toyota is so popular in the US: They are extremely reliable.

(I personally don't drive them, but many of my family members love them.)

If you want to keep a new car 10+ years, they're generally a safe bet. Related: I had very little problems with my 2018 Tesla Model 3, but traded it in at 6.5 years because I needed a larger vehicle for my family.

[–] MathMonkeyMan 2 days ago

Cars are different nowadays (hopefully even more reliable), but the '95 Toyota Camry that my parents bought new in 1995 or 1996 lasted until I was done using it in college in 2011. Then my dad sold it for a chunk of cash. The only thing wrong with it was that the roof paint was gone to shit from the Florida sun. You could probably paint it, redo the ceiling fabric, and run it for another 10 years. They sunk a fair amount into it over the years, but nothing catastrophic -- no powertrain issues, no "fixing this AC will cost more than the car" issues. In the six years I drove it I think it needed about $300 of work (something about the steering or suspension).

[–] pkaye 2 days ago

There are lots of Camry from 2008 to 2017 which has paint delamination issue. Ours is from 2012 but it only started getting noticeably worse near the end of the warranty period and I never heard about it because it was during the pandemic and our dealer went out of business. Toyota didn't publicize the issue till the end.

[–] goosejuice 2 days ago

Family member had a rav4 prime instrument cluster go black. Spent 4+ months without that vehicle while they were trying to figure that shit out. No idea if this is common, but those cars aren't exactly readily available so they were stuck with a Corolla for a long time.

[–] expedition32 2 days ago

I think it depends on were you live. The roads in my country are high quality and the winters are soft. You'd actually have to try really hard to wreck any car in 10 years.

[–] gwbas1c 2 days ago

My dad kept a new Camry for ~15 years in the Northeastern US; no major problems. 20 years earlier he was lucky if he could get a car to go over 100k miles and last 10 years.

(In the winter, road salt corrodes the cars and the snowplows bear up the roads.)

[–] King-Aaron 2 days ago

For second hand cars, here in Australia we have a youtuber that goes by the name ReDriven, this guy Adam reviews second hand cars specifically and focuses on reliability, and what it's like to live with. He's got a mate who's a mechanic that details all the specific mechanical problems that they see with the cars.

Such an insanely useful little channel and they do amazing work.

[–] OptionOfT 2 days ago

I think small accidents == large bills is caused by the amount of sensors and crumple zones in cars.

Layered on top of that is the massively increased cost of parts and labor to install the parts and paint them. And cars aren't really made to be taken apart easily.

Then there is the issue of availability of parts, especially in newer cars.

All of that makes it so that there are a 100+ cars outside the body-shop I frequently pass by. Because of the speed (or slowness) of the pipeline, body-shops need to be a certain size. Then insurance tries to squeeze them, and people don't get paid enough for the work they actually do.

So that's why your repaired bumper is 2 tints darker than your body. No-one has the time to properly blend the paints.

[–] orthogonal_cube 2 days ago

> And cars aren't really made to be taken apart easily.

This is a major contributor for specific models. I was listening to my brother complain about a vehicle that rolled into their shop lately and how the engineers really didn’t think about how difficult it would be for technicians to service things. Some parts are fairly inexpensive and easy to replace but you have to remove the engine or transmission in order to get enough clearance to swap out the part!

[–] scheme271 2 days ago

It's there even for parts that require regular replacement. For example, VW GTIs have required removing the bumper and taking a decent amount of stuff off the car in order to replace the headlights. This has been the case since at least 2007. Granted with LED headlights this isn't as much of an issue but prior generations had xenon headlights which required replacement periodically.

[–] ssl-3 2 days ago

Same on my 14-year-old Honda van. The sane way to replace the HID bulbs (or the ballast or the ignitor, because HID things) is to remove the headlight housings, and the first step of doing that is removing the front bumper cover. It's not completely awful, but it's not exactly awesome either.

The less-sane way to replace just-the-bulb is from the top. It seems like it should be faster, and it sure does look easier, but it's a blind one-handed process with little fiddly bits to manipulate. There's not enough room to add a reasonably-stout glove to that hand, and there wouldn't be enough dexterity and tactile sense if there were. Consequently, there will be blood. I'm told that it's a lot more practical to swap a bulb in-situ with the halogen housings (as those don't have as much depth to them as the ones for HID), but my Honda is not so-endowed.

Part of this is because, AFAICT, the headlight assemblies are structural. They tie into several other assemblies and help hold the front of the vehicle together.

(A pedestrian Buick or Chevrolet from ~20 years ago is very different: To remove a headlight assembly, just lift up on a couple of heavy nylon straps and the whole shebang basically just falls out. It takes seconds. Reinstallation is very nearly as quick.)

