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.
It would seem that a Bauhaus auto would be meant to get you from your Bauhaus apartment (a cell identical to all others) to a Bauhaus parking lot at the Bauhaus factory where you make some part for Bauhaus stuff. A family driving holiday would be an eccentric improper and selfish thought.
When I read the heading I thought the philosophies would be Socialist versus Free Market. But evolution from old to modern manufacturing and market pressures is quite interesting.
Next we’ll be hearing that Eisenhower came up with the interstate highway system in a dream. Germany was first to market in several areas (roads, VWs, jets, rockets although Goddard helped them through personal pre-war correspondence) and it’s silly to sweep it under the rug. VW was an improved Model T/A, in the 70s in the U.S. high school and college kids in my neighborhood near a major city had Model Ts/And such in their driveways. Good luck affording that now.
Building a useful, high volume, nationwide, express road network becomes an entirely different beast when you are doing it in a place that big.
You can practically jog across Germany.
“We built this nice wide road between a few cities and industrial centers” is not the same thing as “We built a million miles of road that interconnects all major cities, ports, industrial centers, and agriculture.”
Building a sturdy shed is great, but it doesn’t mean you built the first skyscraper…
You can actually jog across the United States.
Good luck with Hawaii!
No ‘you’ can’t.
Multiple instances of you, separated by sleep induced discontinuity can. But a SINGLE continuous ‘you’ can’t.
‘You’ only exists in discreet time chunks of ~16-72 hours. After that you get little micro sleeps even with chemical assistance no matter what you try.
Past ‘you’s are dead.
@Ian
Past yous are no more dead than future yous are. Every momentary instance of you exists simultaneously across a multitude of dimensional planes. Your inability to consciously access more than one at a time does not negate their existence. We are not reincarnated after every sleep. You are the same you today you were yesterday and will be tomorrow. One you can jog across the continental United States over the course of many days and nights, sleeping when needed. No death required.
Actually, the conscious experience of you is only 2-3 minutes old. Everything beyond that fades and is either forgotten, or archived away as a distorted memory with almost all of the details lost.
You cannot walk to the end of your street and back. The you that returns is not the same one that left. Can you tell me, what were your thoughts 30 seconds ago? They’re no longer there.
Of which there is no evidence, and never can be, because such “other dimensions” would be inaccessible. Whether such things exist or not makes no observable difference to the world we live in, which means they might as well not exist.
Hi! We, in SU awas hating german speech till 80s but as for me I was working on German plant almost 8 yers/
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.
Not going to lie this is the last place I expected to find someone talking about the infamous (in Citroën circles at least) BX octopus. Trailing arm bearings are also a pig to sort out on these.
But it’s a valid point that a car that was also once deemed as complicated is also generally easy to work on and hack, especially in comparison to the modern rubbish.
Kudos for keeping a BX estate on the road – there’s so few of them around now, considering their ubiquity not so long ago. In fact I saw the BX Estate in a newspaper’s “UK’s rarest cars” feature last year.
I’ve always marvelled at how, in a different universe, the car we know as the Citroen BX would have been sold as the Volvo Tundra :)
(https://dyler.com/blog/457/the-volvo-tundra-concept-that-became-the-citroen-bx for those who don’t already know)
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.
.
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.
They did another.
The rollover safety upgrade.
The a-pillars became wider then your head and the window bottoms all moved up to shoulder level (for stubby people).
You can see it in the safety stats.
Cars did get a little safer, for those in them.
The bad driver views made them a lot less safe for those outside.
Cycling/walking peasants really should have an assistant go ahead of them with a flags and a horn!
Like the rules for cars in the earliest days.
Should be dressed as for dear hunting to ‘walk the sidewalk/ride the bikelane’.
Not ‘mother in law dear hunting suit’: Brown w trophy antlers and a whitetail.
I digress.
I think that my 2010 Subaru Forester falls into that rare niche: It’s old enough that it’s designed (for the most part) to be worked on by human hands, but it’s new enough that it has many of the life-saving safety systems modern cars have. I’m keeping this car as long as I possibly can.
That was a great car and probably the best timeframe for them.
One of my grade-school friends was killed by a parked car. Station wagon rear window got him, during church. So the story goes, I didn’t witness it.
How does a “rear window” get you? I’m fascinated!
Strangulation. Fascinating, Captain.
That took a long time for me to understand, but in Europe the flip-up-rear window was never popular, so I imagined a rear window in a rear hatch.
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.
Every washer, dryer, and dishwasher could be using exactly the same control board, or maybe a range of two or three if you really want to save costs.
Even if they have different features, it doesn’t matter, just add a few extra SSR outputs for a few dollars.
