As someone who's been following this issue pretty closely, I'm very skeptical about what they could fix.
This is a fundamental engine design issue in their popular Theta II engine that results in premature and excessive wear on cylinder wall, leading to excessive noise, vibration, stalling, and ceased operation.
In a quest to save weight and increase power, they made connecting rod too thin and height of the bearings too narrow to hold unwanted movement of pistons in check. Instead of piston moving just up and down, there was sideway play often resulting in severely scratched cylinder wall after 15k mile of driving. There are many reports of connecting rods grenading altogether.
Hyundai found out about this pretty quickly, and de-tuned engine output in later iterations to increase reliability. Yet, they have consistently denied this design defect as a problem for many years.
There already has been multiple massive class action lawsuits and recalls on this in the U.s. since 2015. Many Korean customers were angry that Hyundai was not issuing the same recall in their home country, where they often pay higher price than identical exports.
Hyundai found out about this pretty quickly, and de-tuned engine output in later iterations to increase reliability.
Coincidentally, I was recently reading about early American cars and their heavily overbuilt construction is a huge contrast to this "value engineering" of modern engines; whereas those old engines could be tuned to make far more than stock power with little effect on reliability, it seems today the aim is to make the margin as narrow as possible --- just enough to get past the warranty period, with the associated effect that, due to how the statistics work, quite a few of them will fail before too. Samsung's "exploding" washing machines are a recent, non-automotive, example of this.
Today's cars may be more efficient and less polluting, but if they last a fraction of the time as the old ones and have to be replaced many times more often, are they really that much better environmentally overall?
I'm not sure which era, or which detuning you are talking about, but the 500 cu in (8.2L !!!!) Cadillac engine in the El Dorado made 400 hp when it was introduced in 1970, and 190 hp in 1976, after several rounds of detuning for smog controls, among other reasons.
Anyway, eventually engineers learned how to make engines that are highly efficient and have very low emissions, basically by making the things as complicated as sin.
For a good 10 years or so, all of these goodies they added (like Mass Airflow Sensors, etc) would fail in mysterious ways, and be very expensive to replace.
Now most of that stuff is pretty solid too.
A lot of opinion about car tech is set by stuff that is 10-20 years old, which is both fair and not fair. It's fair, because it's hard to tell how things will wear when they are new. It's not fair, because engineers have already fixed a lot of things that went wrong in the previous generation.
Anyway, Cadillac now has a 3.0L Turbo [0] that makes as much hp as the 8.2 from above.
I was mainly referring to the 50s-60s, when engines could normally be tuned to produce significantly more power than stock without huge decreases in longevity, because their mechanical parts were far stronger than required. The same goes for other powertrain parts (e.g. THM400 transmission.)
after several rounds of detuning for smog controls, among other reasons.
I doubt any of those "other reasons" were because the engine couldn't survive 400hp.
'90s Japanese cars were much the same, you could generally increase the engine power by a factor of at least 1.5x - 2x with bolt-on mods and still keep things mostly reliable.
I don't believe for a minute that modern cars last less long than old cars. Have you actually used a 60's or 70's car as a daily driver? The big difference is also maintenance. If you've ever had an old car you know about oil change intervals that's maybe 25% of modern cars, constant valve adjustments, distributor problems, carburetor adjustments, etc.
Modern cars as a rule go hundreds of thousands of miles without major problems while using a fraction of the gasoline per mile and producing a fraction of the pollution.
Yeah, sometimes they get it wrong and design something that doesn't last. But do you think that didn't happen before, too? Remember that the models we know and remember 50 years later are the winners. There's a strong survivorship bias at work here.
This is a false equivalence. On average, cars last about twice as long today than they did in the 70's. Just since the mid-90's, the average U.S. car age has gone from 8.4 to 11.4 years.
Doesn't that fit in line with what he said though? Newer cars last much longer than older cars did without repairs, but once the newer car breaks youre SOL
The average age of cars on the road is itself a good measure of when "you're SOL". Cars had a much shorter lifespan in past decades because they'd rust and break down much sooner, to the degree that it was more economical to buy a new car than to repair.
