[bena]

Define "modern". I have a 2017 Civic and I've had to replace the battery a couple of times. There's a holding bar that needs to be removed before the battery can be taken out, but other than that the only real problem is the weight of the thing.

[logancbrown]

The Ford Maverick (2022+) requires removing the air intake to remove the car battery. This is fairly common across many new car models.

[snek_case]

In general it looks like these kinds of changes are trying to make it harder for people to do this kind of basic maintenance themselves. Force you to go to the dealer.

[stronglikedan]

> Force you to go to the dealer.

I recommend to never go to the dealer, unless you're going there for a warranty or recall repair. A local repair shop is always the better option. And if you don't know of a trustworthy local shop, take it to the dealer for an estimate, and then you know if the local shops are bullshitting you (they should come in way under dealer prices).

[Paul_Clayton]

While increasing dealer revenue is a plausible goal, it also seems plausible that reducing production cost could cause awkward maintenance. It is even plausible that only the bill of materials would be considered, though the feedback loop for increasing assembly cost is much tighter and less noisy that the loop of end-user dissatisfaction with maintenance issues.

Even within an organization, creating externalities from one department's perspective seems common enough.

Even if a decision maker is aware of the possibility of externalities and cares about a broader constituency (temporal or "spatial"), evaluating actual costs is an expense as is justifying that investigation expense and any mitigation/avoidance expenses to others in the decision web.