Attached Link: Is Computer Design a Substitute for Hands-on Experience?

an article by Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters that is a good point on this. *

We ran into a problem like this on the show. I needed to change the battery on a car we were using to run some tests. Because the cooling system and other hardware were located over the battery, I had the choice of removing the right front wheel and inner fender or dismantling the cooling system to get to the battery. This wasn’t an exotic car that you might expect to have some impractical aspects. This was your average American midsize sedan. I decided to remove the wheel, and it took me about 10 times longer to replace the battery than it should have. I was astonished—the person who designed that car clearly had never changed a battery. The battery fit in CAD, and it fit in the car, but what was an elegant fit in the computer was a problem in the real world. I can just see the designer in front of his computer stuffing the car’s components into available spaces without a clue as to what he was doing.*