I wonder if it's hard for younger HN readers to appreciate the progress here? Having a car last 200,000 miles used to be a stroke of insane luck, like living to 90 years old - for most car models in the last 10 years, 200,000 is basically the least you could expect to get out of a car.
That's not really the point that's being argued though. Modern cars are undeniably better in terms of how long they last, but you can't go in and just repair all the pieces any more like you could with old cars. That is the point being discussed here
Modern car engines reach around 200k--depending on the make.
The transmissions are another beast. They just seem to die at 140k, plus, or minus how you drive.
Their wasen't constant valve adjustments, or carb adjustments , distributors were dead simple. 90% of the time it was a bad condenser, or the points contacts needed sanding, unless you happened to own a British Vehicle.
And yes Amercan vechicles made in the late 70's, and 80's were aweful.
Old was not necessarily better, but Shade Tree mechanics could work on them.
There's a reason wealthy men buy old classic cars. A few years ago the average guy could buy a vice classic. Today--it's changed. Their are guys stockpiling older collectable vechicle.
Every wonder why the new cars offer just 7 year, or 100,000 miles of the Powertrain warranty?
None of those 1970s cars broke because the factory used plastic parts in the engine. When you have experience with that and then find "Oh the plastic theromstat housing cracked" on your "modern" car, that appears to be a regression.
Oh yes they did - and the plastics were not as advanced either so they were worse. For example: 1970 Lincoln Continental 460 v8 with plastic timing chain sprockets for "low noise".
This is a rather rose-tinted view — old cars (c. >25 years) broke down very frequently (by modern standards), rusted easily, and very rarely lasted to 100,000 miles. By a substantial margin, new cars have never been so reliable or required so little maintenance.
Conversely, this doesn't mean that cars were made poorly in the past, it's just that the technologies and methods used in their manufacture have improved over time.
What the other guy said, but that's also why I said "circa" instead of an exact date. The reason Camcords and Corollics became ubiquitous was their reputation for consistently lasting, on no more than the manufacturer-recommended maintenance schedule and a warranty repair or two, past the 100k mile marker without throwing a head gasket or rusting away.
Nowadays that's the minimum we expect (even for bargain-basement Korean subcompacts,* exotic Porsche sports cars or bleeding-edge high-technology computer-controlled Teslas), but >25 years ago it was virtually unheard of outside the Japanese brands.
*The Hyundai Excel and Pony had such poor reputations for reliability that their brand image still remains somewhat tarnished in the US, while the Daewoo brand had to be retired in North America/Europe entirely (I believe some of their models are now sold as Chevys).
Most early 90's cars were garbage. Some would live to high mileage but fall apart in the process. Rust, bad paint, plastics that faded and cracked, terrible suspension, etc.
Thanks to the 'heartbleed' mess I was passed several collections of design documents (for then-current and then-future production) from an european carmaker after some less than scrupulous colleagues got into their vpn.
CAD and FEA are great, but the above spec ruins it. You get parts made of light alloys and plastic, made of the minimum amount of material possible. They happen to be mostly fine when everything is perfect but any unintended load or crack in the plastic due to aging results in a catastrophe.
At least in aerospace, the 2,000 hr spec comes up often as a reasonable service life. We could make everything last forever, but that usually means beefier, heavier parts. How much more in fuel per flight hour are you willing to pay for a product that lasts longer? What about decreased range? Also, how much of a unit cost increase will you accept to pay for larger chunks of aerospace aluminum? Tradeoffs are necessarily driven by consumer demands.
At an average speed of 50mph, 2000 running hours comes out at 100000 miles. If the spec aims for all engines to last this long then you'd expect a good majority of them to last a lot longer. This doesnt seem too bad a goal to me.
Why on earth would you imagine 100,000 is an ok goal? My 2004 Toyota Carolla has around 150k miles on its original engine and supposing you keep maintaining it 250k is not unreasonable.
It seems odd that you would accept a design lifetime that is 40% of a car made 13 years ago.
I'm also not clear why you would expect the majority to perform above spec? Wouldn't a significant number fail under spec? Isn't a care which may become a total loss in 60-80k miles basically tissue paper quality?
