Quote:
Originally Posted by JFNash
Mike:
I'm glad that you have your LS back safely, and hopefully forever.
Just to add to my knowledge, what caused your problem? Was it a design problem? Is there a set of conditions where the problem could be repeated?
Speaking of engines, should I let the car warm up before I drive it, especially in the cold days?
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First, thanks for all the good wishes, guys.
As for the cause, I can only tell you what they told me. I'm not saying I buy their story, but here it is: According to them, there is a set of robots that assemble these engines. In late 2007/early 2008, one of the robots was found to be out of adjustment, such that when it installed the spring, it scraped it and caused a "score" mark on it. That small score mark created a weak point that can cause a failure of the spring after thousands of cycles.
By the time they discovered the adjustment problem, a large number of engines had been assembled and put into cars, which had been shipped out over the world. It was not known if it would be a problem or not, nor when it might result in a failure, so Lexus had to deal with it when/if a spring failed. IOW, on a case-by-case basis. It wasn't practical to recall a ton of engines just because a spring "might" someday fail.
Now, I would hope that they are building a picture of the problem as these springs actually fail ... a sort of failure matrix that will tell them how likely failure is and when it might happen. That would, I hope, eventually lead to a recall and replacement ... or at least a warranty extension for this part for affected cars.
One last comment: Cars are getting to be so sophisticated and so complex that I think we're going to have to accept some loss of reliability. You simply can't continue to cram more and more tech into a machine without expecting some of it to go kaboom. I'm not talking about springs here, since those are fairly low-tech, but our cars have so much high-tech in them nowadays that something will almost certainly break from time to time.
It's kind of an odd consequence of progress ... as our cars get more sophisticated, we get to enjoy more bells and whistles, but we also slip backwards a bit in terms of overall reliability.
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