As a classic car enthusiast, my passion revolves around cars with a Made in West Germany stamp somewhere on them, partially because that phrase generally implied a reputation for mechanical honesty and engineering sanity. Air-cooled Volkswagens are my favorites, and in fact I wrote about these, and my own ’72 Super Beetle, almost a decade ago. The platform is incredibly versatile and hackable, not to mention inexpensive and repairable thanks to its design as a practical, affordable car originally meant for German families in the post-war era and which eventually spread worldwide. My other soft-spot is a car that might seem almost diametrically opposed to early VWs in its design philosophy: the Mercedes 300D. While it was a luxury vehicle, expensive and overbuilt in comparison to classic Volkswagens, the engineers’ design choices ultimately earned it a reputation as one of the most reliable cars ever made.
As much as I appreciate these classics, though, there’s almost nothing that could compel me to purchase a modern vehicle from either of these brands. The core reason is that both have essentially abandoned the design philosophies that made them famous in the first place. And while it’s no longer possible to buy anything stamped Made in West Germany for obvious reasons, even a modern car with a VIN starting with a W doesn’t carry that same weight anymore. It more likely marks a vehicle destined for a lease term rather than one meant to be repaired and driven for decades, like my Beetle or my 300D.
Punch Buggy Blue
Starting with the downfall of Volkswagen, whose Beetle is perhaps the most iconic car ever made, their original stated design intent was to make something affordable and easily repairable with simple tools. The vehicles that came out of this era, including the Beetle, Bus, and Karmann Ghia, omitted many parts we’d think were absolutely essential on a modern car such as a radiator, air conditioner, ABS brakes, a computer, or safety features of any sort. But in exchange the vehicles are easily wrenched on for a very low cost.
For example, removing the valve covers only requires a flat screwdriver and takes about five seconds, and completing a valve adjustment from that point only requires a 13 mm wrench and maybe an additional half hour. The engines can famously be removed in a similar amount of time, and the entire bodies can be lifted off the chassis without much more effort. And some earlier models of Beetle will run just fine even without a battery, assuming you can get a push. As a result of cost and simplicity the Beetle and the other vehicles based on it were incredibly popular for almost an entire century and drove VW to worldwide fame.
This design philosophy didn’t survive the 80s and 90s, however, and this era saw VW abandon nearly everything that made it successful in the first place. Attempting any of the maintenance procedures listed above on a modern Jetta or Golf will have one scratching one’s head, wondering if there’s anything left of the soul of the Volkswagen from the 50s and 60s. Things like having to remove the bumper and grille to change a headlight assembly or removing the intake manifold to change a thermostat are commonplace now. They’ve also abandoned their low-cost roots as well, with their new retro-styled Bus many multiples of even the inflation-adjusted price of a Bus from the 1960s, well beyond what modern safety standards and technology would have added to the cost of the vehicle alone. Let’s also not forget that even when completely ignoring emissions standards, modern VWs have still remained overpriced and difficult to repair.
VW Is Not Alone
The story of Mercedes ends up in almost exactly the same place but from a completely opposite starting point. Mercedes of the 60s and 70s was known for building mostly indestructible tanks for those with means who wanted to feel like they were riding in the peak of luxury. And that’s what Mercedes mostly delivered: leather seats, power windows, climate control, a comfortable ride, and in a package that would easily go hundreds of thousands of miles with basic maintenance. In the case of the W123 platform, this number often extended to a million miles, a number absolutely unheard of for modern vehicles.
This is the platform my 1984 300D was based on, and mine was well over 300,000 miles before we eventually parted ways. Mercedes of this era also made some ultra-luxury vehicles that could be argued to be the ancestors of modern Mercedes-Maybach like the Mercedes 600, a car with all of the power electronics replaced with hydraulics like the windows, power reclining rear seat, and automatic trunk.
While the Mercedes 600 isn’t exactly known for being a hobbyist car nowadays, the W123s certainly are. My 300D was simple by modern Mercedes standards with a mechanical fuel injected diesel engine that was excessively overbuilt. The mechanical climate control systems made out of springs, plastic, and hope might not be working anymore but I’d be truly surprised if the engine from this car isn’t still running today.
Even plenty of gas-powered Mercedes of that era are wrenchable (as long as you bought one from before Chrysler poisoned the company) and also deliver the luxury that Mercedes was known for and is still coasting on. And this ability to repair or work on a car at a minimum of cost didn’t mean Mercedes sacrificed luxury, either. These cars were known for comfort as well as reliability, something rarely combined in modern cars.
Indeed, like Volkswagen, it seems as though a modern Mercedes will make it just as far as the end of the first lease before it turns into an expensive maintenance nightmare. Mercedes at least has the excuse that it never recovered from infecting itself with Chrysler in the 90s, but Volkswagen has no corporate baggage as severe, instead making a conscious choice to regress towards the mean without the anchor of a lackluster American brand tied around its neck. But a few other other less-obvious things have happened that have crushed the souls of my favorite vintage auto makers as well.