Manufacturers often use a term MTBF or "mean time between failure". I'm not sure if the 2000 hours spec is an MTBF or not, but essentially that is an average life with some standard deviation.
Personally, I think a pretty big swath of engines make it well past 100,000 miles now - there are usually other issues with cars at about the 10 to 15 year mark with most makes and models that have to do with rust.
Designing engines that last significantly longer on average (say 250,000 miles) would require either a beefier design, which will add weight and reduce efficiency, or exotic materials that will significantly increase the cost.
Automobiles are pretty amazing for what they are. I agree with many others that they have gotten ridiculously complex, but this is mostly because of the emissions requirements - and that said I do enjoy the fact that smog is not much of an issue (at least in the US) these days.
My main point was that 2000 hrs sounds quite short, at least to me, but 100K miles sounds considerably longer. I suppose that if a manufacturer's goal is that all their vehicles last at least that long, and they can reach that goal then most will last much longer, especially with some TLC.
Honestly, the issue there is that the car market pushed people further towards buying a new car on a loan and then trading it in every few years, or leases. Nobody expects to be driving the same car for the next 20 years, and loans are easy enough to get that few people who're doing reasonably ok with money are "forced" to get a used car.
I did not think of this until reading this thread, but the practice of leasing may be driving the longevity of modern cars, which is in stark contrast to what is happening with domestic appliances. Somewhat paradoxically, the leasing model seems to benefit from a robust used-car market.
Without leases, I'm not sure that there would actually be any supply for the used car market. There are some small percentage of people that buy and sell new cars every two years, but most people I've seen buy cars and drive them into the ground until they hit a major, expensive mechanical repair or couldn't get them to pass inspection any longer.
Most used cars I've looked at in dealerships (as opposed to the Craigslist/Uncle Henry's as-is-where-is private sales) were overwhelmingly former lease vehicles.
None, since that range would make that impossible, but I have ~170k miles on one of mine at the moment with few issues.
It replaced a car that had 190k miles from around 2000. Its worst problems were a bad A/C compressor (replaced at ~100k miles) and a slipping clutch (it was the original clutch). The plugs and wires were replaced once during its service.
Modern cars are amazingly reliable and amazingly safe compared to their predecessors.
You seem to be looking at the past through rose-colored glasses. I owned and drove cars made in the '60s and '70s. Compared to modern cars the quality was terrible in every way. The only advantage over today's cars is they were simpler and thus easier to fix. And that was a good thing, too, since you were going to be fixing them.
In those days you were lucky to get 80k miles on an engine before it needed a rebuild, while it's not hard to find post-2000 cars with over 250k miles on the original, un-rebuilt engine.
To be fair no one had access such vast amounts of CAD/FEM tools and the computing resources required to optimize them. This probably meant that the choices boiled down to over-engineering or bust.
As you know, whistleblowers are punished everywhere, even in the U.S. "60 percent said they were fired after exposing organizational corruption." This is actually lower than the figure in the u.s. Where the rate was 70 - 80 % according to a Virginia tech research.
If I may rephrase your question to "Should your car buying decision take into factor the fact that SKorea does not have as strong whistle blower protection as the U.S.?"
Car market in the U.S. is so competitive, and consumer protection so strong, that personally it wouldn't influence my car buying decision in the U.S.
If I were buying a Hyundai in Korea, then yes, it would be a factor, though how much, it's hard to say. I don't believe Hyundai would consistently misbehave like this. It's entirely possible that had the fix been cheaper for this engine recall, Hyundai may not have dragged their feet.
As to your question on Japan, I'm not really qualified to speak about whistleblower protection legal frameworks about either country. Both countries have it, but they are relatively recent concept, where there still is strong sense of company loyalty, hierarchical chain of command, saving face, and slim chance of re-employment in the same industry after whistleblowing event. It probably still needs to time to mature.
Either way, if I were buying Korean or Japanese goods in the U.S., all I would care about is product quality and performance. They are both nations of people that take strong pride (some may say too much) in their outputs, and care too much about how their countries are perceived on oversea stage that to have meaningful impact on their product quality.
