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Hey guys, it's David from Automotive Press. As you guys know, I've been involved in auto industry for over 35 years during which I worked in various engineering groups, manufacturing, quality control, even product development, prototyping, testing, evaluation, you name it.
I was involved
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at some point during my career. And during those times, I learned a lot about what really works well in the auto industry and what is still broken.
And what I want to do today is a bit of a controversial video because I want to tell you 10 things that the car companies don't want you to know or
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won't tell you because it's a bit of a industry secrets and those are things that you need to be aware of so you can make the best decision moving forward. Whether you're buying a new car or used car or maintaining a car, there are many things that you should be aware of.
So let me explain each of those 10 things
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really carefully as an engineer, as an insider so you can learn from me. Let's go.
Welcome back. So I'm going to talk about 10 things that car companies don't want you to know starting with the first one and that is the fact that first year of
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production or first year of the product review is actually the last stage of prototyping. So think of the first year as a final stage of prototyping which is why so many products and so many cars have so many problems and recalls in the first year.
Now I'm going to make some
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exceptions for brands like Toyota and Lexus which have a much more robust product development stage and manufacturing process and therefore for them maybe first there isn't a prototyping at all. For that matter I might actually extend my exception to other Japanese brands including Honda,
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Mazda and even Subaru because they also have a really good robust and proven product development process. But even for me, I avoided buying the first year of the 2024 Lexus GX 550 because when I bought the first year of Toyota Land Cruiser, I had numerous issues with
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that. And so when I switched over to GX, I wanted to make sure that I bought the second year, which is 2025 instead of the first year 2024 because even the almighty Lexus and Tota do have more problems in the first year than the second year and beyond.
But coming back to my very important point, which is my
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first point, don't ever buy the first year. maybe not even a second year because for most manufacturers around the world first year is actually not truly ready to go 100% perfect production.
It's actually at the latter part of the prototyping stage and then
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when the car is almost good enough, they release it because they have to meet tight marketing deadlines because they have already announced the product review and the product launches. And that's why they often release the car when they know there are still some bugs, any issues related to production,
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manufacturing or product development. So whatever you do, don't buy the first year from any manufacturer, any brands in the world.
Maybe not even the second year unless it's a Toyota or Lexus. I'm pretty comfortable they will be okay.
But otherwise, buy the third year and beyond. And that's my first thing I want to point out.
What other secrets are the
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car companies holding back? Well, the first year, as I mentioned, it's kind of like a pilot year or the final stage of prototyping year.
That's what I like to call it. The second point I want to talk about is the fact that maintenance is actually optimized for customer convenience to help sell the car.
So even though these cars are probably okay
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following the maintenance schedule as outlined by the manual, it's not ideal if you want to keep the cars for a long time. So the oil changes are too long.
It's often 10, 12, 15,000 km or even miles in some cases. and everything else, fluid changes, transmission, all
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that maintenance thing outlined in the manual is too long. And it's designed to give you an impression that you can minimize your cost of maintenance when you buy a new car, which is the case because the maintenance cost has come down due to the fact that you don't have to change fluids for such a long time.
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But if you really want to keep the car for a very long time, you need to cut everything in half. That's my easiest recommendation.
whether it's oil or coolant, anything else, basically cut it in half and that will allow you to keep the car for a very long time because there will be less chance of something breaking down. And I've done many videos
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about this with Amit from Care or not. So, go and take a look at some of my past videos to get more details.
But the simplest thing to do is take a maintenance manual, schedule, cut it in half, and change the oil at least twice as often as what they recommend you. That will allow you to keep the car for
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a long time. So that's the second secret that they don't want you to know is that the actual maintenance schedule was created not in the best interest of keeping the cars for a long long time but to provide the simplest and easiest convenience for the customers.
The third
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secret you should know is that the car companies will do anything to cut even pennies from their manufacturing or product development cost because everything adds up. I still remember years ago I was working in a paint process for one of the car companies and I was told to cut $1 from the paint
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process because it was costing them too much and I was thinking to myself what is the big deal cutting $1 from manufacturing process but then they make 200,000 units of that car per year multiply that by life of a car which is about 10 years and well lo and behold that's $2 million cost saving if I can
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cut $1 off from each car. So every scent and every ounce actually count.
And so for example, you'll notice that on the side of the hood for all the cars you see these days does not have a shiny paint. So it's missing a clear coat.
Sometimes even missing the uh top coat
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to save cost and also to save weight because lower weight also means better fuel efficiency and therefore it saves us money as well. But let me show you some additional stuff they do to cut cost inside.
