Too much of what we design and manufacture today is broken from the get-go. I can finesse or work around a lot of improperly designed user interfaces and hardware, but I shouldn’t have to—and neither should you. On more occasions than I care to remember, I’ve had to make or modify a lot of tools in my shop to take something apart and/or put it back together, often in the wee hours of the morning. A lot of people without the skills or time to make tools and parts are totally adrift when confronted with mechanical tasks like these. Too many people have abandoned working on their own cars, and I’d bet a lot of that comes from seeing the way things are engineered. Tasks that should be simple are instead very complicated because someone didn’t think through the consequences of their design. Let’s take something as simple as spark-plug access.

I once changed the spark plugs on an older Corvette, but getting to a few of those plugs was a real pain. I had to remove the front wheel and stack up every socket extension in my toolbox to reach them through the wheel well. What a headache. Another time I was changing the plugs on a pedestrian front-drive car, which is normally very simple. Well, this time I had to use a jack to rotate the engine forward to access the plugs at the rear. It was impossible to reach them without resorting to this annoying procedure.

A few months ago, I was replacing a power-window motor on a late-model sedan. In order to remove the old motor’s cable from the mechanism, I had to unbolt the fitting on the bottom of the window glass. The manufacturer had thoughtfully stamped a pair of holes into the door’s inner panel to allow a socket to turn these nuts. Unfortunately, the holes were placed so that a socket would only fit onto the nuts when the window was rolled down about 4 in. Of course, the reason I needed to access these nuts was because the window wouldn’t move. My options were to break the window or drill two new holes in the door.

Why must cars be designed with such inaccessible components? Do car companies simply not expect owners to fix their cars at home? My frustration continues with even light, routine maintenance.

Many new cars have no way to check the transmission fluid level. You have to drain the fluid out and refill the trans with the correct amount because there’s no dipstick. How much more could a dipstick cost?

There’s a bunch of newer cars that have a maintenance minder light that illuminates when the car needs service. Great. But on some models, only a dealer has the special tool to turn it off. So it forces you to either put up with the light or pay the dealer’s price for a routine service that’s as minor as an oil change. Not really fair, is it?

Even if you never once pick up a wrench to fix your own car, faulty engineering will find you. Last week I was listening to the satellite radio system in a high-end luxury car. As I headed into a long tunnel, I decided to swap the satellite radio station for FM. In this car, the only way to do that is to use the touchscreen controls on the video monitor. Once the car entered the tunnel, the satellite signal faded, as I knew it would. I reached for the touchscreen and poked my finger at the pick list of radio stations. In the time it took for my finger to travel from the steering wheel to the screen, an announcement popped up saying that the satellite reception had been lost. Electronic nannies are silly, yes, but that’s not my main beef with this system. The larger problem is that this message completely covered the part of the screen that lists the radio station presets, which made it impossible to change the station until I got out of the tunnel—3 miles later. And by that time, the satellite signal had returned. Don’t the engineers who design these systems test for conditions like this?

I could go on, but you get the idea. I have a theory as to why these parts and systems are designed the way they are: The engineers themselves probably aren’t the hands-on mechanics they should be.

A few years back, my brother and I were working on his car. He was studying to complete his master’s degree in mechanical engineering and is quite handy with wrenches. While we worked, one of his classmates was hanging around kibitzing . A major car company had already recruited this guy as a design engineer, and he asked me if I could perform a relatively minor repair on his car. I was swamped at the time, so I volunteered to let him use my shop and tools so he could do it himself. Ahh, no. Not an option. He doesn’t work on cars—and he wasn’t the slightest bit interested in learning how.

How can you effectively design a car that needs to be repaired and maintained if you’ve never actually worked on one? In Europe, newly hired automotive design engineers spend a few months working on the assembly lines twisting wrenches before they go into the office and try to design something. Maybe they have an inkling of what a backyard mechanic goes through. Maybe they know what it’s like to need a second elbow in the middle of your forearm just to change a spark plug. I sure do.