You really can't fire people in Japan. It is virtually impossible. I have heard that many Japanese companies maintain employees that have no job function, though. Some people will quit out of shame, but many won't because getting another job is also nearly impossible (job hopping is not a thing unless you are a temporary/contract worker).
So, whistle blowers get a "vacation" for the rest of their careers. Hard to say if that's better or worse than getting fired.
>Should my car buying decision take into factor the fact that SKorea, as Nytimes says, punishes whistle blowers?
Are you asking this as a moral question or a technical/value question? For moral, I can't help you. For technical/value, new Hyundais/Kias are generally regarded as very decent cars.
>If so, does this happen in Japan too?
Japan also has a VERY hierarchical management system, where top-down direction is the only way things are done.
> How does one take this kind of stuff into account?
One generally does not, because generally speaking none of these things have a first order effect on the product.
As far as I can tell, other than reduced output figures, they're still using Theta II engine design. However, they may have revised manufacturing process and improved tolerance... it's hard to say.
Many people with well over 100k don't have any issues, so it's bit of a crapshoot.
Given the cost of this recall, I don't think they're stupid enough to keep cranking out the same engine without having high level of confidence that the issue has been more or less addressed.
With that said, even in its revised state, I doubt this engine will be as reliable as Toyota's AR engine or Honda's K24 engine. Time will tell.
Wow. I have a Hyundai Sonata 2009 with 2.0L engine and I somehow totally missed any news about this recall. Crazy. Reading Wiki I can't determine which Theta engine I have - I or II. Apparently it's 163hp so most likely Theta II, but it is definitely non-turbo so I'm lost here.
> But in March, South Korea’s Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission ruled that he should get his job back. Mr. Kim returned to Hyundai last month, but the carmaker had been challenging the commission’s decision with an administrative court. On Tuesday, the two sides appeared to reach a deal, with Mr. Kim resigning from Hyundai and the company withdrawing both the lawsuits and the complaint to the police, a Hyundai spokeswoman said.
Even if the courts required a company to restore my employment, I would find it impossible to walk into the office of the company that I had whistleblew.
Vindicated whistleblowers should get a raise and a promotion. Instead they are the subject of prolonged acts of revenge.
Engineers speaking out about safety issues that then get swept under the carpet must be amongst the most frustrated people in the world. First you go to school for many years to learn how to do the very best job you can and then some pencil pusher annuls all that by refusing your input because it affects the bottom line in a negative way.
Kudos to this man, I'd hire him in a heartbeat if I was in a position to do so. He's even more courageous than it might seem at first glance because in the society he's from this is an absolute taboo to the point where airplanes have crashed because people did not dare to disagree with someone senior in rank.
They should really get a minimum settlement (10 years pay or something similar), because it's completely unreasonable to think that it would be tenable for them to continue their employment without severe strain.
Not just that, but the exposure hurts their chances of getting a new job with another organization as they become branded 'disloyal,' which is a quality managers don't like even if they're not explicitly breaking the law.
I wonder whether MBA students learn about the Coase theorem, for which there's abundant empirical evidence. It seems to me that deliberate attempts to shirk the costs of externalities are little more than the 'conspiracy to defraud the publick' that Adam Smith famously mentioned.
He resigned shortly after his employment was restored. This is totally expected given the amount of ostracization he would have faced, but I think it's still a better outcome for him in the long term than if he had just gotten a large settlement.
He's close to retirement age anyway, so by resigning voluntarily instead of being terminated for cause, he gets to keep his pension and other benefits. (South Korea has a public pension system, but large corporations often add a lot on top of that.) Hyundai also agreed to drop all other complaints against him in exchange for his resignation, which would not have happened had the court just ordered them to pay him a bunch of money. This man deserves a peaceful retirement.
I hope he moves to another town and runs an auto shop or something :)
Could this have promote an interesting incentive?
-> notice safety breach/design defect
-> don't speak up
-> manufacture and distribute
-> highlight defects to management
-> whistleblow if they don't recall
-> profit???