So, I open the door of my Lexa GX550 to show you that even for Lexus, they really changed the materials
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management. And you can tell that most of the plastics are actually soft material because it's a Lexus after all.
But actually this top part is semi-h hard. And you wouldn't see that few years ago because everything was covered in soft material or leather.
So, they also reduce amount of leather in cars
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equipped with leather. But thankfully for Lexus, most of the components are soft plastic.
But if you go to Land Cruiser, which I owned before this one, it was all hard plastic everywhere. And there's clear difference in cost, as much as 10% cost difference between soft
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and hard plastic. And that's why you see more and more of that inside the car these days.
I wish that they didn't do that because those are things that are very obvious to us as uh owners and buyers of these cars. And I wish that they'll reverse those decisions, but it's going to continue on because cost keeps going up and they can't always
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raise the price of car as much. and they're going to cut cost everywhere.
Even if it's one cent or 1 ounce of weight, don't take care of a car to save cost. The fourth thing you should know, and it's something that they don't ever talk about in brochures or marketing or even at the dealership, is the fact that
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original tires that come with cars are actually not the same as the tires buy from a retail market afterwards. So, for example, I have the Falcon Wild Peak right now with aftermarket wheels.
It's really sticks out quite a bit, and I really love the design. But this car
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originally came with the Toyo Open Country off-road tires, but it's not the same as Open Country that you buy straight from a retail shop at a tire shop. In fact, the OEM tires have less tread, usually about half of the regular tread, and their compound is a little bit harder to maximize fuel efficiency.
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So, their tires have a different purpose. It is to give cars the best fuel economy and also to give them a good handling.
So usually the trade is a little bit less than what you buy off the market. And that's a decision they made on purpose to maximize the performance of the car and also the fuel
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efficiency. So keep in mind that the tires that come with the cars are not actually best in terms of keeping for longterm or to have a best traction because their trade is a little bit less.
And that's why I changed my tires right away to more aggressive one. And for most of you guys, you don't have to do that right off the bat.
But I would
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say don't wait until the tires are completely worn out. Maybe three quarter of the way, go ahead and change it because aftermarket tires actually perform better.
The fifth thing you should know is about the paint. When you buy a brand new car off the lot, you should keep in mind that the paint actually has no protection whatsoever.
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Coming out of the factory, of course, they've gone through either four or five layers of paint, including clear coat, but they don't apply any kind of wax when it's shipped out of the factory. and then the dealership will then take off the protective wrapping and they may apply some wax, but right off the bat,
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it doesn't come with any protection. And there's two reasons for it.
One, the paint needs some time to heal and to cure over time. So, when the car comes right off the assembly line, you actually need to wait a couple months for paint to settle down.
And that's why I usually recommend people don't apply
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PPF protection or uh ceramic coating straight from the factory. You got to let the paint set for at least two to three months.
So look at the production date in the door jam and then wait 3 months for paint to cure. Then beyond that you should definitely apply either
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a ceramic coating or high quality wax or in some cases PPF to protect the whole paint from further damage. And I recommend that because really the paints are very thin these days.
Usually about 100 microns above the metal. That's really nothing.
That's almost a thinness
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of your hair and there's no protection at all. Also, if you get a bird dropping or worse, someone threw an egg at your paint, it permanently etches and damages the paint.
So, make sure you get a ceramic coating or PPF or some other protection after 3 months of letting the paint cure and then you're good to go.
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The sixth one is a bit difficult to explain, but unfortunately, car companies are not designed to really make long-term strategic decisions. Their whole business model is designed to create shorter decisions based on shorter term profit and what makes the
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equity and the company look better in short term. I know you hear that all the time and sometime we doubt that but for the most part decisions are based on short term.
So what does that mean? Well, when things change like the tariffs uh or additional taxes or demand
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for EV is dying right now, that kind of stuff happens. The car company will quickly make decision on a short-term basis to accommodate those changes.
The good thing is that the car companies are trying to be reactive and and be agile and change with the changing times. But
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the bad thing is that the decisions are not always the best thing for that company long term. witness what happened to Nissan and witness what happened to some other brands as well when they're trying to make too many short decisions versus listed Pura which does tend to think much longer term as much as 10 20
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years down the road and that's why they're not as affected by short-term market changes or industry changes and they're able to survive because they tend to have a vision based on long term so this is something I teach and work quite a bit in my actual day-to-day work so I always want to encourage companies to think 10 to 20 years ahead not one to
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two years ahead. But the honest truth is that they still think short term.