Toyota
Japanese automakers disrupted everything in the 70s and 80s with cars that had everything Volkswagen used to be: simple, inexpensive, repairable, and arguably even more reliable. And, with the advent of Lexus in the 80s and their first model, the LS400, they showed that they could master the Mercedes traits of bulletproof luxury as well. They didn’t need nostalgia or marketing mythology; they just quietly built what Volkswagen and Mercedes once promised, and Volkswagen, Mercedes, and almost every other legacy automaker at the time were simply unable to compete on any of these terms. Many people will blame increasing safety and emissions requirements on the changes seen in the last three decades, but fail to account for the fact that Japanese brands had these same requirements but were able to succeed despite them.
Marketing
Without being able to build reliable vehicles at a competitive price to Toyota, or Honda, or others, these companies turned to their marketing departments and away from their engineers. Many car makers, not just Mercedes and VW, chase gadgetry and features today rather than any underlying engineering principles. They also hope to sell buyers on a lifestyle rather than on the vehicle itself. With Mercedes it’s the image of luxury rather than luxury itself, and for Volkswagen especially it’s often nostalgia rather than repairability or reliability.
This isn’t limited to car companies, either. The 80s and 90s also ushered in a more general time of prioritizing stock holders and quarterly earnings rather than customers, long-term thinking, and quality. Companies like Boeing, GE, Craftsman, Sony, and Nokia all have fallen to victim to the short-term trend at the expense of what once made them great.
Designing for Assembly Rather than Repair
And, if customers are only spending money on a lease term it doesn’t really matter if the cars last longer than that. So, it follows that the easiest way to trim costs when not designing for longevity is to design in ways that minimize assembly cost rather than costs of ownership. That’s partially how we get the classic “remove the bumper to replace the headlight” predicament of many modern vehicles: these cars are designed to please robots on the assembly line, not humans with wrenches.
Dealerships
The way that we’ve structured car buying as a society bears some of this burden as well. Dealerships, especially in North America, are protected by law and skew the car ownership experience significantly, generally to the detriment of car owners. Without these legal protections the dealership model would effectively disappear overnight, and their lobbying groups have fought tooth-and-nail to stop newer companies from shipping cars directly to owners. Not only do dealerships drive up the cost of purchasing a vehicle compared to if it were legally possible to buy direct from a manufacturer, they often make the bulk of their profits on service. That means their incentives are also aligned so that the more unreliable and complex vehicles become, the more the dealerships will benefit and entrench themselves further. This wasn’t as true when VW and Mercedes were making the vehicles that made them famous, but has slowly eroded what made these classics possible in the modern world.
Hope? Probably Not.
There’s no sign that any of these trends are slowing down, and to me it seems to be part of a broader trend that others like [Maya] have pointed out that goes beyond cars. And it’s a shame too as there’s a brand new frontier of electric vehicles that could (in theory) bring us back to a world where we could have reliable, repairable vehicles again. EVs are simpler machines at heart, and they could be the perfect platform for open-source software, accessible schematics, and owner repair. But manufacturers and dealers aren’t incentivized to build anything like the Volkswagens or Mercedes of old, electric or otherwise, even though they easily could. I also won’t hold my breath hoping for [Jeff Bezos] to save us, either, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
And I also don’t fault anyone for appreciating these legacy brands. I’ve picked on VW and Merc here because I’ve owned them and appreciate them too, or at least what they used to represent. The problem is that somewhere along the way, loyalty to engineering and design ideals got replaced by loyalty to the logo itself. If we really care about what made cars like the Beetle and 300D special in the first place, we should be demanding that the companies that built them live up to those values again, not making excuses when they don’t.
So for now, I’ll keep gravitating toward the vehicles that came closest to those ideals. Others at Hackaday have as well, notably [Lewin] and his Miata which certainly fits this bill. Although I don’t have my VW or Mercedes anymore, I currently have a ’19 Toyota pickup, largely designed in the early 2000s, which isn’t glamorous but it’s refreshingly honest by modern standards and is perhaps a last gasp from this company’s soul, as Toyota now risks following the same path that hollowed out Volkswagen and Mercedes: swapping durability and practicality for complexity, flashy features, and short-term profits. I was also gifted an old Buick with an engine I once heard described as “the time GM accidentally made a Toyota engine.” The rubber bits may be dry-rotting away, but it’s a perfect blend of my Beetle and my 300D because it’s cheap, comfortable, reliable, and fixable (and the climate control actually works). The only thing missing is that little stamp: Made in West Germany.
Great article. The best example today of the partially-engineered madness is in trucks. Hundreds of thousands of trucks from Toyota, GM and Ford for defective engines and transmissions. An unintended consequence is the resale value of old vehicles.