Give them an ESP32, hall effect rotary encoder and a color LCD and speaker, and just give up the hard coded dial settings, make it all run on an interpreted OpenWasherConfig file so you can swap out CPUs if needed, and don’t ever break the backwards compatibility.
Everything could be designed with commodity parts that we can swap out ourselves for repair, upgrade or customization.
How do we get there???
Maybe work with repairs shops and develop a standard control board with all the features anyone could ever want, including Matter, that you can configure from a GUI to support new washers and dryers, assuming the physical motors are still similar enough to make that work?
Sounds like a scary amount of liability though, if anything goes wrong with it and floods something. I don’t think I’d want to build something like that for myself, unless I was part of a whole team or at least an open source community carefully reviewing everything about the design.
survivorship bias might be a bit off as that implies that theyre somehow rare and special instances of units that werent somehow flawed and subpar.
MANY of the old appliances that have been hauled off to the landfill over the decades were not irreparable. Many of them were merely discarded by owners who used a small issue to justify the indulgence in the NEW. Many have been cast off in working condition for the offense of lacking trendy appeal.
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
Best is an old Maytag with a dryness sensor and no timer-no timer to fail.
In dishwashers the level sensor fails and the water overflows. Nobody thought to actually make the door seal waterproof, it’s just barely good enough to prevent splashes from leaking out.
Nobody though to?
Nobody saw the need for the added expense. You dont want your dishwasher filling to the top with water when the drain is clogged and the sensor has failed. Id rather a warning puddle leaking out during a running fail, than a tsunami when I open the door after not knowing it had.
I had to fix this the other day. Had to take off the entire door, metal front panel, pull out a tray in the bottom, and unscrew another panel just to access and sop up the water that raised the float switch. Then put it all back together and press a magic button combo to reset it.
They literally made it as hard as possible to get to, presumably to encourage calling a repairman.
Same for refrigerators. Modern ones have very short life expectancy.
But energy consumption is probably nowhere near a modern dryer’s.
Similar to refrigerators.
I wonder when the energy saved in operating a new one is more than the energy it took to build the new one and scrap the old one.
Yea, reminds me of that supervisor in our student home, who decided to get rid of the ooold refrigerators in the kitchen (just white cubes with plenty of space in them). So he got one new one to show off, and since it occupied the same space, but was not sharable (who gets the bottle space in the door? Who gets the salad drawer? Who the egg and butter board?) everybody voted to keep the old ones. What to do? Mister supervisor played the “energy” card and agreed to toss the one which consumed more energy. We installed energy meters and the old ones clocked in at about two thirds of the new one.
Later the supervisor got his revenge by installing motion sensors in the shower rooms instead of light switches “because this turns on the ventilator, and we have a mold problem”. In the end the light turned on when it was not needed, but you had to leave the shower and wave at the sensor when showering after sunset. Fun fact: only the shower room without window (but same ventilators) had a mold problem, the others were fine.
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.
Pussy.
Run your car on Hydrazine!
Until you can source something better.
‘Ignition’ is a great resource for alternate car fuel ideas.
Looking forward to running on Sodium/Fluorine fuel.
Read my other comment – I want a compact boron-hydrogen Z-Pinch fusion reactor, that runs on one pinch of fuel for something like 15+ years straight, no refueling.
No moving parts, no batteries, no rare earth stuffs. Compact, the size of a briefcase that can be removed and put back in when/if needed.
Technology is being shoved into background just because. Canada is developing their own version, btw, in a small shed in the middle of nowhere, and they have a chance of succeeding (though, for now it is stationary kind of deal, but they may scale it down to small truck size).
We truly have no way of catching up with the rest of the world – and we HAVE to start paying engineers more than managers. Like it was during the Apollo project. 4% GNP is nothing compared with what we are wasting propping up Wall Street Casinos and all kinds of politicians’ pet projects.
“I want a compact boron-hydrogen Z-Pinch fusion reactor, that runs on one pinch of fuel for something like 15+ years straight, no refueling.” Which Heinlein novel is that in and what do you plan to do when gamma rays damage the metal of the structure?
RE: gamma rays damage the metal – that’s why ENGINEERS should be working on this, and not bean counters.
Direct jolt of electricity charging supercapacitors. Work out the details why gamma rays should be flipped into taus that would decay into electrons. Theoretical Physics majors, there is entire Fermat Lab full of scientists who should help with that. Fusion. Flipping things into usable energy and generating extra fuel as it does. Maybe some goldbars, too, while at it, to help with the financing once the fuel runs out.
“Fermat Lab”? Automatic disqualification. Judges?
Again, editing would be nice, HaD.
“Flipping things into usable energy and generating extra fuel as it does.” If pigs had wings where would I get my porkchops?
