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Comment by danielh | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone believe a modern Benz will be able to drive for 1,000,000 miles the way old ones regularly would? I don’t.

I think this has to do with the advances in material sciences and engineering. My theory is that parts in old cars were massively overengineered because the variation in quality was so high. If you wanted most of your cars to last 100,000 miles, you had to construct a car to last 1,000,000 miles. Nowadays, you can probably get away with constructing a car to last 200,000 miles.

Can someone with the right background comment on this train of thoughts?

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The problem is more one of cost and efficiency. You can still run your care for 100k of miles (the 1M miles is fiction, imho). But when e.g. the engine is broken, you don't fix it anymore but replace it wholesale. Less hassle, guaranty on the new part by the manufacture and generally cheaper: The old engine gets sent to the manufacturer for refurbishment by people only doing this (and hence more efficient than your run-of-the-mill mechanic).

Furthermore you can't fix a car do-it-yourself-style anymore because these things have become way more complex. So running a car _way_ past it's economically sensible lifetime (if you'd factor in the labour cost) is simply no longer possible.

And even old cars totally overengineered do fail all the time (my brother has a bunch of them). But since it's usually just for leisure, labour cost doesn't count. And because the parts are simpler it can usually be fixed.

So I'd blame this on the massively increased labour cost/car cost ratio. Go to a country with really cheap labour and it all works like it did here half a century ago.

You bring up an interesting factor I didn't really take into account. It probably makes no economic sense to run a car for 1M miles considering the high costs of labour. The question is whether it is possible to run a modern car for so long with somewhat reasonable maintenance, or if it will die with a fatal engine failure.

We will see in about 15 years, whether the modern taxis of today still serve as taxi in lesser developed countries.

Fun anecdote: I recently sat in an old BMW taxi (I guess early 80s). The mileage indicator showed about 50,000 km, which is way to little for any taxi. The indicator had 6 digits. My guess is that it reached 999,999 km, overflowed and started again at 0.

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