Why have cars moved to a timing chain

Question

The old Corollas in the 70s and 80s had timing chains. In the 90s, Honda, Toyota, and even Nissan started making belt-driven cranks instead of chains. Now they are back to timing chains. What happened?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

60k mile timing belt change intervals. They tried to stretch them to 80 and 100k miles, but that’s just tempting fate. The belts are cheap and quiet, but when they break the motor is toast. Chains are noisy and will ultimately stretch and get noisy and shift timing so the motor isn’t as efficient, but they rarely break and wreck the motor.