“No moving parts, no batteries, no rare earth stuffs. Compact, the size of a briefcase that can be removed and put back in when/if needed.” Res ipsa you know the rest.
You must be a StarTrek fan.
Technobabble is no substitute for pyromania.
Plot complication on scanners captain!
Glad my buzzwords were entertaining latch-on for mostly pointless/useless comments.
“Fermilab” for the grammar nazi, of course, theoretical physics (and its other helpers, The Perimeter Institute, etc), and gazillion applied physics majors who ground ideas in reality, followed by gazillion engineers who make technology happen. All three majors are needed, but, as usual, it is the grant money that fuel one direction and bleed off the other ones. It doesn’t mean the things are weed-induced “visions”, it means there are no money to pay salaries, and people who can make it happen are presently busy elsewhere.
Regardless, we (the US) still suck at churning engineers of almost any kind – both China and India churn three or four times our rate (even when accounted for MIT imported graduates who decided to make US their home), so we’ll just keep on losing to the rest of the world just the same we’ve been for the last three decades since NAFTA 1.0.
At the rate we have it, I’d say we need the rest of the world stop whatever they are doing for the next 35+ years until we catch up. I don’t see anything improving any time soon, with Taco Wind or without Taco Wind. What I see now is planned obsolescence, we are becoming increasingly irrelevant. One small example, speed trains, where are they in the US?
Another update – Subaru Rex is now offered (only in Japan) for the starting price of $13K USD. It is a hybrid car and it is a crossover. Given, taxing may price it at around $20K, but that’s still less than $50K. Why we don’t have Subaru Rex sold in the US? I truly don’t know. It is targeted at “emerging Asia markets” and I have no idea why, say, Delaware cannot rebadge itself as “emerging Asia market” and pretend we are.
The reason car ECU systems are so convoluted and complicated in todays world is emission control. With the ever tightening limits, the profits go out the windows and the temptation to doctor your emission reports becomes more and more palatable for the manufacturers. If cars could spew out the same soup they did back in 1950, cars like the 2cv and Beetle would still be made. All i care about is getting to work and back home, in sun, rain, sleet and snow, with a fuel consumption less than 10l/100 km driven. Alas, with the modern EV insanity, affordable cars will become a thing of the past.
Good points, and it does rewind the history of the not-so-bad gas guzzling engines (Ford Cleveland V-8 yes, a relative of mine just restored one, inside 1972 Ford Ranchero, it is a truck-grade engine, and Ranchero in general supposed to be good enough to tow a small boat or a large mobile home) that were nearly destroyed by the regulations.
Having said that, corporations have the moneys to invest into what is being asked of them. If they don’t do that, someone else will make it happen, on smaller budget, etc (Preston Tucker, etc).
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.
RE: Air-cooled engines were a trade-off, so that the bulky coolant pipes are not needed. Hence, the lower power, too, lest one likes the heat runaway process whilst driving up a modest hill.
One of the weirdest contraptions I’ve seen were Chevy Corvairs, the engine is at the bottom of the trunk, and they screwed up not only the center of gravity, but air cooling vents. It may have worked in VW Beetles, since they are humble, and the size of the engine (and average speeds designed for) were coming together (more-or-less) nicely (of course, they had their own unpleasant quirks, so did 2CVs with horizontal coil springs suspension), but was set for disappointment with larger engine, THOUGH, I give Chevy engineers due credit for making the engine mostly flat, trying to lower the center of gravity as much as possible.
I agree with the standardized/interchangeable parts – it is no longer a financial decision to make, pretty much all of the major mechanical parts can be made perfectly uniform, and given to the gazillion independent makers to streamline/improve (obviously, with proper certification by the engineers). I see no sane/odd reason NOT to make parts uniform among many makers, since we are down to only 2 1/2 car makers in the US (and I bet all 2 1/2 by now are commanded by the same investment maafia/group/whatever). I also see no reason not to establish a proper international body overviewing the conformity – if IMF can shutdown entire economies for tiny non-compliance with their “ideal economic model”, then it is just a matter of technicalities/details, and nothing else. After all, pretty much all cars on the road today (that I see) are of three (or four) types, sedan, truck, compact, luxury, and it is getting harder to tell Toyota from Jaguar from Kia, so why not. Let’s just make all parts, doors, windshields, uniform, with a dozen or two varieties, and be over with.
Something like that.
“vintage VWs famously could not go up a hill.” That’s not strictly true. In the early 1980s I drove my Beetle up a substantial unpaved (grass) hill covered with snow with a layer of ice on top. It was quite peppy and went up the hill diagonally with the rear point at about 8:30 and the from pointed at about 2:30. Real paved hills were also not a problem.
