Actually a lot of cars are built to run for 500k now. The problem is that normal maintenance and repair to achieve it has gone through the roof. Its not a 150 dollar job to replace an alternator anymore. Its 800. Its a thousand dollars for a set of tires. Its 1500 bucks to replace suspension arms. The cost of maintenance if you pay someone else is astronomical and no one does their own work anymore.
We used to repair our own shit. Now we dont, and because we dont the car companies dont take self repair into account when designing these cars, making it even harder to repair, driving the cost of professional repair even higher and the likelihood of self repair even lower.
The cost of maintenance if you pay someone else is astronomical and no one does their own work anymore.
One of the problems with no one doing their own work anymore is that car maintenance is a skill that your father knew, and was taught to him by his father, but he didn't teach it to you.
I get that youtube etc. exists, but it's kind of hard to blame people born after 1990 for this considering that the education system spends more time on the holobunga than it does teaching kids practical skills that they would need to survive.
For example, I'm a car guy, but I have very limited mechanic knowledge. Most of what I know about cars consists of one semester of shop class in high school and some youtube videos on how engines work.
I might have a general idea of how a car works, but I can't accurately diagnose problems that my car has, and even if I could, I don't have the tools to do anything beyond something requiring a socket wrench. If something needs repairing inside my engine, I have to go to my mechanic, and while he's a great guy, he's also almost $200 an hour.
Up until last week I owned two cars, one of them a 90s Miata, and the other a German luxury sedan. The Miata is simple enough that even I can do some repairs on it with the assistance of youtube, but the sedan I basically wouldn't even bother touching. There was basically no room in the engine bay to reach your hand in, and basically every repair beyond an oil change required you to take the whole front of the car off to do anything. It was a nice car when it ran, but i do not miss paying to fix it. I just wish the deer that totaled it had done so about two weeks earlier before I had to pay $900 to replace the starter motor.
One huge problem with a lot of them is the latter. It's so common now to have to take half the car apart to do almost anything. I've done a lot of work on modern cars myself and the reality is in a lot of cases you better have a backup car. For an amateur willing to try you're going to be working on the car a week for something that might have taken an amateur half a day on an older car.
The electronics aren't necessarily an undoing like many think. Maybe it's foreign to someone older, but to someone who grew up on this stuff using a dongle and an app to help diagnose isn't the bad part. What then happens is the manufacturers put security in the way to make sure only their approved devices can even do that.
Guess she doesn't remember cash for clunkers.
Or how nearly every car is built to collapse at 100k miles. These arent the builds from the 70s-90s
Actually a lot of cars are built to run for 500k now. The problem is that normal maintenance and repair to achieve it has gone through the roof. Its not a 150 dollar job to replace an alternator anymore. Its 800. Its a thousand dollars for a set of tires. Its 1500 bucks to replace suspension arms. The cost of maintenance if you pay someone else is astronomical and no one does their own work anymore.
We used to repair our own shit. Now we dont, and because we dont the car companies dont take self repair into account when designing these cars, making it even harder to repair, driving the cost of professional repair even higher and the likelihood of self repair even lower.
One of the problems with no one doing their own work anymore is that car maintenance is a skill that your father knew, and was taught to him by his father, but he didn't teach it to you.
I get that youtube etc. exists, but it's kind of hard to blame people born after 1990 for this considering that the education system spends more time on the holobunga than it does teaching kids practical skills that they would need to survive.
For example, I'm a car guy, but I have very limited mechanic knowledge. Most of what I know about cars consists of one semester of shop class in high school and some youtube videos on how engines work.
I might have a general idea of how a car works, but I can't accurately diagnose problems that my car has, and even if I could, I don't have the tools to do anything beyond something requiring a socket wrench. If something needs repairing inside my engine, I have to go to my mechanic, and while he's a great guy, he's also almost $200 an hour.
Up until last week I owned two cars, one of them a 90s Miata, and the other a German luxury sedan. The Miata is simple enough that even I can do some repairs on it with the assistance of youtube, but the sedan I basically wouldn't even bother touching. There was basically no room in the engine bay to reach your hand in, and basically every repair beyond an oil change required you to take the whole front of the car off to do anything. It was a nice car when it ran, but i do not miss paying to fix it. I just wish the deer that totaled it had done so about two weeks earlier before I had to pay $900 to replace the starter motor.
One huge problem with a lot of them is the latter. It's so common now to have to take half the car apart to do almost anything. I've done a lot of work on modern cars myself and the reality is in a lot of cases you better have a backup car. For an amateur willing to try you're going to be working on the car a week for something that might have taken an amateur half a day on an older car.
The electronics aren't necessarily an undoing like many think. Maybe it's foreign to someone older, but to someone who grew up on this stuff using a dongle and an app to help diagnose isn't the bad part. What then happens is the manufacturers put security in the way to make sure only their approved devices can even do that.