[–] bigfatkitten 2 days ago

That’s not a new thing.

I replaced the heater core on a 1987 Ford XF Falcon. In hindsight, it would’ve been easier to pull the motor out and cut myself an access panel in the firewall than it was to disassemble and reassemble the dash.

[–] orthogonal_cube 2 days ago

Certainly not new. Though the space under the hood remains fairly constant, the free space has decreased. There are more and more components becoming difficult to reach and service while they’re among the first to wear out.

[–] Scubabear68 2 days ago

Sensors and crumple zones are part of it. But for the Telluride, some of the issue as well is that the OEM parts are often available only for gross assemblies. So where as historically you could get discrete parts for other manufacturers, for KIA they often only have big pre-assembled assemblies available. That was the case for the alternator which played a few different roles and could only be replaced en-masse. Headlights are another area where any damage requires an entirely new assembly.

The approach makes repairability really, really expensive.

[–] toeknee 2 days ago

One interesting thing I noticed about Chinese vehicles is that the expensive sensor arrays are commonly mounted on the roof, presumably safe from small fender benders. Hopefully Western manufacturers will pick up that feature.

[–] scheme271 2 days ago

Ideally that would be the place to keep them. It'd also help with not having to recalibrate the sensor arrays due to bumps that might not damage anything but which jostle things a bit. I think recalibration essentially requires an expensive visit to the dealer since the software needed to do it is dealer only or extremely expensive for independent mechanics.

[–] hedgehog 2 days ago

If you're conservative and buying something as critical as a daily use car it makes a lot of sense to get second or later model year of the second or later generation since a major redesign. Preferably a model that has been sold in high volumes and used heavily as a taxi or something. Then at least you will know the most likely problems before you buy.

[–] SteveNuts 2 days ago

Last time I flew into O'hare it was incredible how it seemed like half the Ubers were Rav4s or Highlanders.

[–] hedgehog 2 days ago

Either of those with the 2.5L hybrid drivetrain is about as boring of a car as you can get (in a good way).

[–] red-iron-pine 2 days ago

yeah easily 50% of my ubers have been Rav4s or Corollas.

seriously impacted my view and did change my car selection (but not to a Rav4, to a Toyota Sienna minivan)

[–] austin-cheney 2 days ago

I think reliability is the reason they killed the Soul. It scored too high a score on reliability for its price point.

[–] macintux 2 days ago

Can’t be true of their brake lights. One of my hobbies is alerting people to burnt-out tail lights, and every time I see a Soul I pay particular attention to it, because at least 1 out of every 4 cars has a light or two out.

[–] dghlsakjg 2 days ago

Or is that a reflection of Kia buyers...

[–] alephnerd 2 days ago

That's not why. The Soul like other small cars (eg. Fit, Yaris, Accent) saw shrinking uptake from consumers.

People on HN love talking about small cars, but purchasing data has shown otherwise in most markets.

The Kia Soul was also heavy hit by tariffs on South Korean automotive exports in North America and the EU as well as the sanctions on Russia, as it was manufactured and assembled in Kia's Gwangju and Kaliningrad factories. Btw, the Russian factory now assembles Chinese cars for the Russian and Belarusian market.

[–] Tanoc 2 days ago

The second generation Soul was Kia's best selling vehicle in the U.S., and for Honda the Fit was their third best seller behind the CR-V and Civic. The issue wasn't that people weren't buying them. They absolutely were. The issue was that dealer allocations kept getting lower and lower as the manufacturers pushed CUVs and SUVs more and more after 2006. 2008 delayed that shift since big SUVs were seen as icons of the crash, but by 2011 the shift resumed. CAFE standards made it infeasible to sell the smaller cars because their development and testing was more expensive thanks to the footprint rule. Since the U.S. was the second largest market behind China and China was already overcrowded in the A and B segments, the moment that the U.S. stopped being enough of a profit center (around 2014) those segments got axed. When they deemed it too narrow in profits for the C segment (around 2018) that also got axed. Honda and Toyota are the only holdouts with the Civic and Corolla because Europe and Asia love the things, and while those two markets are only 30% of the size of the U.S. in terms of sales per year that's still big enough to justify keeping it around. Especially as the Civic now has no competition except the Corolla in the U.S. since Ford, GM, Stellantis, Nissan, Hyundai, Geely, and Tata all abandoned hatchbacks, coupes, and sedans. It's all down to loopholes and perverse incentives betraying the buying public once again.

[–] red-iron-pine 2 days ago

i call bollocks. the Honda Fit sold like hotcakes and the Civic and Corolla continue to be ubiquitous .

margins and market incentives aren't there for small vehicles. same reason that things like clothes are bifurcated into either bottom-barrel fast-fashion or $1000 button ups.