Average age of a car in the US is more than 13 years

Eventually, you get a trickle down effect with EVs as well. They can last quite long and the new ones are gradually getting cheaper. At some point the cumulative maintenance cost and fuel cost start canceling the benefits of hanging on to your old ICE car. There will be plenty of relatively good ones to swap it with for a while as people abandon their ICE cars with more affordable EVs. So the good news, there's going to some supply of relatively new but cheap ICE cars for some time to come. The better news is that at some point those will be competing with old EVs and the EVs will be the more economical option and you'll have the option to do both.

However, a lot of people with older cars don't have the option to spend on the more economical car though. Old cars are cheap to buy but not to drive. They need repairs, burn more fuel, and can break down on you. It's a form of poverty when that is all you can afford.

In the same way people own fridges or washing machines that are cheap but inefficient and cost them a fortune in energy cost. The fancy energy efficient models would save them money. But it requires having the cash on hand to buy one. Also people are bad at math.

It seems every new car out there is a smart, electrified out the wahzoo abomination that needs regular updates. I work enough in software to know I want as little software as possible in my vehicle.

I had a similar debate about the 'wastefulness' of upgrading phones each year. As long as previous phone is going to someone else, was any more waste necessarily created?

I feel like I must be missing something, because of how prevalent such arguments are.

Recycling a X year ICE means ~26 - X year of pollution savings, but you also get ~X years of normal EV usage. Aka your not paying the full cost of an EV just for a few years of savings, your paying a fraction of an EV for that fraction in savings.

Assuming the best case of say high mileage and 100% wind/solar power the savings could be quite significant.

You can't build your way out of congestion, and you can't buy your way out of car pollution.

But mostly, I agree, and think the cutoff is somewhere around 25 mpg. Our first priorities should not junking 13 year old 30 mpg ICE, but instead greatly reducing the number of 17 mpg vehicles that are still being sold today, especially with no commercial utility like a 4runner.

The problem with "simple" is that everyone uses a different definition and there's a dramatic asymmetry in how people treat missing vs extraneous features. You probably won't reject a vehicle for having Bluetooth, but many people won't buy a car without it for example. A simple car also won't convert someone who wants a truck, nor will it convert the person who wants to fix it in his garage with only a wrench set because it still has to comply with safety and efficiency regs that require electronics.

Another issue is that you're not actually paying the full development cost of your vehicle. Development costs are amortized over multiple trims, models, platforms, and even manufacturers. It's likely that a "simpler" vehicle would wind up costing more due to more custom development and fewer economies of scale.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35919133

1) those electronics don’t age well.

2) my smartphone already does all of the things I could possibly want a touch panel to do and I’m already familiar with it.

3) why does my car need software updates? At most, it’s a peripheral.

4) just give me nice unique knobs and buttons for critical things like environmental controls, signals, wipers etc. I don’t ever want to look/tap/swipe/etc to do these things.

5) shiny things I can’t easily move/remove in my field of vision are horrible while driving.

Youll see 20 or 30 year old crown vics. I dont think youll see any turbo charged 2023 Tauruses in 20 years.

You might have to replace the frame every few decades as it rusts, but that is possible with body-on-frame construction. They're also simple enough to be maintainable and repairable until their ECUs croak - maybe even then, with something like speeduino.

If you want, you can still pick up a cheap one from a dry, warm area and make your own car of Theseus. It's not cheaper than running a new car after the initial purchase price, of course.

[1] https://www.cars.com/articles/how-much-do-electric-car-batte...

If people are replacing internal combustion vehicles with EVs then that will push the average age of ICEs up and the average age of EVs down for reasons that have to do with arithmetic, not product reliability.

Which is to say, who needs to buy a new EV? Refurbish your old one by changing the battery once a decade, and once in a while your suspension will need replaced.

No it won't. Some will, but most won't. EV's have been around long enough to have longevity data, and a 200,000 mile batteries are averaging well over 80% capacity. (Unless you have a Leaf).