Is it me or are all the £1500 cars now £5k?

[Tinders]

Old engines are dirt cheap and most of the time still have life in them. You can replace any individual parts. The good ones (Japanese, old American v8s etc) just go on forever. Once EVs get to around the 8 year old mark they are hot potatoes.

Another issue (mostly with Teslas) is people have gone to replace a module and found they have some obscure/obsolete revision of the battery pack, so costs rocket even more as you cant just mix them up. In the more recent ones Musk has made it much worse by sticking all the cells together inside an Eton mess of glue and foam to save some pennies, so good luck replacing those. Not sure how they are going to recycle that either...

Modern engines are far from cheap. OM651 for a merc sprinter/C/E class is £1700 plus fitting for something with 100k plus on it, and they are prone to failure, we are talking 2011-15 cars, so not exactly old. Rebuilds arent cheap, the cranks go on them and dont respond well to machining and over size bearings, so its a new crank.

The majority of modern cars are diesel, and there hasnt been a reliable engine, japanese or german since the early 2000's. Theres only one modern bullet proof engine, and thats the atkinson cycle hybrid.

 

[b0rn2sk8]

Yep it's very labour intensive on top of the parts cost. Disassemble most of the car to get to it. Then carefully chissel away at a solid foamy mess for hours. It requires breaking the casing too so that would also need replacing.

Very poor design and poor packaging. That's how they were able to knock money off them. Hopefully it isn't too flammable...

You can swap a battery in most EVs in less than a day, it’s very easy in most cases taking one person a few hours.

No one is doing cell level replacements in the real world at your local garage and very rarely a whole module replacement but only on certain models. They’ll just be swapping it out for a remanufactured/refurbished part they bought in from a specialist and sending the old one back to be remanufactured or recycled.

You make it sound like people are replacing these things all the time, in reality a failure is extremely rare.

 

[Nasher]

Modern engines are far from cheap. OM651 for a merc sprinter/C/E class is £1700 plus fitting for something with 100k plus on it, and they are prone to failure, we are talking 2011-15 cars, so not exactly old. Rebuilds arent cheap, the cranks go on them and dont respond well to machining and over size bearings, so its a new crank.

The majority of modern cars are diesel, and there hasnt been a reliable engine, japanese or german since the early 2000's. Theres only one modern bullet proof engine, and thats the atkinson cycle hybrid.

Well yea, cars in general have got worse since the 00s. That is obvious. The emissions control stuff seems to kill them eventually and they don't drive as nicely with digital controls.

But the German engines have been flakey for a long time. Merc aren't like the 190E days when they could survive a Sahara crossing. They make only chintzy bling mobiles now. As do Audi.