Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "Toyota Mechanic Works on a BMW. How Hard Can It Be?" video.

  1. I've yet to see a car where frameless door window design is worth the compromises it causes.
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  2. This whole design seems like a copy of VW door latch setup. For some reason, VW desided in late 1990s that the doors should not have visible switch so they embedded a small microswitch inside the door latch mechanism. The microswitch is really poor quality and probably every VW car manufactured during two last decades have had at least one microswitch failure. The switch itself costs maybe $1.50 but you're supposed to replace the whole latch every time the switch fails which costs maybe $70 and requires hours of work with the panels and stuff. If only they had used more robust $3 microswitch and this design would have been accetable. But manufacturer wanted to save $1.50 per door and caused multiple hundreds worth of extra expenses in billable hours when the cheap microswitch fails. And some cars require that the window is some specific predefined height (not fully open or fully closed) for the door panels to be extracted without trouble. Lots of fun if you're taking the panels off to repair the window movement mechanism! And obviously all the connectors are designed only for the initial factory build. It makes zero difference to designers how hard the car is to repair in the future because that's additional billable work from the customer that already purchased the car. I would much prefer functional design where the mechanism can be seen if it improves reliability or repairability. Modern cars are more like Apple devices where the customer is supposed to pretend that there are no screws anywhere so either you hide all the screws in imaginative ways or glue everything in place. Glueing is getting more and more commont these days, unfortunately. See smartphones and laptops for worst examples.
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  3. 43:15 My current thinking is that German car manufacturers do have the handling but they definitely make everything over-engineered. I'm just wondering why other manufacturers do not simply copy the suspension from some well known car such as BMW M3 or VW Golf GTI and then do the other stuff as they have always done. If I could have a small Toyota with BMW M3 suspension, that would be the best of both worlds.
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  4. 47:00 I think you should have also verified that the mechanical backup key does work. It's only matter of time when (not if) you have to use it to get the door open and it would suck to learn at that time that the backup method doesn't work because of installation error.
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  5. Wow! That door design really sucks. I can only imagine how much work it would be to replace the door window after a thief cracks it. And even VW design is not insane enough to require removing the rail for the window to replace the locking latch.
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  6. German engineering: if it's not over-engineered, it requires more design work.
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  7. 33:00 I think the reason this is so complex is that the exterior designer was not given any rules about what kind of hardware there needs to be inside the door. Once the exterior was designed, some poor door handle and latch designer was told that there's the door with exterior (and inside paneling) already decided. Make it a door handle mechanism that's fast to install in the factory. And to make things more complex, they were probably told that if there's any way to use some existing part (e.g. the latch mechanism without any electronics or plastic parts) they must re-use the same part even if it makes the overall design way more complex as a result.
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