“pointed” & “front”. Sorry about that Chief. Missed it by that much. In this context, would an Edit button kill you, HaD?
In 1945 the lowest powered VW beetle was only 25 HP and truly could not maintain highway speeds up even moderately steep hills.
Very few VW enthusiasts are daily driving WWII era bugs.
The 1928 Chevrolet Series AB national was last model before chevrolet phased out 4 cylinder engines for a few decades. It weighed 2,435 pounds and had a 35hp motor. ~70#/hp
The VW Beetle was first imported to the US in 1949, with only two sold that year. Those weighed in at 1,600 pounds with a 25hp 1193cc engine. ~64#/hp
Annual sales grew significantly breaking 100,000 by 1958. The Beetle achieved its peak sales year in1968 with 423,008 vehicles sold in the US. By that point they were ~1808# and were equipped with a 44hp 1493cc engine. 41#/hp
The 2011 New Beetle (which is basically a stylized beetle replica on a Jetta chassis) weighed in at 2,983 lbs with a 150hp (nonturbo) 2.5L engine. 19.88#/hp
I drove a 69 beetle in colorado during the early 90s. I cant deny it struggled going up to Estes Park, but so did the 91 escort I drove there a decade later. There were plenty of other mountain roads that both cars ate without a problem.
Good details filling in the information gaps rather nicely, thank you for sharing these with us.
Do I know you?
Did you escape before the cops showed up, because the tow trucks got their first?
West misery midnight ‘suicide hill’ climb?
About six of us…IIRC
Good times.
There really needs to be a better source to finding/making 3d models of all those plastic bits from old cars, so that people can get them 3d printed. There is no reason to have to live with broken rotting ugly plastic bits in old cars anymore. It is cheap and easy to recreate these parts and even make them better than original to keep these engineering masterpieces on the road and looking nice!
I’ve been making a few for old Chrysler products. Not fully open source, but the STL files for the repop parts are free for non commercial use.
Funny how the Mercedes fans blame Chrysler for things going downhill and the Chrysler fans blame Mercedes.
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.
I second diesel, turbo or not.
I know a retired car mechanic who buys busted engine cars and transplants diesels. He is well pass 80s, and his previous car (that fell apart due to corrosion) was 1980s Volvo station wagon with a diesel he put in some time early 1990s – that car finally gave up in 2020 – that’s almost 40 years of service with the heart implant. Oh, he drives VW diesel (one of those that were deemed “faking the test” TDIs thingies that were actually quite well built – according to him, it will not only outlast him, but will be passed to his grandkids and continue running).
BTW, same dude was one of the first people telling me the story of the Detroit Diesel that was destroyed by the horrible management, and nothing else. He said if GM would restart making same diesels, improved and upgraded, it will sell out like pancakes, they were THAT reliable.
Having replaced one of those stupid oil cooler housing on a ’13 Passat… No, they still have me convinced Rube Goldberg is their patron saint. Some of the repairs I’ve had to do on that car have made me wonder if an older Bug breakd down twice as much but takes half as long to fix, would it be a better daily?
When I was young, foreign car parts were too pricey, if you could even get them. Great article, it should have ended with “Now get off my lawn.”
Amen! Poring one out for my metallic blue 1979 Mercedes 230E (RIP, my own youthful fault), and I will give my 1999 Toyota 4Runner a pat today (240k miles and still going). I’m not much of a wrencher, but I sure appreciate reliability.
THIS.
Spoken as someone who owned a Honda where you had to remove the hood latch assembly to change the #2 spark plug.
Never buy a V6 Honda.
They make great 4 bangers, stick to their core competency.
The problem is MBAs stuffing bigger engines into chassis never built for them, spans all car companies.
First seen (by me), pony cars/big blocks in the 1960s.
That was less MBA, more ‘good reasons’.
Have to nod at the post war 2 seat Brit car with a normally asperated 24 liter Merlin v12, but it never came with crappy little engine and IIRC was a kit car.
Looking at you, the V6 engine shoehorned into the Holden/Opel Vectra.
What an expletive inducing piece of [censored] for engine bay work……
My brother had one for a short while and literally couldn’t find a mechanic in the local area who would work on it. All flatly refused when they were told what it was.
Just doing something as simple as replacing the top radiator hose was enough to realise why.
That’s a ‘motor out’ procedure.
The upside of that kind of car, you get real good at pulling the motor.
Which isn’t really that bad, second and later times.
All the stuck and broken bolts got fixed first time, you know all the tricks already.
Of course it has to be a good car to be worth the effort.
