Comments on "Post here if you've........" threads

[swilly]

At the time of posting 41 vs 16 had never had a rebuild.

What is worrying is the low mileages being displayed for most cars.

[powerlord]

so far confirming my (and some others) feelings.. i.e. it's not 'just a vocal minority' but a very sizable percentage.

I don't think there is any reason to believe that people on piston heads are any more or less likely to have had a rebuild either, so it should be a pretty good general indictation.

stu

[PetrolTed]

An analysis of the age of the engines vs rebuilds would be interesting to see if newer engines are less likely to suffer problems (although the lower mileages on newer cars will skew the figures).

[nubbin]

The information is very useful - lots of trouble free Tamoras, and the two problems are fish fingers and worn valve guides - 12000 miles is emerging as the time when problems develop - SHIT! my Tamora is on 8200 miles....

Still, I will ask HHC to check for wear next week at the 24 month service.

[and]

honest metrics on warm up routine would be the finishing touch. difficult but probably possible

[PetrolTed]

Good point, but probably impossible to ascertain without watching someone start their car

[conner]

So why doesn’t TVR link their engine warranty to how many miles you have done, say on a scaleable format first 24000 miles 100%, next 12000 miles 75%, and so on.
This way we would all have peace of mind buying a TVR.

[j_s_g]

Yeah, it would be nice to see how people warm their car up, but then you've got to take into account previous owners, and you won't know about that, etc. etc.

Personally, I'm surprised at how low the %age of rebuilds is - I was expecting it to be well over half. *But* there are a lot of newer and old low-mileage cars on here.

Once we've got all the posts we're going to, I'll do some proper analysis of the results - I'll put some pretty graphs together, etc.

[donatien]

So far it is running 18 yes 46 no (ignoring the initial post)

So before someone says "most people haven't" let's put these figures in to perspective.

18/64 is 28%. Now if you were nuying a new car and the dealer said "28% chance of the engine going tits up" would you still be interested?

Quite a worrying statistic really. And if you assume that many people on here do take the care to warm up engines and give proper maintenance that might mean that the "outside" figure is higher

Dave

[and]

and why no warm up rev limiter ? I daren't go anywhere with valet parking (at least that my excuse for never taking the missus anywhere posh)

[j_s_g]

donatien said:

So far it is running 18 yes 46 no (ignoring the initial post) So before someone says "most people haven't" let's put these figures in to perspective. 18/64 is 28%. Now if you were nuying a new car and the dealer said "28% chance of the engine going tits up" would you still be interested?

Also, that's just proper rebuilds. There are others with head gasket failures who've said "no". And people with multiple rebuilds.

[cough]Class action[/cough]

[PetrolTed]

..and people who don't want to mention the fact that their car has had engine work...

[donatien]

There may be a silver lining - some folk are saying that after a rebuild the engine is better than ever. Of course that could just be the elation of getting the car back after many weeks off the road.

Hopefully ours will come back refreshed and better than ever (certainly better than when it was born) but in the meantime the girlie is getting anxious. She's even started saying words like "porsche", "turbo" and "buy" in the same sentence

[NickD]

donatien said:

She's even started saying words like "porsche", "turbo" and "buy" in the same sentence

As in, "We don't want to buy..."?

[martinp]

Another reassuring observation from the rebuilds is the number relating to the finger follows. If these are ignored (on the grounds/hope that TVR have that one under control) then the number drops dramatically - I know this is no consolation for those poor souls with cars lined up at TVR Power but at least it makes me a lot less nervous whilst waiting for delivery of mine. It will be interesting to see the final statistics.

Also its good to see a thread on the SP6 topic that hasn't been overwhelmed by the doom-mongers that have no experience of TVR ownership...

[bogie]

the worrying thing is that a lot of people use their TVR as a 2nd or 3rd car - it may be 3 years or so before they get near 12-15K miles and encounter problems...so all the sub 10K mile owners reporting no probs could in fact be having probs in a year or 2.

The only people that know for real how many cars have had probs are TVR ...and I bet the real figure is quite scary.

As for treatment of the engine - we always religously wamr all our cars up and treat them with mechanical sympathy...however Ive no idea about the previous 2 owners....the original owner was a lady who did 1K miles per years over 2 years in it...just going around the shops....mmmmm...


Lets have another thread - "30K miles + on S6 engine with zero defects?" ...and see if anyone AT ALL answers

I know its a performance engine and requires a lot of maintenance etc...but surely it should be able to do say 50K miles at least without an overhaul...but at the rate TVR developed it, I doubt they even had a test mule that had done 20K miles.

How is the new guy gonna take TVR into the US, when you have to have an engine that can do 120K miles without even a cambelt change?? !

[jamster]

if you take out all the cars that have done less than 10K miles and havent failed yet the failure ratio is at 50%.

A brilliant post none the less. Nothing beats hard factual data. Of course it can be cut many ways. I'm looking forward to the findings in the coming weeks and some analysis of the data.

Bet watchdog would love to get their hands on it!!!

[victormeldrew]

Why has no-one done this before? Excellent idea.

I don't think the tendency for people to moan when they have a problem but keep schtum when they are happy will be skewing this either - the pro's are pretty vocal and quick to defend their pride and joy here, so I wouldn't imagine them being shy to register their vote.

The really alarming thing is the number of multiple rebuilds. It blew up, the factory got a second chance to do the job properly, and bang! This would suggest that it's [u]not[/u] a quality control issue IMHO. Unless suicidal, any manufacturer would be especially careful with warranty returns to make sure the rebuild was 100%, wouldn't they?

Maybe having worked in Aerospace, where any failure in service results in major investigation and close scrutiny of the repairs, is falsely rasing my expectations here?

[j_s_g]

victormeldrew said:

Why has no-one done this before? Excellent idea.

I was half expecting responses of "we've done this one half a dozen times before".

victormeldrew said:

The really alarming thing is the number of multiple rebuilds. It blew up, the factory got a second chance to do the job properly, and bang! This would suggest that it's [u]not[/u] a quality control issue IMHO. Unless suicidal, any manufacturer would be especially careful with warranty returns to make sure the rebuild was 100%, wouldn't they?

I think there are a few factors...

1. With very early rebuilds, the problem with the hardening of the finger followers or whatever might not have been known. Causing some second rebuilds.
2. Some second rebuilds are for other things. Mine has just been for valve guides - an issue that probably cropped up after the first rebuild.
3. It's a hand build car, so there'll probably be some (read "very low") natural failure rate.

[j_s_g]

Here's something I was thinking about this morning... Imagine a mechanic on £25k PA (guesstimate figure), that's £500 a week in his/her wages. Assume it takes 1 week to do a rebuild, add another £500 in for the parts, overheads, etc. (not many parts needed, really), and that's £1k cost to TVR for a rebuild.

So, £2k for a "goodwill" rebuild...