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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Engines have oil flowing through them, lubricating and cooling the components. The oil gets used up and the debris from inside the engine gets stuck in the oil filter which also needs to be changed.
The fact that they are still alive is more down to simply physics: as long as you can spark fuel, the engine will run. Although the engine might not “die” until later, the components definitely wear down over time and old engines are significantly less efficient than they were when they were new.
Brakes work by turning motion into heat through friction and they lose material in the process. Tires work by pressing soft rubber into hard cement and lose material that way.
It’s not that they can’t make brakes or tires that last as long as a car, it’s that the most size-effective and cost-effective brakes and tires work through processes in which material is lost. You could potentially make tires out of titanium and brakes out of teflon but they wouldn’t work well at all.
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