“The identical badge-enginee[re]d Buick Skyhawk, Chevy Monza, Pontiac Sunbird, and Olds Starfire of the ’75-’80 model years”
https://community.cartalk.com/t/1970s-urban-legends-cars-that-required-engine-removal-to-replace-spark-plugs/72015/2
LOL, we bought our first EV 6 months ago and I never want to use internal combustion again. Maybe it’s the smooth, quiet, and probably excessive performance, maybe it’s being able to run climate control while it’s in my garage without filling the space with carbon-monoxide, maybe it’s fulfilling a long-term dream of this electrical engineer, maybe it’s the 40 years of oil changes and handling gasoline (including leaded for the first cars I wrenched on and drove) but whatever it is I do not miss the sounds, the feel, or the smells of using fire for transportation.
I do wish there were simpler EVs, and I’m glad mine doesn’t pretend to know how to drive down the road without me. I am hoping to put a couple hundred thousand miles on the EV like we have for our gas-powered family haulers. Early data on batteries and drivetrains suggest that’s not unrealistic for those components. Time will tell if the auxiliary stuff (infotainment, safety sensors and systems, motorized windows/doors/hatches) will last alongside.
I’ll miss the sound of a thumping V8.
The kind of car that shakes so hard it literally gives you wood at idle.
Really shouldn’t be driven on the street.
But Karnak sees the future:
Kids will make their e-cars produce ‘volume accurate’ 1990 20k RPM F1 car sounds and almost volume accurate top fuel car sounds.
Engine noise at full volume with cut range by 3/4.
Obnoxious kids will make their cars play EDM, those kids should be kicked in the crotch.
Good luck w your 200k+ mile battery pack plan.
Avoid rapid charging and deep cycling.
I’ve never had a complaint about vibration or noise from pillions on my motorcycle – a v-twin Moto Guzzi
The future is electric, no doubt about that. But there’ll always be space for some old-timey engines.
Preferably 4-5K RPM in third, going up a hill with throttle wide open.
Come -30F and you have to go on a 220 mile trip through the wilds, you will curse your EV while you slowly succumb to hypothermia. EV´s are nice toys for people that just as well could bike or use public transports in warm climates, where its cold with long distances involved, they are useless.
Clearly you have never used an EV as a daily.
I live in a place where -30F is a common occurrence 3 months per year and my EV gets me to and from work in-town as easily as doing the 250km ride to the metropolis close by, at regular highway speeds and with heat and windows defrosted.
Of course, I have to charge before coming back, but my previous hybrid also needed a refill for that trip.
You ask of EVs capabilities that normal gas cars do not have, no wonder they never will be good enough for you.
“this number often extended to a million miles, a number absolutely unheard of for modern vehicles.”
What are you people doing to modern cars? I mean, look, OK, “a million” is a hell of a lot, and realistically an exaggeration by the author. I mean, cars that have reached a million miles are kindof “a thing,” with car manufacturers doing silly things like parades or giving the owner a new car when they reached it (and that’s been true for decades, not just recently). So saying “often” is a stretch. But a good fraction of a million is totally fine if you can avoid rust, and that’s a tractable problem.
A lot of the problem isn’t the actual reliability of the car, it’s the repairability of it, and I am constantly amazed at how ungodly insane some manufacturers are. Even simple things like “why do you have 18 different fasteners rather than just like, 3-4 bolt sizes,” but better is when the engine compartment is designed for serviceability so you don’t have to like, take the thing half apart to change things that by design are going to need to be cleaned.
All of those things just add up to making a car unaffordable to maintain because shop prices are going to be nuts, and money does everything.
The car companies customers are the new car buyers.
They want to control the average time those chumps keep the cars, but that’s largely an ego driven schedule.
The second chumps are the ones being a problem.
Refusing to pay the % required for the ‘first chump pays too much, second chumps pays shop too much’ business model to continue rolling.
Which is largely down to the cars being worth parts breakup value (deducting value of currently broken pars) by the time the second owners are ‘done with this insanity’.
Even Honda.
They don’t run cylinder liners in their new aluminum block engines.
That was a bad idea when GM tried it in the 70s.
When Porsche tried it in the 80s.
And when everybody did it in the 10s.
Honda did it starting in 14, research models or stay earlier.
250k mile average engine life was a PROBLEM for car manufacturers, problem solved!
On the upside, newer Jatco CVTs are better.
You can expect 60-80k mile life, if you never use any power.
Will make it out of warranty, the only thing that matters.
The free second transmission was killing them.
As a German™, I’d like to mention the “Ente” (engl. “Duck”, Citroën 2CV, France) and the “Trabi” (Trabant, E-Germany), too! :D
Both were, err, outstanding cars of their time, too.
The Slate looks promising. Honestly, I wish it was available with an ice, diesel, or diesel hybrid powertrain. the least interesting thing about the concept is that its electric. Of course, it’d still cost nearly 10 times as much as I’ve ever spent on a vehicle.