Or similar?
Just interested to see if anyone could elaborate or dispel this notion for me.
I guess it comes down to the character of the person?
There is this proverb about exceptions and rules. The vast majority of whistleblowers are ostracized and will never work again in their industry, if at all.
That's a pretty high price to pay for just doing your bloody job and society should make sure they get rewarded properly for providing some necessary transparency and safety.
Given all that what should really surprise you is how much integrity these people have, they know that they'll be dealt with unjustly, that their lives and the lives of their dependents will probably be ruined and still they blow that whistle, loud and clear.
We need more of these people, and fewer 'team players'.
If you've been paying attention at all, whistle blowing is actually a learned technique.
Some blunder forth into hell unimaginable, and others create a springloaded safety net before cutting away. It's often difficult to distinguish between the two, since whistle blowing often captures spectacular attention, and even the flame-outs that jump out of the frying pan and into the fire seem inspirational in that sense of a tragic, yet dashing pyrrhic victory.
But seriously, any given whistle blower should consciously attempt to organize a launch pad and a landing zone, even if for a crash landing. For every poorly understood tragedy, we usually get another negative example of "why no one should do such a thing," rather than "what went wrong and how to do it right."
That was a court-ordered payment, not an act of generosity on the part of his or her employer. He or she may have been unpopular with his or her coworkers if the whistleblower chose to remain in the same job.
>Vindicated whistleblowers should get a raise and a promotion. Instead they are the subject of prolonged acts of revenge.
I absolutely agree with you, but there's a bit of a nitpick to be made here--but an important one:
From Google: "A whistleblower (also written as whistle-blower or whistle blower) is a person who exposes any kind of information or activity that is deemed illegal, unethical, or not correct within an organization that is either private or public."
Whistleblowers by definition do not need vindication.
Vindication: "proof that someone or something is right, reasonable, or justified."
A whistleblower is not a whistleblower unless they reveal wrongdoing.
Edit:
For example: Snowden is by definition a whistleblower because the information he leaked revealed illegal and unconstitutional activity. The courts already ruled it illegal. So he is by definition already a whistleblower/vindicated of wrongdoing. Perhaps the OP intended (and rightfully so) some statement about public opinion/perception of the value of whistleblowers.
By contrast: someone who leaks information containing no wrongdoing or nothing illegal is not a whistleblower. In other words: perhaps in such cases some extenuating circumstances may mitigate or vindicate the offender of wrongdoing. Whistleblowers, however, are not in such situations.
The whistleblowers themselves do need vindication though; proof that their actions were justified. See e.g. the need for Snowden's leaks, and his responsible handling of sensitive information, to be vindicated publicly.
For this matter, if I had to sue an employer to make them give me my job back, I wouldn't feel comfortable working with them anymore. Everyone would hate my guts, especially those with the power to make my work life miserable.
It's a weird Catch-22. You don't sue for your job back, you don't work there again. You do sue for your job back, you won't want to work there again.
Best thing in the case of wrongful termination would be to sue for enough money you can spend a year or two not working after your lawyer and the IRS take their cut and then take your sweet time looking for another job.
It's not pleasant, for sure, but it beats penury. Plus it seems here that it gave him some leverage:
> On Tuesday, the two sides appeared to reach a deal, with Mr. Kim resigning from Hyundai and the company withdrawing both the lawsuits and the complaint to the police, a Hyundai spokeswoman said.
Yes, it's the best that he can hope for given the circumstances.
If the court had ordered Hyundai to pay him a certain amount of money for wrongful termination, Hyundai would have paid him and then continued with the lawsuit to make him pay back even more. They would have dragged on the lawsuit for years to ruin his life.
Instead, the court ordered them to continue to employ him until such time as he chose to resign. Which gave him a lot of power to dictate the terms of his resignation. He's close to retirement age anyway (most employees of large corporations in Korea retire between 55 and 60) so in addition to dropping the lawsuit, keeping his pension and other benefits would have been a high priority for him.
On the other hand, it takes a great deal of courage and determination for a man to make actual use of such leverage against his employer. Kudos to Mr. Kim for standing firm and asserting his rights not only in his act of whistleblowing but throughout the aftermath!
