[Bob Lincoln]

Modern BMWs aren't exactly reliable, and that exhaust setup has to be one of the dumbest most complicated ways to route the exhaust I have seen. I bet they use a proprietary 10.5mm 9 point star bolt too.
I mean seriously how important is weight distribution to have the exhaust cross over 12 inches forward? It's miniscule at best while having a hot pipe that is squished and has sharp turns blocking access to the transmission.

Are these alleged reliability issues for BMW directly traceable to hot exhaust near a transmission? If not, then this is irrelevant.

 

[Bob Lincoln]

I've heard that argument more times than I can count. What's always left out is the fact that the bean counters dictate what the engineers do, not vise versa.

Are you an engineer, or a bean counter?
40 years in engineering.
What you claim, is seldom true, in my experience.

 

[Bob Lincoln]

I'm an engineering technologist who for 30 years has been the unfortunate recipient of vehicles that were cheapened up by bean counters. Sometimes it's blatantly obvious where corners were cut. Sad...

And how were you privy to the insider knowledge as to who actually made those decisions?

 

[Bob Lincoln]

Here's one for the bean counters. Go back to 1976 and 77. No inner rustproofing on F body front fenders. Calculate how much per fender was saved verses how much the recall cost the company's bottom line and their reputation. Another example, Ultradrive, an employee from Kokomo told me in Plymouth Mass. at a car meet in 1988 that the transmission was going to fail because they didn't seal something correctly. This allowed fluid to be where it wasn't supposed to be, causing failure. Sounds like bean counters to me. I can go on and on.

Evidence? This is hearsay. The failure could just as easily be a defective design by Chrysler or a part manufacturer.
And do we know that the fender issue was due to bean counters, or a process overlooked? Or are people just guessing.
I'm an engineer with 40 years of experience in components, quality, reliability, failure analysis - hands-on. I've done root cause analysis. You never guess or speculate. You prove or disprove.

 

[Bob Lincoln]

I'm not sure how long you've owned Chrysler products, but bean counters are all over their products. If they weren't bean counters involved, then the engineers were asleep in many cases. The fellow in an above post showed what bean counters have done. They continue to destroy an already spotty quality record which IMHO has always been caused by cutting corners.

I've owned nothing but Chrysler products since 1979 - ten vehicles, some new, some used.
They have been the best vehicles available to me at the time. All have performed well above average.

 

[Bob Lincoln]

I remember back when the mini vans (not sure of which years) would get hit in the rear the rear hatch would pop open and some people had fell out the back of it because the rear latch only had one catch instead of the second safety catch in case the first on failed/opened. From what I remember the guy from Chrysler was being interviewed about it from a person on a news channel and said the reason there was only one catch was because the one with 2 catches cost .25 cent more. When asked why a quarter was that important he said when you sell 4 million vehicles that was a savings of 1 million dollars. I thought, I wonder if just 1 lawsuit will be less than 1 million dollars (I doubt it). I thought..... put the more expensive one on an charge me .50 cent, I'll never notice it on the price you charge for the vehicle anyways and you could have made 1 million more dollars also. Feel free to see if you can find this anywhere because I could have got something wrong.

This is not an accurate representation of the story. The latch was NOT a single-action one. The problem was that the latch would stick and not fully engage the primary latch, so that only the secondary latch was engaged.
Regardless, what does this have to do with a new engine being introduced?
ANSWER: NOTHING.

 

[Bob Lincoln]

Yes
prove or disprove
I used dealer OEM rotors the first time my '98 got the rotor shakes (@11,000 miles) = same outcome in same # miles
Bendix full cast iron next time, lasted 4x as long. So, what was proven? it is either the engineers bad design or bean counters forcing that on the engineers

Or...other possibilities that you didn't consider, that are really neither. Especially in the case of rotors.
I'll answer the off-topic post, because this is often mentioned and often inaccurate.

When rotors became largely sourced from China (one vendor claims that 100% of rotors are cast in China, and theirs is the only one that has final processing done in the US), people began noticing premature wearout and warping on a wide scale, all brands.
I did a lot of digging into this.
In the past, rotors were heat-treated to harden the surface to a depth of at least 0.050 inches, and usually more, often as much as .080 inches.
Turning them typically removes .030 inches, and so you could expect to turn them twice before replacement. $15 was a good investment. And turning them twice still left you with some hardened surface, so you got a lot of miles out of them.
When they were sourced to China, the Chinese OEMs reduced the hardened thickness to as little as .010 inches, with a maximum of usually no more than .050 inches. This occurred for a few reasons.
One, some US companies did not specify all of the requirements fully, and so the Chinese suppliers took their own initiative on the heat treatment. Naturally, they would try to maximize their margins with as little processing as possible to meet the datasheet specs, rather than implied goals.
Two, some Chinese suppliers knowingly reduced the heat-treated depth, again, to improve margin. Not catching that can be blamed on the quality organizations of the US supplier, and not their 'bean counters'. Having worked in Quality Engineering management for a large company, I can tell you from personal experience that some managers and directors insist on attaining certain published results, even if they are not reality. When they do not want to hear reality, sometimes they remove the ethical stumbling block (me, in my case) and install someone who will publish what makes them look good. Again, not the bean counters OR the engineers at fault here. Personal agendas.

Anyway, this is why rotors warp prematurely. They are generally no longer hardened to the proper depth. And so, with very few miles on them, you have cut through the hardened surface into the softer iron, which warps and wears more readily. Centric is the company that advertised, at least, several years ago, that they do the final processing in the US to ensure the heat treatment is sufficient, and also corrosion-resistant coatings. I've been using them for several years with good results.