My first car, bought after graduate school, was a Saturn SL sedan. Not an SL1, which was a required upgrade if you wanted the air conditioning option or you wanted an automatic transmission.
Living in Canada, the two options we did get were a dealer-installed block heater and, get this, an optional passenger-side mirror.
The inline 4 had liters of empty space around it that made most service pretty reasonable (not that I ever did any myself).
Modern cars are, generally speaking, safer, more powerful, more efficient, more affordable, and require less maintenance. Serviceability is not that important to most consumers, and these sorts of articles seem to be aimed at a part of the population who enjoys wrenching the car more than actually using it to get to places.
I cant argue with you about safer or more efficient. But I disagree about the maintenance and affordability bit.
Older cars only require more maintenance if they are poorly cared for. When I bought my 1970 Nova I did a full body off restoration. Its been 22 years since I did the restoration. In total, excluding labor, Ive got $18k in my car. FAR below most new cars.
I do an oil change every 3-6 months depending on how much Ive driven. I change my brake pads every 3-5 years. I drain and replace my transmission fluid, and change my fuel filter whenever I do the brakes. Other than a windshield replacement due to a rock truck ahead of me on the highway, Ive had no breakdowns or repairs, just a couple of decades of routinely scheduled maintenance.
I dont mind wrenching but its certainly not my goal or hobby. I appreciate that if anything does go wrong with my car it will be something I can manage to repair on my own.
You’ve obviously never owned a Tarpan Honker.
i have to disagree, the beetle needed an oil change every 1500 miles, transmission oil change every 12 000 miles, engine oil strainer cleaned up every 6000 miles. The amount i drive, id have to change the engine oil on the beetle every 5 weeks, tranny oil every 11 months and oil strainer every 5 months. Not to mention all the myriads of knicknacks you gotta grease oil and tighten on a beetle. Even after all that, it would rust away after one winter driving in the salt slop on the roads in my neck of the woods, unless i took extreme precautions and drowned the car body regularly with some suitable tar/oil/wax concotion. So by all means, for their era the bug and 2cv were quite nice, but goddamn it, id slit my wrists after a year daily driving one in todays world.
Yeah my experience driving a VW Bug in High school was quite different. Mine had the spin on oil filter conversion that pretty much every beetle owner I knew used to double or more the time between oil changes. With that simple modification the sump screen becomes a redundant system thats good to check if your already there.
Your transmission oil changes were far more frequent than the 30K miles most beetle enthusiast sites recommend, which is 20K already 20K less than original factory recommendations.
Salted roads are cruel to cars, no doubt. Old cars that are still relying on OLD coatings are going to suffer sure. Half measures get half the result. My nova got a polyurea undercoating that will beat any new cars factory undercoating.
So by all means, for their era the bug and 2cv were basic simple cars (wouldnt call them quite nice). But even with the aggressive maintenance schedule youve cited, Youre talking about 30 mins for an oil change, an extra 15 minutes if you need to check the sump screen (which you really should only have to do if youve other issues or havent added a proper oil filter kit) and around an hour for the transmission oil. Suicide threats are a bit dramatic for such minimal concerns.
30 minutes for an oil change?
That’s a slow motor swap, on a baja w useless sheet metal delete.
There were contests…you were allowed to have the clutch setup before hand.
I bet my old ass could still go under an hour, single handed.
Maybe an hour and a half, to allow for beer drinking and lie telling.
owned a 240D and a 300D in the 80s. Lost them both in accidents :-(. And they could run with Jetfuel, drained for maintenance out of aircraft!!!
I see this sort of opinion all the time on car forums – while it’s true design priorities have changed, I would refer you back to Hackaday’s own article on the myth of planned obsolescence (https://hackaday.com/2018/09/24/planned-obsolescence-isnt-a-thing-but-its-your-fault/).
If you bought an original beetle the ease of repair was a positive because you’d always be repairing something – that’s how cars were in the old days. On any given weekend your dad would be adjusting points, changing spark plugs, checking oil, etc. etc. and if you were going on a long trip you’d better be sure you checked everything twice and packed a toolkit & spares before setting off. Many odometers didn’t even have a 6th digit back then.
Modern cars, for all their cost-reduced corner cutting, gimmicky complexity and increasing enshittification are at their core orders of magnitude more reliable, cleaner, safer, more comfortable and let’s not forget cheaper than their ancestors. Yes a VW id.Buzz is overpriced but they’re now a luxury brand with the associated markup – a modern Dacia is closer to where VW were back then and those are great value.
Manufacturers give the car buying public what they want – and the general public are not hackers, they are busy and don’t care about the technical details, they just want a comfortable reliable cheap box that gets them and their snotty kids from A to B and has enough touchscreens and gimmicks to be able to feel superior to you and your low-tech shitbox.