The seventh point is also not very encouraging in terms of things that you should know about what car companies do. And the sad truth is that the customer feedback is not always taken into account when they're redesigning the car
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or when they're trying to make changes. I'll talk about the dealership in a minute here, but consumer feedback is considered important and they talk about it, but by the time that they do get some feedback from consumer is too late to make any changes, which will take a couple of years to get proper feedback from customers and the owners and by
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that time they've already redesigned the product for the next generation or next facelift and it's probably too late to incorporate that. So, the earlier we can provide feedback to the automakers, the better because they can try to incorporate those changes.
But the honest truth is they're not always listening to us. They tend to listen to
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a dealership because the dealers are actually real customers. And that brings me to the next point that the dealers are actually the real customers.
They're the one who's buying the cars from the manufacturer. They're the one who is paying for these vehicles before we pay for the cars.
And so they will listen to
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dealership quite a bit. And a good example is Lexus TX plug-in hybrid has a V6 engine which surprised all of us.
And that was based on direct feedback from a dealership. Another example is when Toyota decided to bring the uh crown in a sedan format in Japan that looks more
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like a traditional sedan. Again, that was feedback from a dealership.
So, they will listen to dealership and therefore the best thing you can do is to provide as much feedback as possible to maybe senior executives or management of the dealership so they can then bring those feedback to the companies with the hope
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that they'll be incorporated. The ninth thing you should know it's about co-brand.
What do I mean by that? Well, for example, Lexus U co-branded Mark Levenson for a high-end stereo.
If it's a Toyota is JBL, you also hear Bose which is most common type of uh stereo
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system. Uh and of course, some companies also offer BNO and some other brands.
Now, keep in mind that even though those brands have spent enormous amount of time developing, designing the stereo system, it's not quite the same as what those brands actually represent. I think it's more of a marketing gimmick than
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the true meaning of those brand. So for example, the Mark Levenson obviously sounds better than the base Lexus GX, but the difference is not as big as you would think.
Same for JBL, same for Bose. Their intent is to sell the brand, not necessarily sell the meat underneath, if you know what I mean.
So
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don't always be fooled by brand that you see, especially for stereo system. They don't always represent the best value.
Now, if you buy off-road cars, you'll see other brands such as Fox suspension in Toyota models, and those are, I think, might be more meaningful because their shocks are actually really good.
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So, do have to choose carefully which co-branded components make sense or not to you, but but don't be blindsided by that. Don't make hard decision based on co-branded things that might look really important, but the actual components underneath is not quite the same as what
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those brands represent. The last and the 10th point I want to talk about is the fact that in the auto industry everything takes a long time.
It's not days, it's not weeks, it's usually month, maybe even years. So when we complain about certain things, whether
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is some fit of the components or some potential recall of the engine. It just takes a long time and there's lots of moving parts, lots of things have to happen for car companies to actually make a change, whether it's a component change or design change or manufacturing change.
So most of us lose patience
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trying to wait for things to happen. And you know what?
It's not going to change because actually takes even longer now than it used to be despite all the efficiency car companies have gained over the years because supply chain and engineer associated with it takes longer than it used to be for many many different reason. Partly because we're
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doing some international work and many different components are outsourced to global suppliers and therefore it just takes a long time. It's like dealing with an elephant.
You can kick it and it might or might not move. So, you know, even though you might lose patient waiting for parts or things like that, unfortunately, that's the way it is with
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car companies, I would say Toyota and Lexus are a little bit better in terms of responding to immediate needs, but most brands are pretty slow and it's something you have to accept. So, I know that this whole video is a little bit negative and kind of discouraging, but what I wanted to do is to give you my
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honest opinion on things that you should be aware of so that you can make good decisions and best decisions moving forward when you're buying a car, whether it's new or old. And I want to share with you in full transparency and share with you what I do feel is still lacking and still not working out in the
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auto industry. I'm hoping that by voicing my concerns, car companies and industry itself will get stronger and better, listen to us more and make changes faster and be more agile and think long term.
Those are things I wish they would do because I know that it's possible to make those important
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decisions that would bring a very positive influence around the auto industry. So, anyhow, if you found this video to be interesting and useful, please give me a thumbs up and make some comments.
And if you haven't done so yet, would you kindly subscribe? Because many of you guys watch my videos but are not subscribers and I would truly
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appreciate that. Let me know if you got questions in the comments below.
Until next video, I'm signing off for now. Thanks so much.