It was meant for German families pre-war. Except it wasn’t because Austrian uncle H. screwed them and pocketed all the money in the name of building a great German nation. What was meant to be VW KdF (Strength Through Joy) became Type 82 (aka Kübelwagen) and instead of family driving on smooth autobahns it was just father and his army mates going on off-road “holidays” in exotic places like Africa or Soviet Union.
I think by far the most repairable car ever was the citroen 2cv. taking off doors was just sliding them off. chairs fixed with a simple clamp and ment to be taken out regulary to increas storing space or to have something to sit on during picnicks.
but then again, the car was one big crumple zone…
and yes, this is one of the reasons I’m driving a Citroen BX estate as my regular car. the other reason is the famous citroen active suspension. of course this car also has a few hard to reach parts, but they were designed to be, as those parts would not be replaced during its 15 years designed liftime. now those parts of course are already replaced a few times, and some are replaced with different parts to make service easier. weak point in this car are the hydraulic return hoses. they gather on a almost unreachable point on the frontal sub frame in a junction block and are molded as one piece, as this was easier during production. i replaced all rubber return hoses with festo pressure air hoses and couplings. now in the event that a rupture occurs in one hose( unlikely) i can replace just that one, not all the other 12 hoses on the same junction block.
Excellent article that sums up what a lot of us are thinking. The one thing though is that despite alllll the down sides listed, modern cars are way, way safer. Until I had a family (and started working trauma room duty at about the same time) I didn’t care much. Now I bought a new-ish car with all the modern safety doo-dads plus alllll the rest of the bloat and problems listed in the article. I hate the trade off but it is justified to me now.
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For what it’s worth my friend’s dad died when we were like 10 in a VW beetle at a relatively low speed in a wreck that wouldn’t even make you miss your appointment today.
Worth pointing out that before the designed to fail and be impossible to service type cars come in but after nearly all the modern safety systems do cars do exist, seems to me like a cross over period of at least 15 years maybe 20 centred around the 90’s somewhere.
Probably the most expensive second hand cars you can possibly find that were never ‘supercar’ niche though, as the examples I’m aware of as being easy to work on certainly seem to hold their value rather well as a rule.
My dad 300d did well over 1000000km. What a beast
When our 1989 Whirlpool dryer went on the blink, I suggested to the wife we get a new one. She hesitated and called a repairman. He fixed it for like $40 and told us to hang on to these as long as we can. He said at 36 years old, they’ll still probably outlasts a new one.
This has been my experience, and to some extent this is survivorship bias: the 1980’s Kenmores and Whirlpools we see are the ones that have lived this long not the ones that failed, but with that said, my mom, brother, and I have old washers and dryers that do break but take me an hour to fix, and I’ve kept them all going, where my coworker’s nearly new I dunno what brand clothes washer has failed twice under warranty, both times partially flooding her basement, and as she puts it, at least it emails her that it’s catastrophically failed so I guess that’s something. But I value something that I am capable of fixing and have to do so once every five years, over something that might last for 10 years because modern engineering is amazing, but if it does die I’m unable to fix it because I need a custom software/hardware diagnostics tool to even figure out what the error is.
I feel like part of this is that there’s an expectation of complex functionality (particularly that it SHOULD have a phone app even if the person doesn’t want to use it) and because of that, everybody assumes that it’s too complicated to fix, and design has settled on “we’ll give you something miraculous but disposable.”
And, worse, now that we’re stuck in that particular local maximum, the same companies think oh hey as long as we can text people when their clothes are done washing, we can also text them ads inside the same app, and turn the sale into a sort of rental, and I really hate that.
Yeah i maintain a couple ancient dryers and the only wear components are the heater element, the drive belt, the motor, and the timer. And i’ve only ever had to replace the heater and the belt. Did an idiot super glue / baking soda fix to a timer, knock on wood. Can last forever. Regular usage doesn’t tend to destroy the basic components, the lint trap, the door hinge, the metal cabinet.
Washing machines, on the other hand…once the main seal starts to leak, it’s a pain to replace it and if you don’t get to it right away then everything downstream becomes a solid chunk of rust.
And dishwashers all seem to die from the pump’s rotor eroding to nothing until it can’t build up pressure anymore, which you can only replace as a big pump unit that costs at least half the price of a new dishwasher. Hard to motivate that repair when it’s hard to tell if anything else is broken / clogged / etc.
And i thought an oven/range could last forever, but i actually rusted through the metal box of my oven. Had trouble deciding whether to buy a new box or replace the whole appliance…decided to replace the whole appliance (with its closest modern equivalent) and was so disappointed by what they delivered to my doorstep that i stripped out the electronics from the old one and put it in a plastic bag for when the new one’s knobs and burners fail.
