THe hardest ones are the ones with NO ROOM to work in! JAPANESE fingers are SMALLER than EUROPEAN Ones! They tend to be DAINTY and have small clearances! EUROPEAN cars are a GOAL! They often DO require a special tool here or there but they are easy to RENT! Most GM engines are headed straight to the JUNK YARD if they are from the 80's and 90's and early 2000's! They are SIMPLY made from BAD and CHEAPER alloys, GASKET compounds and Gm was sued MILLIONS for DEXCOOL problems, the SATURN transmissions that keep breaking OVER and OVER again, and for NORTHSTAR< the LEAKER engine! Their MAINSTAY is the NEWLY DESIGNED 350 CHEVY< which carries the CRANK in the middle of the block aen h\not HANGING out on the bottom! It requires SPECIAL oil pumps and trays to do this! STPAUL GUY is TAINTED a bit, but has good answers many times! The NEWER the car, the MORE electronics are needed to meet EMISSIONS and other SAFETY requirements. I would rather work on TEN EURO CARS than TWO domestic ones depending upon what the problem is! The BEST cars are made for EASE Of repair, and not for EASE of assembly! Most current DOMESTIC cars use mostly EUROPEAN or JAPANESE engines and parts as well!
many imports especially luxury german cars require special tools to do their maintenance. these cars can often be over-engineered and though their parts are still very similar to those in regular cars, accessing or servicing them can be more annoying/expensive (if you are a regular mechanic and the cars you fix allow you to buy the tools you need, that works out great but if you need to pay for very expensive and very specialized tools to fix a single type of car, you need to start charging a lot more to make up the extra costs.
add in on top of this that some cars will always be harder to work on than others. some cars like a regular family car are built in a very simple manner. all their parts are exactly where you'd expect them to be in an easy to work on layout. others however have layouts that are simply horrendous to work on.
take for instance a Ford Focus or honda civic. these are front wheel drive cars with 4 cylinder engines (the fiesta even has a 3 cylinder option). if you want to change spark plugs, you buy regular spark plugs at your autoparts store and get to work. you take off the engine cover and reach the old plugs. you may need a longer socket wrench to reach them but in the end you'll be able to reach them without issues. job done in no time at all. now think about doing a similar fix on a high performance car like the Bugatti Veyron. they veyron's engine is in the middle between the driver and the rear wheels. and rather than having 4 cylinders. it has 16. and rather than having regular sparkplugs, it has much larger, performance plugs that might need to be special ordered. and if things weren't already many times more complex, the buattis' engine is placed as low down as possible to lower the center of gravity so you may need to remove the engine. add in that this is a very rare car and you don't have the tools for it and that basic maintenance means that you may need to ship the car off to France to get serviced there. (they only make the cars in france) now ultimately that sounds like quite an expensive ordeal but it's ok because where a civic or fiesta will cost less than $20,000, a veyron will cost over $2,000,000 so the guys at bugatti know you can afford it.
I don't think it matters, when I was a teen I owned Pontiac V8's , ripping them down and pretty much everything to keep them running from racing.
I also helped my friends fix their VW bugs and such, a clutch is a clutch, and brakes are just brakes . Unless things have changed much in the last few decades, then no. The last 5 cars I have owned were all Asian, 2 Honda, 2 Acura, and now a Hyundai .
Their are certainly more electronics on modern cars, in the old days you had to listen carefully to "hear" the problems now you use a code reader then it tells you the problem on a tiny screen.
Some European cars are very difficult to work on. But the bigger issue is whether they need special tools. European cars need tons of special factory tools.
Cars are cars are cars. It depends of style, complexity and repair steps as per the manufacturer. If you are interested as to the average mechanic, why not ask average mechanics in your city?
friggen chryslers which means jeep dodge etc. my friend owns a chrylser 300 and i tried to help him work on it and i wont do it anymore they are such a pain in the ***. and my other friend had a 4x4 jeep compass and the oil change place wanted 20 dollars extra to remove a skid plate to get to the oil filter. which in most vehicles you should beable to reach it without removing the skid plate but leave it to god damn chryler e.e
Foreign cars like Mercedes?