Well, yes and no. It’s not about technology so much, but about the product philosophy/the concept.
Early cars could be fixed with conventional parts or by improvising.
In an emergency, you could get the car going.
If you had a girlfriend on board, her nylon stockings could be used as a replacement belt (on an old car such as VW Beetle). ;)
Modern cars from ca. 1970s onwards are being intentionally made proprietary,
requiring special tools and parts that won’t work with cars of other manufacturers.
By 1980s, on-board computers had been introduced.
Nowadays, a car is a moving computer really.
The system is closed and locked (except being very open for wireless attacks).
Anyway, I’m not a car fan. I prefer using a bicycle.
PS: In the hands of the right people, modern cars could be made modular and “open hardware” just fine.
The computer part could be enclosed in a water-proof box, for example, so it would survive if the car was being driven in a lake or something.
Again, the modern technology isn’t the main problem, but the implementation of it.
Let’s just look at PCs. They used to be serious office machines in a steel case and now they’re just cheesy, weak toys.
In principle, even modern cars could be made more robust and more serious again, like an original Jeep or a military vehicle.
According to the legend. I suspect that the engine would chew up the stockings immediately, because to make the belt you have to make a knot, and that knot will not pass the pulleys easily.
Never did this, i suspect. Knot was so small it fit inside the pulley. Hopefully your gal was long legged so you got two full passes around the pulleys
Oh and if you didn’t have a spare belt, you deserved to get stuck
Piotrsko: The spare is the old one.
If you have one, you will not need it.
Same as hoses.
Never had to. On other devices where I’ve had to make ersatz belts out of random materials, they never lasted more than a minute.
It’s not that the knot is large, but every time it hits the pulley it slips and that wears it down, and after few thousand revolutions it chafes into bits and the makeshift belt comes apart.
The nylon had to be twisted, as far as far understand.
And I read it only worked in old cars, such as the VW Beetle..
As a recent purchaser of an id.buzz, I guess by definition I disagree about it being overpriced. Not that I wouldn’t want it to be cheaper but we did put our money down. VW’s done a terrible job marketing it – focusing on the outside – when it’s the inside where it really shines. The height (taken from the Type 2) allows a cavernous interior which makes for a very pleasant space, especially when compared to the Pacifica or Sienna. It costs roughly $20k more than those but depending on your electricity costs some of that comes back in savings. I’m able to get night time electricity at $0.07/kWh, and that makes my fuel/mile under $0.03. Sienna hybrid at 35 mpg would be about $0.086, so lots of variables but I’ll save ~$6k in fuel costs (more if compared to Pacifica) per 100k miles when charged at home. The remainder of the premium gets us the comfy ride and all the usual EV benefits. Of course we’re placing a bet here – will it be reliable over the next 10 years and 200k miles? Our last 3 family vehicles (minivan, big SUV, crossover, all ICE) were each driven over roughly that duration – we’re not update every 2 or 3 year people – so resale value isn’t a concern. This isn’t an investment but a big expense.
Not really on reliable or comfortable IMO, as there are some very comfortable old cars that ride way better than most modern ones, with decently padded but simpler shaped more universal seats so when you are a giant they are about as comfortable as for the midget or regular sized folk (unlike modern cars where the ‘adjustable’ seat is frequently not adjustable enough for me anyway).
And reliable covers a wide range of things, but ultimately the older car (at least up to a point) is reliably doing everything it should as long as you do that little bit of simple and easy maintenance often enough, and when it really goes wrong anyway is usually a cheap and quick fix. Where modern cars have a tendency to do bull crap like OTA updates that break features, or just go wonky electrically and do things like stop working entirely because a sensor is dirty or drain the battery fast (Ford Vans are apparently very good at that for instance, and also hide the battery under the drivers seat in a way that is remarkably annoying to get at). So while the time between services is usually longer the cost of replacing any of the wear parts is often crazy as the design is awful and the parts more bespoke so they can charge you whatever they like…
So total cost of ownership over more than that first year or two starts leaning in favour of the older car even though you have to look after it a little more often, and the ready to work uptime on the old car is likely better after that first few years too (if you assume the owner does look after it) – eventually you’ll need something like a clutch replacement on both, on the old car whatever it is will be probably an hour or two to do the job, and less if you have a real workshop, the new car often requires darn nearly dissembling and really can’t be done at all outside of a workshop at all.
