A car engine basically has thousands of mini explosions happening inside of it, is has parts moving very fast and generating tons of heat, and experiences extreme temperature fluctuations on a daily basis. Yet it is the part that usually dies last in a car.
How do they make them last so long and why are we unable to make other parts of the car as long lasting, such as tires and brakes?
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Answer: Not all explosions are made the same.
Car motors are made of very strong steel, steel that can withstand temperatures far higher than that created by the cylindar combustion.
Combustion motors have also had over 150 years of engineering to root out and overcome production and quality issues. Throw two world wars and any number of regional wars in there and you’ve got a century or more of accellerated engineering to produce the most well designed devices on the planet.
So why is the motor always the last part to die? Becauze it is the most important part of an automobile. The body, the cabin, the seats and accessories are far less important, so are sibject to far lower standards of quality, and are far cheaper to replace. Vehicle manufacturers do all they can to keep costs low to maximise profits and sometimes keep vehicles affordable, so many parts have their quality reduced to the bare minimum, however the motor rarely skirts this line. **Some** car companies cut costs on some parts of the motor, but at that point, they’ve severely diminished the quality of the rest of the vehicle too.
Many parts of a car are also engineered to **intentionally** fail, too, for safety. The classic argument is that car bodies are made of rubbish materials that break and fall apart all the time. Sometimes this isn’t intentional, but almost every car body is deisgned to follow strict safety standards set by the largest markets in the world, so body parts are designed to fail in a way that absorbs impact damage and transfers forces away from the driver/passengers. This often means that they’re flimsy and less durable, but I know for sure what I would want in a car accident.
As much as I love classic cars, they’re death traps and should be treated like so. Sure, they were far more robust, but fatalities were way higher in thrm than before.
As for less important stuff like cheap and nasty trimming, as I said, thats cost cutting because those particular parts aren’t vital to the vehicle’s function like a motor is.
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