Another example of American car stupid design

I rented a car this week in Dallas, and it is a late model Dodge Caliber. The left turn signal was clicking very rapidly, and from my experience it meant that one of the turn signal bulb filament is burned out. I verified that and determined that the rear left bulb was bad. In my previous cars, this is an easy thing to fix. Just open the trunk door, remove the tail light access panel and the bulb socket is usually easy to pulled out for bulb replacement.

Since we are still using this Dodge Caliber car for a couple more days and for safety reason, I decided to go ahead and replace the bulb myself. I happened to have the exact bulb needed in the garage.

In this Dodge Caliber, there is no access door to the tail light back side. The tail light is not held by screws, but held on by a couple of plastic wedge push on clip that spreads out as the center post is pushed in. This pin wedge thing broke up in pieces when you attempt to pull/pry out the center post. So why do Detroit engineers do this and perpetuate their incompetent design and poor engineering? Why not use a couple of screws to hold the tail light so it is easily removed to access the bulbs. Better yet, why not provide a tail light cut out/access panel so you don't need any tools to replace these tail light bulbs? Any import cars that I ever had always provide this access panel. Why can't Detroit be smart an be consumer friendly? Filament based light bulbs are bound to go out sooner than later. This is so stupid! Needless to say, the tail light is back on, but since the holes for this plastic thing are so big and the original clips are in pieces, I don't have any way of securing the tail light assembly properly. So it is now held in place by a couple of those rubber tire plugs.

Oh, one other thing. Before replacing the bulb, whenever the car is just started and driven, when I turned on the left turn signal for the first time within a few seconds later you hear a "chime". I didn't make the connection of this fact until later, and the manual didn't even have an index of the keyword chime or warning. I think the car's computer is programmed to recognize that one of the turn signal bulb is bad, but how would the average person know what this chime meant? Nothing on the dashboard indicated that something is amiss.