Safer, at least once you go back to the 70’s maybe 80’s is however certainly true of the modern car, and cleaner is probably true as all the engine management systems on a modern car should keep it burning right all the time, where the old car before that computer or with a less capable computer might be pretty darn clean most of the time, but likely not always – however much more likely to actually work properly all the times its that bit off even though its not perfectly tuned as it will keep on trucking rather than brick itself or go into limp home over a sensor failure…
Except for the 400-800 Volt elephant in the room, which you’re not allowed to touch without proper training and certifications. Repairs on the things that make electric vehicles go can go very wrong very easily in the hands of people who don’t know what they’re doing.
And even if you do have the training and certifications per se, you still need some officially recognized authority to confirm that the repairs have been done according to manufacturer specs in order to get the car insured and passed by MOT.
The MOT rules can be rather strict. If the manufacturer says a 1 cm dent in the bottom pan covering the battery is “out of spec”, that’s a fail. Then, to get the bottom plate replaced, the manufacturer demands you to change the entire battery and they won’t certify anything else. That has lead to people having $20-50k repair bills from driving over a rock.
There’s all sorts of ways EVs can and have already become another John Deere situation.
Thats why you shouldnt by an EV from a company that doesnt give a full 10 year warranty on their product.
No warranty covers road hazards.
That’s what insurance is for.
To protect the finance companies bottom line.
Driver’s bill though.
To be fair, you can get substantially more than a $20k repair bill by driving an IC engine car ‘over a rock’.
Even a little rock.
New car, cracks the oil pan and you’re ‘average driving skill’ (read ‘moron’).
Frankly the MOT sound like a bunch of bitches.
Move.
Worse than the the CA state ref…
Who sucks big wet donkey balls.
Because he loves the flavor when he finds a nice boil, ready to pop.
And while insurance may pay for the battery swap, it won’t re-certify damaged and repaired battery modules, so the cost of repairs remains high and your insurance payments will reflect that.
And after 10 years?
What a world where we can’t pass repairs with the MOT for cars over the age of the manufacturer warranty. That would make the resale value of your car essentially zero, while now a ten year old car is still worth a good bit.
so glad we dont have to deal with this MOT stuff in the states. As long as you can pass emissions, and meet basic safety requirements (proper lighting, tire tread depth, etc) you can keep pretty much anything on the road FOREVER. In fact, old cars can be even easier to keep on the road as in many states, even california, they become exempt from emissions testing beyond a certain age.
If you were to pull your EV battery, repair/recondition it, there isnt an inspection/certification process in place to disqualify you from registration. DIY EV conversions only get a basic safety inspection in most states before being certified as emission free and exempt from further testing requirements.
That said, there are certainly more junker cars on our roads than yours, but its not an issue many people find concern/offense with.
Now I want an old battery pack…
‘Fun and games with an old EV battery pack’ would be a good hackaday article.
That they certainly won’t do.
My wife drives a 1989 Buick Park Avenue 100 miles daily to work. We purchased the car in 2011 and she has put 200k miles on it. We just keep maintaining it, fixing stuff, and it keeps giving back. They might have been considered old people cars, but they were some of the best engineered cars GM ever built. I suspect no vehicle made today will still be daily drivered 36 years from now.
Those engines are legends.
Go 200k miles with sand in the valve cover.
GM’s mistake, they won’t do that again.
But they know how.
I’ve been a VW owner / driver / amateur tech for 30 years now. It’s not ideal, but I’m OK with “Step 1” (AKA “Remove front bumper and fascia”) being a part of all repairs. What drives me slightly closer (but not entirely) to murderous intent is that every single piece of electronics is now “protected” (from theft, you’re supposed to think) by “component protection”. That is, every one of the 40 or so computers that make modern VWs and Audis do ANYTHING is software-locked such that you cannot simply replace it with a used part.
Instead, you must use a dealer, who will steer you toward or arbitrarily require that you use a new part from which they’ll profit. They’ll profit further by charging you to pair this part with your car, which is something only they can do since “component protection” safeguards you from theft of vehicle components that are NEVER stolen by requiring VW to cryptographically sign off on the pairing of, say, an HVAC control module or a sunroof control module to the other computers in your car.
Here on Hack-a-Day, we waste a lot of time talking about Apple’s walled garden, where there’s actual security benefit to pissing you off.
While we were focused on the trees, here’s the forest we no find ourselves in. It’s not just John Deere and $250K tractors any more. It’s everything you imagine owning, so long as it requires power and can incorporate an I/O port. Good luck if your car’s comfort control module fails… That’ll be $1500 for the part, $1000 for pairing it, and oh, it contains the immobilizer, so that’ll be another $600 per key being reprogrammed.
It’s a far cry from going to a junk yard and picking up a replacement for $100, which was the norm a couple decades ago. But hey, while our $40K cars are immobile due to DRM, at least we’ll have more time to sit around complaining about the repairability of $800 phones that we replace every 36 months whether needed or not.