Had the trigger in my vintage sawzall die, and ordered what appeared to be the official milwaukee replacement part but it doesn’t have the same performance anymore.
Sigh
IMHO, VW Beetle and Citroen 2CV are the two cars that should have never been destroyed by the Big Bad Car Making companies. Jeep, too (the original one) so is Bantam and other well-thought-through SIMPLE and FIXABLE cars with as fewer parts as possible (oh, Ford Model A, too, while at it).
Rewind to present and find no easy way to afford a “modern car” ($50K minimum for a new car is absolute lunacy – $15K is more like it) without needing a car loan; mind what you are thinking, Ford, too, didn’t make Ford Ts cheap enough for the masses, BUT Ford gave employees a discount AND provided credit; something that’s now long gone from Ford or GM.
I’d say we need not just Beetles or 2CVs, but Holdens, Packards, etc etc. All made and sold locally, for under $15K flat, no hidden gotchas, a basic/minimum car that’s infinitely upgradeable and fixable, like the original Beetle and 2CVs were, so simple, average farmer could fix one on the way to/from market using basic tools. Obviously, 100 years later there is no longer a need to go with the terrible efficiency or okay quality parts, and proper crash cage unibody is a must, but progress in general HAD moved forward, comparable tranny (engine/transmission/hybrid/whatevah) are about as cheap as 2 cycle engines were in the post-WWII France. All it takes is engineers (not bean counters) designing and building what market is asking for, a solid $15K car ($20K with ALL OPTIONS included).
If modern-day CEOs of Big Bad Car Making Companies can’t cough up a working $15K 100%-US-built (with 100% US made parts) car sold for profit, time to fire them. If I would be Henry Ford that’s what I will be doing, replacing defunct executives with young eager minds who want to make a difference (and working with the Supreme Court to reverse the “Dodge vs Ford Motor Company” win, thus, removing the short-term profit strip-miners from the investors).
Update – Byd introduced and started selling “average family sedan” for the US $13K equivalent basic model. This year.
GM/Ford/Stellantis, your time to outsell Byd globally with better quality CHEAPER model – start with the US, too, home turf where we have to import Byds through Canada, because the local mafias/unions won’t allow us to buy affordable cars.
Honestly, I am tired living in the museum of the former glory. Time to move forward – not just hybrid (that was 1980s technology, hybrid engines are OLD HAT resold/re-engineered infinitely, just like MS Windows), give us encased Z-Pinch fusion reactor that runs on entombed fuel for the lifetime of the vehicle – yes, I know what the hell I am talking about, no, car makers don’t give a damn that 100% electric may not even need rare earth metals and expensive batteries – try boron as fuel, available worldwide anywhere on Earth; mix of boron and hydrogen, if I remember correctly.
Again, why are we stuck in the late 20 century with the bronze-age economics again? I don’t get it.
I can’t really defend modern practices. And i’d love to see what something modern actually designed around repairability would look like. I definitely think that technology has reached a point where almost nothing (cars, computers, washing machines) really needs to be optimized for performance / size / weight / cost at the expense of repairability anymore. We could definitely afford a few trade-offs to increase repairability and lifespan.
But i think it’s easy to over-romanticize the past. My friend recently took to collecting 1950ish Ford trucks so i’ve seen them torn down…the reason they’re easy to work on isn’t that Ford cared about repairability (i don’t know if they did or not), but simply that there’s nothing to them. None of the modern complications had been invented. The windshield is flat. The body around the engine is all separate pieces of simple cuts of sheet metal. Like this article mentions, there’s no ABS or fuel injection or airbags.
There’s a famous rule that you shouldn’t attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. And i think we might need a corollary for historical artifacts — never attribute to benevolence what can be attributed to incapacity.
Anyways, among things that are still fundamentally simple today, repairability only seems to increase as commoditization matures. For example, consider the bicycle. When i started out, used bikes from the 1970s were still flowing through my neighborhood. They all had different standards, different dimensions and attachment points. So compatible replacement parts were unobtainable (maybe special order from Italy?), and there’s a limit to how many times you can re-pack a bearing.
But today, i have 6 bikes (for a family of 4) ranging from 1984 to 2015ish and i can replace every single component on them for between $10 and $50 at the local bike shop. They have almost everything in stock, and it’s all things i’ve seen before. Even modern innovations like index shifting, while intimidating at first, are not hard to work with, nor obscure / proprietary. I know i could spend $5000 for a bike that is still incompatible with everything but for decades the majority of non-Huffy mass-manufactured bikes are durable, repairable, and capable.
I think what people miss isn’t a question of intent but rather simplicity. And while i admire the simplicity of an air-cooled engine, it’s no coincidence that the vintage VWs famously could not go up a hill.
Think turbo diesel VW AROUND 2000-2015 any body style. Tells you what’s wrong, hackable, cheap. Survives incidents well. Will let you know when it dies.