Idle Doodle: Emissions and car reliability
I took my car in for service and new wheel bearings recently. I drive a 2005 Subaru WRX STi. She's getting old, but still runs great.
As I waited for my car to be finished up, I talked with the service representative. He said my generation was the best generation of that model to date. It turns out that the year after, engine failures went through the roof.
Apparently, Subaru attempted to comply with stricter emissions standards by making some changes to the engine. The service rep said that the ringland and rod bearings were redesigned. Neither of us knew how the redesign reduced emissions, but the rep said these redesigned parts started to fail much earlier in the 2006+ editions compared to the earlier generations. Since the STi is a specialty car, many of its parts are unique to it and as such, it only affected that trim line.
Looking into it a bit more at home, there was a NASIOC thread on it that corroborated the design changes due to CAFE standards by the EPA and that the design changes resulted in higher failure rates. It appears that the ignition timing was also altered to have a tighter tolerance. Given that these cars tend to be highly modified, these have resulted in higher knock rates as well.
Although these cars have limited production each year, I imagine the broader car market suffers from these redesigns due to emissions standards once every few years as emissions regulations continue to tighten. Unless I'm mistaken, the STi has been using the same basic engine design since 2006, with next year's model moving to the FA20 engine, the first major upgrade to the model since it debuted in the United States in 2004.
It would be interesting to know how many cars across all manufacturers make design changes due to emissions that lower the car's reliability. How many more tow truck miles does all this result in? How much more shipment of replacement parts does all this result in? How much more mining, refining, and machining of raw materials does all this result in? How many resources are pulled into repairing these components and how much time is wasted in having to bring these cars in for repair? How does it compare to the emissions actually saved by the tightening of emissions standards?
