Answer: the market is captured, and controlled via government regulation, by corporations that do not see individual owners wrenching on their cars as advantageous.
Follow-up: how do we restore capitalism to our (nominally) free market?
As somebody who drives an ancient car, I'm keenly aware of its lack of safety features. The "american steel" argument falls flat; my car was made before the concept of crumple zones, much less airbags -- driving this boat, I'd be seriously injured or die in a head-on collison with a Yaris, where the other driver and passengers would probably walk away. Unless my gas tank explodes and engulfs us all, that is.
If everybody was driving pre-1984 vehicles, the emissions would result in horrible smog, bringing most cities on par with Beijing.
The world must bring carbon emissions down to prevent severe climate change. Maybe lax safety standards could contribute to that; but environmental regulations must not go.
Follow up: the "free" market that you propose is not actually free, but ignorant of externalities that the modern market has limited facilities to account for.
Maybe you're rebutting my parent? Because I've never heard of a regulation towards drive-by-wire, so I suspect this particular aspect of automotive design is a result of a free market.
No pinion shaft required. No pinion shaft cutout through the firewall means the body can be made with less steel.
Belt-driven pumps are moving to electric-drive for efficiency, but when you're switching from hydraulic assist to motor-assist, making the whole thing 'by-wire' and motor driven reduces complexity.
Having hit a pothole recently, I've been driving with a bit of a lean... this could be extremely easy to fix in software, and I suspect that automatic recalibration would be pretty simple to implement. As it stands, I'm waiting for nice weather on a weekend in the Fall, and I'll probably end up at the mechanic.
And economy of scale doesn't just apply to LHD/RHD, but the parts necessary to implement drive-by-wire can be shared between makes and models -- a Fiat won't need as much torque to steer as a Peterbilt, but in theory a huge amount of that system could be shared. That can significantly reduce engineering costs as well.
But with drive-by-wire, we could simulate all kinds of scenarios in software and switch between them.
Because the folks that ask this type of question are few and far between, and rarely serious. Otherwise, at least one manufacturer would have brown diesel wagons with manual transmissions. ;-)
Maybe 1 in 1000 people wrench on their own car. Manufacturers don't cater to that. They design cars to be appealing to the other 999, and they design the mechanical bits to be as cheap as possible to assemble in a factory.
But not if the fixed regulatory overhead is equal to the margin on twenty thousand cars.
"Individuals have built cars out of parts in their own garage" doesn't really prove that the costs for producing a car isn't high. They're most certainly enthusiasts, and they could have plowed tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of parts/labor into it.
On the face of it I'm with you, but then when it came down to it I'd be thinking well hang on this actually doesn't seem as safe (or at least not as thoroughly tested to determine if it is) as these other mass-produced things, and wouldn't end up buying it.
If it was easy to make something as safe as a $modern_run_of_the_mill_family_car and that looked 'normal' (i.e. curvy, I suppose, not weird slabs of barely bent sheet metal) I think there'd be loads of Kickstarter campaigns 'basic'/'maintainable'/.. cars.
It's possible and even likely that we have rules which are unnecessary or not worth the cost for small production runs, but which apply to them anyway, because companies doing small production runs don't have lobbying clout and companies doing large production runs are amortizing the cost over hundreds of thousands of cars and don't want things to be easier for smaller competitors.
The product you want already exists, though - it is commonly referred to as the 70 series Land Cruiser. :)
Or maybe this is a market opportunity, and you should set up a manufacturing line for stripped down jeep-like vehicles.
Probably won’t be road legal, though, because they’re horrifically unsafe in a collision compared to modern cars.
Fixing broken cars became a cultural thing because cars really sucked and you had to waste a fair portion of your life fixing them. Things like emission regulation brought metrics and standards to the industry and resulted in better cars. The typical lifespan of a car is 2x what is was in the 80s (200k miles or 12 years).
This kind of hyperbole is exactly why we have the president we do.
It’s not hyperbole. Clean air is something we have because of regulatory action.
The 70 Series Land Cruiser was mentioned above.