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Comment by throwaway89848b | Hacker News Reader

That's the story, but it doesn't hold up in the general case. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21167942

My car (at 200,000+ miles at the time of the accident) was exactly such a case of "take care of it, and all will be well", which is why I was able to avoid dealing with the nightmare that is the auto industry today. (It's also why I still think of that one as "my car," while the others I own today do not.) Again, being well-aware of the worth of a car that is well taken care of by experiencing it firsthand and having spent some time looking for something that would allow me to replicate the previous 10+ years of car ownership, you're not really teaching me anything. Because at the end of the day, it comes down to the affordances offered to you by the market, and the market deals in junk.

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I don't know what you are expecting. A 200k mile car that lasted ten years before an accident is something I would consider as "well built".

How many miles do you drive each year? What kind of car did you expect to get, and how many miles+years would you expect it to operate at to be considered "well built".

You have misunderstood something. Yes, that car was worth the price. It is the benchmark against which I am measuring newer cars. "Cars today", which is what we are talking about, give an experience that is unlike that one. (Including the Chevy Bolt @ $14k that you mention in your other comment, which is more like a Walmart car than a Costco car, and nowhere close to the price point I mentioned or the cost/value ratio of the reference car.) That that car lasted 200k, and would have been on its way to last another 100k at least, underscores my point, not undermines it.

For the reason above, the question is not "What kind of car did you expect?" It's "What kind of car do you expect to get?" And the answer is, "Considering the opportunity we have had to make technological progress, I would expect that I should be able to find a car today that is at least as good as that one. I should definitely not expect to be disappointed to find that as a general rule what's available is so much worse."

> How many miles do you drive each year?

Maybe the OP bought it with 190k on the clock, but surely the answer is going to be close to 200k/10?

> My car (at 200,000+ miles at the time of the accident) was exactly such a case of "take care of it, and all will be well"

Bargain priced domestic-market cars in China have a reputation for needing major repairs within the first couple years of ownership.

We had vehicles like this in the US in the 70s -- it is possible to build vehicles very cheaply with the use of cheap materials. But today, even the cheapest cars in the US make extensive use of anticorrosive coatings, ultra-high-strength steel, and have extensive active and passive safety systems.

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