Why I'm not fond of modern cars...

[Deschodt]

Simple oil change on my 08 GTI commuter tonight... Well...simple... I could have changed the oil on the 911+912 in same amount of time, without a single cuss word !

First, figure out what is acceptable when you cannot find 5W40....open the manual..

Remove a whole plastic shroud attached with a rare torx size, just because, lose a few screws...

Unbolt what looks like the drain plug - has to be the drain plug, except it's not, oops..

Oooh, OK... The drain plug is horizontal !!! And tightened with an air wrench, thanks !

Confidently place the porsche high capacity pan more or less under the hole, observe the oil shooting out of the opening 3ft away (no exageration) and completely missing the pan, faster than even the 911 empties itself (that crap is mercury, not oil)...

Move the pan in a hurry, observe the jet now shooting only 1ft away and still missing the pan, while simultaneously also dripping directly downwards and... missing the pan again... Instant floor mess, 1/2 in the pan, 1/2 on the floor... That oil proceeds to spread everywhere in microseconds because honestly, it has the consistency of water !

Do the filter, it's even worse, actually impossible to do cleanly, but by that time you won't care because the floor is covered in what passes for oil, and some is dripping all the way to your armpits...

Spend 10 minutes figuring out how that shroud was clipped on again while your head bathes in that mercury on the floor, refill with almost 5 qts of what look like flat mountain dew (seriously, mobil 1 0W40 is not oil)...

Shrug, shake your head, swear you'll never stray from Porsche again! ;-) Good car, but it's front wheel drive anyway....

[ruf-porsche]

All my cars are pre 95 because in our state if your car don't have OBDII you don't need to bring it in for emission testing.

[varmint]

one of the primary reason i ride motorcycles is that i can get at everything, and do most of the work myself.


still, i have to remove all the fairings, a couple feet of air intake, unbolt and lift up the gas tank, pull over the wiring harness, undo about 40 allen bolts, to finally get at and change the air filter on the BMW. i call it "inconsiderate german prick engineering".

[Schumi]

To be fair almost every car I have ever seen has a horizontally placed, at the edge of the pan drain plug. 911's are the exception with their dry sump plate and plug in the bottom.

[Hawkney911]

make sure u also used a new crush washer... or else you might be seeing some dribbles

[porsche4life]

Originally Posted by Schumi

To be fair almost every car I have ever seen has a horizontally placed, at the edge of the pan drain plug. 911's are the exception with their dry sump plate and plug in the bottom.

Toyota pickups. Literally I could change the oil in 15mins with a filter change. Plug facing down.

[HarryD]

Gotta love it. My Windstar and Focus both have the spouting oil drain plug. good thing I have a Looooong pan.

Oddly, the Ford engineers screwed up with the Focus Oil filter location. It is mounted with the opening straight up and there is NOTHING below it to interfere with your access. when you remove the filter, you just spin it off and carefully turn it over into the oil pan with no drips. What were they thinking

Of course the Windstar has it's filter mounted at a 55.6 degree angle and blocked by a crossmember. To increase the level of difficulty, while you can get a strap wrench on the filter (after a few gyrations), you can only turn it 2.04 degrees so it is a b#%^h getting off. Once you remove it, oil gushes out and soaks the crossmember so no matter where you place you pan, you are guaranteed to miss.

Sigh....

[serge944]

I really like modern BMWs' cartridge oil filters.

My Range Rover Classic's oil change takes 5 minutes - don't even need a jack.

[BeerBurner]

Of the three cars in our household, my wife's PT Cruiser is the best to change the oil in because the filter is placed such that when you loosen it you can drain the oil directly into the catch bin... unlike the Miata which runs down the side of the engine and requires you be a contortionist to remove and the 944 whose belly pan redistributes the oil over several different areas...

BB.

[willtel]

I had an '07 GTI and hated it. 7 unscheduled trips to the dealer in 24000 miles, I was so glad to see someone else drive it away when I sold it.

My worst oil change car was a '95 Range Rover Classic. The drain was bigger than a garden hose and vertical on the left side of the pan. As soon as you pulled it off it would shoot out in a giant arc so you had to move the pan with the arc to catch it. Of course mid way through the arc would hit the track bar for the front suspension and splatter everywhere, no way to avoid it.

[Scuba Steve]

On cars with a horizontal oil plug sometimes I unscrew it only most of the way out at first. Oil still comes out, just not so fast (go away, do something else for a while). Then I can pull the plug and it won't shoot everywhere because it's already halfway drained.

My Celica drives me nuts. Every other car I've owned the procedure for changing antifreeze was
- put bucket below radiator
- pull plug, drain, reinstall plug
- refill antifreeze

But on the Celica (2000) it's
- break a few snap clips while fighting with engine bay plastic piece #1
- realize that engine bay plastic piece #2 is holding #1 on, so remove that one too
- look everywhere for the drain plug (gotta be in there somewhere...)
- go on the internet to research, find out where it is from a forum, get mad because everybody else has problems with it too
- pull plug, drain, put plug back in
- reinstall plastic pieces as close to the way it was as possible
- jack up front of the car 2 feet off the friggin floor because of the bizarro refill procedure
- finish, drive around and watch the temp gauge bounce around for the next couple of days while air in the system sorts itself out

[Porsche-O-Phile]

I think I've gotten about as "modern" as I care to with respect to my vehicle fleet. My wife has a 2002 Toyota and I've got a 2001 Mercedes. Both are nice and reasonably easy to work on, but both also have entirely too much computer/electronic bull***** in them for my liking. My '85 944 is about as advanced as I care to have insofar as computerized technology in a car - I can actually understand all of the circuitry and sensors and exactly how the logic processing in the DME works. Anything more modern than that starts getting into computer-programmer voodoo realms that I don't particularly care to deal with (I spend enough of my life on frikkin' computers, why the hell do I need them in my hobbies too?)