It's not. "whistleblower" is a commonly used compound noun, and "whistle-blow" is starting to enter usage, but in common usage, it's "blow the whistle" and "blew the whistle."
Both "whistleblew" and "whistleblown" seem awkward to me, though I am not enough of a grammarian to explain why (the latter sounds to me to more appropriate to the company than the person, in analogy to "wind-blown sand".) Maybe this is a case of impractical verbing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H formation of a verb from a noun.
>> “Engineers are like that,” Mr. Kim said. “We don’t lie.”
Hmm. That's pretty general, but he may be right. The engineers willing to lie tend to get promoted to management to do the necessary lying on behalf of the engineers that aren't.
I have a 'pet theory' (ie random thought that crossed my mind a few times), that to become a good engineer or software developer you need to have, or make yourself a perspective of the world, and your place in it, where you don't need to - even subconsciously - lie to yourself in order to feel all right.
It almost appears as if the brain almost doesn't allow us to see what we need to see, and think what we need to think to be good at those task, if doing so will interfere with our self image and/or worldview in a similar vein as our more physical self-preservation instincts make it very hard to consciously do things that will cause pain or harm.
I don't think it is about having to be altogether rational or truthful, but rather that you and the perception of whatever world you experience will not be significantly challenged by the observations you do each day, the thoughts you experience, and the decisions you make.
This is sort of along the lines of something I've commented on with my wife a couple of times recently. People like to see themselves as doers of good, not evil. It helps keep a person sane. Not many people are okay with being bad people (doing unethical things on purpose). So what do we do when we are acting unethically? We have internal justifications and rationalizations that we use to excuse unethical behaviors in our own minds in order to keep a positive picture of ourselves in our own minds or identities.
As a tangent, this also reminds me of what an NYTimes op-ed columnist wrote about the current administration:
> Truth be told, the incessant lying by this president and the elaborate apparatus he has built in the White House to bend reality to meet those lies means that nothing they say is to be believed anyway, but this is of a different nature. This says to America: I’m going to tell you a lie that is so outrageous that you will want to believe that some part of it is true, to preserve your faith in truth, democracy and mankind.
It's probably a mix of stockholm syndrome (with respect to peers and company) and the Dunning–Kruger effect (overall competence). Also with a heavy serving of denial.
Not disclosing automotive defects should be punished to the full extent of the law. Until examples are set there will always be known internal defects that are never disclosed and only addressed when discovered by external sources.
Exactly. I never understand why courts spend so much time prosecuting individuals who kill one or two people by drunk driving, when there are these despicable individuals whose completely sober decisions result in the deaths of thousands.
>Kim Gwang-ho, an automotive engineer, did something last year that many South Koreans saw as an act of betrayal
Is this really the Korean mentality? It makes me wary of buying anything from that country if it is, let alone something expensive and potentially dangerous like a car.
If you're going to exclude purchasing products from an entire nation based on perceived issues of "mentality", you'd better ditch all of your American goods:
This is a fundamental engine design issue in their popular Theta II engine that results in premature and excessive wear on cylinder wall, leading to excessive noise, vibration, stalling, and ceased operation.
In a quest to save weight and increase power, they made connecting rod too thin and height of the bearings too narrow to hold unwanted movement of pistons in check. Instead of piston moving just up and down, there was sideway play often resulting in severely scratched cylinder wall after 15k mile of driving. There are many reports of connecting rods grenading altogether.
For those not familiar with engine parts, here it is. https://image.slidesharecdn.com/sixstrokeengineppt-140826102...
Hyundai found out about this pretty quickly, and de-tuned engine output in later iterations to increase reliability. Yet, they have consistently denied this design defect as a problem for many years.
There already has been multiple massive class action lawsuits and recalls on this in the U.s. since 2015. Many Korean customers were angry that Hyundai was not issuing the same recall in their home country, where they often pay higher price than identical exports.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/hyundai-kia-recall-engin...
The only fix that will 'stick' is complete engine replacement.
I hope Korean customers get the same treatment.