This is really unbelievable.

Major Car Company Issue Recall Affecting Hundreds of Thousands of Vehicles (crowndaily.com)

One of my neighbors had her car recalled and they kept it for 3 or 4 months. Engine fire issues.
Sounds like BMW is even worse.

 

This is really unbelievable.

Major Car Company Issue Recall Affecting Hundreds of Thousands of Vehicles (crowndaily.com)

One of my neighbors had her car recalled and they kept it for 3 or 4 months. Engine fire issues.
Sounds like BMW is even worse.

Just hope they don't recall your feet. [Crocodile tears for all the Beemer drivers – sniff]

 

This is really unbelievable.

Major Car Company Issue Recall Affecting Hundreds of Thousands of Vehicles (crowndaily.com)

One of my neighbors had her car recalled and they kept it for 3 or 4 months. Engine fire issues.
Sounds like BMW is even worse.

I don't know how much faith to put into that article (which is not to say that the info about the recall isn't accurate). But it starts off stating that car recalls indicate a serious issue because manufacturers avoid them due to the cost, and then implies that these two recalls somehow indicate a serious issue that is seemingly unique to BMW. Now, I'm not a BMW fan by any means, but this article seems like an anti-BMW hit piece designed to elicit the exact reaction that you had -- that BMW is "even worse". They talk about BMW's "busy year" because they've had 17 recalls so far this year. Well, Ford has had 37, Chrysler has had 36. Mercedes-Benz, Kia, and Hyundai have each had 15. It lists a number of issues that BMW has issued recalls for, and most of them are issues that other manufacturers have also issued much larger recalls for. That's especially the case with airbag issues, which the article does at least, in passing, note has affected other car brands. As an example, they talk about a recall for "rollaway" that affected 2,000 vehicles. Well, Ford issued a rollaway recall for 113,000 F-150's. Also, recalls affecting a few hundred thousand vehicles are not at all uncommon -- they often affect millions of vehicles. Furthermore, auto manufacturers issue quite a few recalls and many of those issues are relatively minor or are preventative for things that could cause a problem even though they never actually have. Tesla issued a recall affecting two million vehicles because of the font size of warning lights on the display.

 

I just read that Toyota has to recall 100,000 vehicles that could have possible engine failure due to manufacturing debris left in the engines.

 

With the tens of millions of vehicles produced every year, and the exponentially increasing complexity of modern vehicles, and the fact that between the Tier-1 and -2 suppliers there may be over a hundred different vendors spread all over the world, it is actually surprising that there are so few faults.

 

Hi,

Yes, some good points made here. It seems things have gotten much more complicated.
Also, many authors these days tend to be biased towards one group or another. It's hard to be fair all around anymore because if you are you end up being the only one while everyone else cheats.

When I see what the newer cars look like, even the ones that seem old now like from 1998, there was a huge shift from what I saw in 1970. I could fix anything on my 1970 Plymouth, and on my 1964 Pontiac I even did a complete engine rebuild in the basement. That stuff would be utterly and sadly impossible today.

I know this is getting a little far out there, but I saw a movie recently called "Aniara". It was about a space ship as large as an entire city, which BTW China is seriously considering today. Earth had become uninhabitable, so a large number of people boarded this huge space ship via vertical tether lines from ground to outer space (a serious consideration in real life some time ago). After they boarded the ship took off destination Mars where there was already a colony set up. The travel time would have been three weeks (according to their advanced technology).
Well almost as soon as they departed, something went wrong with the ship. I think they had to turn to avoid space debris (a serious issue these days). In doing so, they had to make a sharp turn off course, and one of their reactors was damaged so they had to abort all of their nuclear fuel. That meant that they would not be able to turn around and get back on course, meaning they were off in some unknown trajectory headed into deep space.
The captain announced the problem to the passengers, and they were all upset of course. He said once they get near a celestial body they could use the gravity to slingshot back onto course, but the nearest body was two years away. The passengers were devastated. Unfortunately, one of the scientists on board realized that was a lie as there was no celestial body that close by.
Two years came and went by. They all began to realize it was going to be much longer and there were multiple suicides each month.
After the tenth year with the ship wandering deeper and deeper into the unknown space, the girlfriend of one of the crew members had a baby, but she realized the baby would have no real future, so she killed the baby and herself, and the crew member was completely devastated.
After year 24, that crew member could hardly function knowing the fate of everyone left onboard as well as herself, and what had happened to her girlfriend. She was pictured just sitting in a large room with some other people, just sitting there silently, as if waiting for nothing to happen because at that point nothing ever happened.
During all this time, we get a view of outside of the craft where we can see the lights you might see in a large city. After some more time passed, the next view was the entire ship was dark with no lights, and everyone on board had died. The scene was labeled "Sarcophagus". That's basically what it was then. Drifting deeper and deeper into space with no known destination.
The next time frame was over 5 millions years, and we get a view of the dead craft drifting by a planet that looked a lot like earth. That was the end.
There were a lot of other things that came up between those times given but I did not want to describe every part of the movie. For example, they were able to 'grab' a large cylinder that was drifting in space that they thought was fuel sent to help them recover. That gave everyone hope. However, after many hours of analyzing the cylinder they found out it was not fuel, so that was the end of that hope.

To me that seems like a very likely scenario of what could happen with advanced technology. It's so complex that something goes wrong that nobody could have ever seen coming. It gets to the point where the complexity approaches that of nature, and nature is often incomprehensible and unpredictable.