Whew, I'm safe. I avoid that stuff like the plague.
That's not a comprehensive list by any means, just the first three off the top of my head.
some cars have no dipstick are fairly easy like on GM's you fill trans though a filler hole on top and when it runs out of a level plug put the plug in and drive away.
That's how the manual transaxle on my 968 works (obviously not going to have a dipstick since the engine is in the front and the transaxle is in the back, so no access from above). It's very easy, actually I prefer it to a dipstick.
How many miles did the model t's run? Think you could get 200 or 300 thousand out of them?
If you think "lifetime fill" coolant and transmission and differential fluid, and 15,000 mile oil changes, will ever get you to 200,000 miles (or anywhere past 100,000 miles, for that matter), you're dreaming.
d_rock said:
Believe it or not, some things are designed to keep your car on the road longer. Not everything the car companies do is a conspiracy.
No conspiracy...just simple economics. The manufacturers need to make sure that the dealership service departments have a steady flow of customers, because the sales departments sure aren't keeping the dealerships afloat (but the manufacturers obviously need to keep the dealerships alive with their sales departments in order to move their product). So there's a big incentive to force customers to the dealership service departments, in spite of ever increasing rates. Hence the cars that are unnecessarily difficult and confusing to work on. They've been making cars with those oil change interval warning lights/messages for years now, but there's always been some combination of buttons that anybody can use to reset them, even if you changed the oil at home. Until now. The Jaguar XJ (with the same 5.0L V8 as the XF and XK) has an oil change interval warning that cannot be reset in any way at all without the factory software. It's not like it's more difficult or complicated to change the oil on this car than any other, hell it's got the exact same engine as the XF and XK and apparently those are safe enough for the "shadetree mechanic" that they have a relatively simple reset sequence using the trip reset button and the foglight button. For now, at least. It's just a scam to force owners to keep coming back to the dealership.
At the same time, some manufacturers (BMW, etc) feel that in order to be competitive, they need to offer free maintenance. Well guess what, when maintenance is free, the cars suddenly magically need less of it. Why is that? Did the manufacturing technology and the lubricant technology just happen to advance by leaps and bounds at exactly the right time? Of course not, the maintenance schedule just transitioned from one that keeps the car running (and coming back into the dealership, at the customer's expense) for as long as possible, to one that just barely keeps the car from blowing up for 60,000 miles, after which point it's off warranty, any repairs due to the poor maintenance are at customer expense, and it's expected that the vehicle will be junked and replaced with a new model. Like I said, simple economics.
Yeah probably the guy who gave the green light to build the Jag XKR-S with a torque converter automatic. "Supercar with a torque converter? Sure, why not?"