I like my 911 because it's simple, yet refined. The most complicated electronic circuit in it was the radio, and I tore that out. The less electronics crap in cars and the less plastic crap in them, the better. There's precious little of either in my '74, which is just fine by me.

With respect to oil drain design, I have to say my former 1988 GMC pickup was the most idiotically designed vehicle I've ever come across. For a simple oil change, the pan and drain plug was easy to get to. However the filter was not. It would require literally destroying the old filter by skewering it with a screwdriver and trying to twist it off in a very confined space, and naturally all the oil ran all over the place and you'd bash your knuckles about 50 times in the process. There was absolutely, positively no way to get a filter wrench (strap or socket type) on that thing.

Changing the oil pan gasket was impossible without removing the entire front suspension, the front driveshafts, dropping the transfer case and associated powertrain components - never mind that you could access all of the oil pan bolts and drop the pan down about 1/2", but it wasn't enough to extract the old gasket or install the new one (couldn't get it to clear the oil pickup tube). Complete idiocy. A $5 gasket and a job that should by all rights take about 30 minutes (if that) was over 50 hours of labor, two $200 transmission jacks, a few hundred bucks worth of air tools for all the heavy-duty suspension bolts and drivetrain bolts, numerous circlips and other "one-time-use" fasteners, etc. I think the total associated costs ran north of $1,000 by the time all was said and done. The day I kicked that infernal POS to the curb I celebrated. I'll never buy another GM product. Ever.

[Aurel]

The only car I change the oil on myself is the 911, because most places won`t do it, don`t know how to do it properly, or will charge a fortune to do it. All the other cars get a $30 Wash&lube deal. And I dump my old Porsche oil for free at their place when they do the other cars.The aggravation of changing oil myself on a modern car is not worth the savings.

[VenezianBlau 87]

When my (sold) '03 Jetta GLI was under warranty, I would take it to Dwight Harrison VW for oil/filter changes. When I started doing them, I find out they left off four of the six little Torx screws holding the plastic shroud. I just replaced all six with phillips head screws and new speed nuts. I wonder what else they didn't do.

[Deschodt]

Originally Posted by Aurel

The only car I change the oil on myself is the 911, because most places won`t do it, don`t know how to do it properly, or will charge a fortune to do it. All the other cars get a $30 Wash&lube deal. And I dump my old Porsche oil for free at their place when they do the other cars.The aggravation of changing oil myself on a modern car is not worth the savings.

That is the conclusion that I reached to after this exercise... That and modern oil is like water ;-)

[jcunning]

All three of my cars are very straight foward. I don't need to jack any of them up. All three have bottom facing drainplugs and easy access oil filters.
911, 1988 SAAB 900, 2001 SAAB 9-5.

I haven't touched my wife's 2007 Jetta. She pays for dealer service on that one.

[porsche4life]

Originally Posted by VenezianBlau 87

... I wonder what else they didn't do.

I know of a Toyota dealer that forgot to refill the oil after the drain. Let the customer drive away like that too. They got to put a new motor in the car.

[MatthewBrum]

Imy my wifes 2003 Jetta you have to take off the bottom cover with a torx bit and and the power steering hose is directly below the filter making the process a little more difficult. But I change the oil every 10k miles. So if it is a little harder than the older cars at least you don't have to change it as often.

[onewhippedpuppy]

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

I like my 911 because it's simple, yet refined. The most complicated electronic circuit in it was the radio, and I tore that out. The less electronics crap in cars and the less plastic crap in them, the better. There's precious little of either in my '74, which is just fine by me.

That's why I love my Land Cruiser. All the electronic stuff you want (power windows, locks, cruise, A/C) without any extra crap to break. Non-OBD, so the smog stuff is going bye-bye as well. No airbags, no ABS, very few sensors to crap out. It's just a truck, and every time you turn the key it starts.

My wife's '03 4Runner was the best I've had for oil changes. Plug in the bottom of the pan with an access cover in the skid-plate to get to the plug (as opposed to removing the entire damn thing). Filter mounted upside down on the top of the motor, but with a drip collar to catch the leaking oil. The drip collar then had a small drain plug to drain the excess oil into a cup for disposal.

[Deschodt]

Originally Posted by MatthewBrum

Imy my wifes 2003 Jetta you have to take off the bottom cover with a torx bit and and the power steering hose is directly below the filter making the process a little more difficult. But I change the oil every 10k miles. So if it is a little harder than the older cars at least you don't have to change it as often.

Oil change interval is another kettle of fish, but my 08 GTI has supposedly 10K intervals and when I look at my oil (sorry, water, that stuff is not oil) at 5K, it's filthy ! Since that lubricates the turbo and that things pumps out 260hp with a software rev, I change it as often as I do on the 911 ;-( (just the oil, not the filter, I let them do that at regular services)

Next time I need a pan shaped like a long rectangle...