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I have a 2009 Citroen and the battery is secured with a bolt that is under the battery compartment and to access it you need to go under the car with a very long wrench, who engineered it is a psycho

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.

Repair shop owners also don't enjoy work which is unnecessarily difficult.

Between rebuilding an engine and disassembling a bumper to replace a lightbulb most mechanics would genuinely rather be doing the lengthy but interesting work of rebuilding an engine than the lengthy and fucking boring task of disassembling a bumper to fix a lightbulb.

Moreover, even if a mechanic must charge you stupid amounts of labour cost to do a simple repair because it genuinely takes that much time, the customer might not come away with it thinking: "fuck, I bought a dumb car which is expensive to repair", they might instead come away with it thinking: "all these mechanics, quoting ridiculous prices to fix a light bulb, they must all be scammers".

If it is a part with a regular maintenance schedule, it should be designed for maintainability.

Most maintainability conflicts come from packaging and design for assembly.

Efficiency more often comes into conflict with durability, and sometimes safety.

This is like saying you can get a 10% improvement in battery life by changing where you position the RAM on your motherboard.

There is just no universe in which placing an oil filter in one location or another is going to make such a difference. You'd have to mount it completely outside the engine, say sitting as a cylinder on top of the hood, and even there you are not going to get a 2mpg improvement.

If the engine failed due to missing oil change because of the difficulty, the whole car is gone. The waste in cost, material, and environmental impact far outweighs the savings in 2mpg improvement.

We don't have magic oil filters which last even 22k miles. You should be replacing them every 6 months / 6k miles, or 12 months / 12k miles depending on your risk tolerance (some people suggest even half my short interval).

Anyone who actually drives their car regularly will be doing an oil change at least twice a year. If an oil change takes more than 30 minutes of actual labour time of an inexperienced mechanic, it's going to be a serious financial burden which will likely outweigh any 2mpg improvement.

I’m no mechanical engineer, but I would assume those extreme tradeoffs occur more often when repairability is not prioritized from early iterations. I.e. “boss we’re 90% into the design cycle why are you bringing up the position of the oil filter now?”

There’s definitely a programming equivalent as well…

Except..there is never such reason. They can put the filter anywhere in the pipeline. Some even have it exactly where it should be: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/2013+Subaru+Legacy+Oil+and+Oil+...

Most cars sold in the US are not aerodynamic so it seems a couple of mpg isn't the focus anyway

You may not know this, but EVs also have oil filters and gears. They also having cooling systems. What they don't have is an engine (they have motors). But the motors have their own cooling system, and the gears have their own oil system with filters.

Every moving part - especially gears -- needs to be oiled, and whenever you are oiling metal on metal contact such as in gears, you are going to want an oil filter to catch worn metal debris, to remove it from the oil.

The difference between EVs and ICE vehicles is not that only one of them uses oil to reduce friction, but that the oil service intervals on EVs are so long that regular oil maintenance is not needed, you do it every 60,000 miles or whatever the manufacturer recommends, so it's out of mind. But that doesn't mean it doesn't require service.

Once EVs have been around for a while and there is an established market for used EVs, the people who buy them are going to want to change the oil to add more life to the EV. So it's something that is dealt with in the long-life maintenance, not the monthly maintenance. But when you do the oil service, you will curse Tesla for needing to drop the battery in order to do it, and all of a sudden you will care where things are placed and how accessible they are.

Here is a nice video -- I follow Sam Crac as one of my favorite automotive youtubers - and he picked up an old Tesla and did an oil service for it. It's a nice watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0ZNHKjHalY

EVs have gears and gear oil in their drive units. There is a reduction gear that needs lubrication, as well as the differential.

They actually will need oil changes starting anywhere from the 50k to 100k mile mark.

Here's the maintenance guide with pictures walking through changing the oil and filter for the Rear Drive Unit (RDU) in a Tesla Model S:

https://service.tesla.com/docs/ModelS/ServiceManual/Palladiu...

EVs also have consumable parts which it would be incredibly annoying to place in nonsensical locations.

The obvious one is the battery, and you can argue that modern EVs have batteries so expensive that when they are dead the car becomes scrap, and - sure, whatever.

But EVs still have: cabin air filters, coolant, brake fluid, lubricants in various places (although granted, these lubricants will mostly last the service life).

At the end of the day, as long as you have a car which moves, and not a statue, it will have things which wear out and which should be easy to replace.

Engine oil and oil filters are just an example.

It is completely possible that the path that got them to this point was the optimal path given their goals and knowledge at the time. And wildly enough, maybe it was even the optimal path with perfect knowledge of the future as well.

That's the opposite of 'great'. Good code is that which can be refactored.

I do have a feeling that the example of bigger players is carefully followed by many of the other companies, kind of as a cult of success. And that example for a long time has been rather lacking.

This is definitely true. In growth companies there is way more emphasis these days on investor hype over user centricity.

For companies that have a solid competitive moat they have at best gotten lazy about user centricity and at worst actively hostile.