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Comment by alfor | Hacker News Reader

They talk about ’reusing’ car up to 10 years!

In Canada Toyota car are used for about 20 years without the manufacturer involvement.

There is very few thing to ’fix’ of a less than 10y Toyota in a climate without salt on the road.

Yeah I had a good laugh at that too. I don't even look at cars less than 10 years old when I shop for a "new" car. Let someone else take the depreciation hit and find all the lemons. I'll pick up a survivor for a tenth of what the car cost when new.

This is my strategy now too, but I add another decade. That gives me a car with less stuff that can break.

I wondered if they were talking about battery powered/electric vehicles, and just forgot to mention that part? But it is a bit weird. My Toyota Corolla is 8 years old and runs perfectly without having been "remanufactured" once, and my experience is by no means unusual (from Toyota, anyway).

A few things I can think of:

- Suspension rebuild. The car will function with old suspension but the ride quality will be poor.

- Servicing of engine internals. A car would be down on power significantly after 10 years of wear and can be restored by adjust valve clearances, replacing seals and piston rings, cleaning parts, etc.

- Replacement of hybrid/EV battery. This is already something owners of old Priuses do to restore their cars' range.

- Repair of damaged interiors, especially seat bolstering. Also deep cleaning and ozone treatment.

- Repainting, especially if the car was stored outdoors where UV light wore the paint

- Hardware and software updates for the infotainment system

>Servicing of engine internals. A car would be down on power significantly after 10 years of wear and can be restored by adjust valve clearances, replacing seals and piston rings, cleaning parts, etc.

This has been functionally debunked by hundreds and hundreds of YouTube videos by dozens of channels who buy bangers and put them on a dyno.

At 10 years, usually only 3-5% power reduction. 20 years? More like 5-6%.

I'm not talking about spring chickens which were babied by retirees, either. I'm talking cars that clearly have had a hard life with tons of deferred maintenance.

Do all of these and you are going to lose money on that operation.

Suspension is a few hundred plus labor. Prius battery replacement is $1500 plus labor. Paint can be done efficiently at scale in a factory.

Ship the car overseas for the work and labor costs could be quite low.

We regularly salt our roads in winter in the UK even if it's not as cold as Canada.

Salting of roads is only done a very narrow band of environments, the UK sitting in the middle of it. If it’s too cold, only a couple of degrees lower than a UK winter, then the salted melt water will re-freeze into deadly black ice. I believe the UK is fairly unique in how much we salt roads, most other countries will grit roads but not salt them.

Salting is useless if it gets too cold. So it’s only done at max -7C or so (if memory serves right). Here in Finland the southern parts are a salth bath. But the colder northern parts are not salted, and that shows in the average rust levels of cars.

Wait until they make the eventual switch to liquid magnesium chloride. Amazing for roads and ice. Pretty awful for rust.

Here in Seattle the DOT is proud to salt the roads, in spite of the damage it causes to plants, cars and the dirty runoff it generates.

Considering we didn't let a current mayor make it to the runoffs over his mishandling of snowmageddon a decade ago, I don't think SDOT will be considering modern salt alternatives anytime soon.

It is kinda odd, in snowier rural Oregon they just used red rock cinders to deliver snow and ice traction effectively. But salt seems to be a lower effort solution?

https://www.theurbanist.org/2019/02/06/seattles-salt-addicti...

Without a sufficient number of snow plows, they can't keep the snow on roads down to an acceptable amount, so just adding traction elements doesn't help. They never even plowed the almost-arterial near my house, let alone my actual road. At least with salt it will keep the snow softer and more likely to be pushed away by traffic.

And that mushy mass won’t freeze, unless it’s -13c or colder

Different use cases.

Salt works great when it’s re-freezing back and forth multiple times a day. Stone chips are great when it freezes once and stays for a long time.

We salt them in Canada too.

Cars take a bit of a beating here in the UK, we salt the heck out of our roads, you’re never more than 100 miles from the sea and it rains all the time. I just scrapped a 14 year old A4 as it had got to the point where so much was rusting away it simply wasn’t worth it. I don’t know anyone with a far older than 15 years.

I live on an island in eastern Canada. Never for than 10 miles from the ocean and they salt the heck out of the roads here too. I’ve never had a car go because of rust. Or even get close to that point. And my current car is the first one I’ve ever owned that is less than 10 years old.

They are talking about fleet vehicles too, which typically get way more usage then a personal vehicle.

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