Renault Clio Cam Belt Broke

On Fri, 1 Jun 2007 19:12:18 +0100, I waved a wand and this message magically appears in front of Conor:

Like computers, a loose wire that sometimes wiggles can cause a lot of trouble.

The message from Roger Hunt contains these words:

Nah, that one got shunted up the arse by a non-stopper. The new Clio's probably going to snap a belt some time, too. I really ought to get round to changing it.

Tim.. explained :

The valves could well have also damaged the pistons, so even a replacement head is not a certain fix.

Ivan pretended :

As you suggest...

Second hand cars are so cheap and labour so expensive - thats what makes it just not economic to fix them. Unless you can do the work yourself and get the parts at a reasonable cost.

Ivan explained on 31/05/2007 :

In the old days the built to be serviceable and repairable. They had to, the broke down much more often and needed much more servicing. Now they build so that given the proper services everything wears out at around the same time - the end of service life.

Which bits fail first, then depend a lot on the type of service the vehicle has actually seen. Neglect, accidents, followed by redundancy of the vehicle are now the biggest causes of their being scrapped.

Adrian was thinking very hard :

But it is so much simpler than it would be if it used discrete wires with cars becoming so very complex. A multiplex fault can only be on the easily traceable wiring, the connectors, or the module failing to respond.

Twice my son in law is has been let down by his Discovery three with 'suspension failure', on both occasions it's been a software problem, why is so much grief programmed into all this modern crap as? Just as king and fixed

I thought Ken Bruce came up with a cracker last night on Countdown, "To the rest of us it's.. if it ain't broke don't fix it... to the engineer it's.. if it ain't broke it hasn't got enough features!".

The message from "Ivan" contains these words:

I'm not sure it's fair to blame engineers for this - it's more likely the marketing department that keeps adding "feature bloat".