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Comment by gjstein | Hacker News Reader

That really is a somewhat incredible statistic to me, not because it's surprising given my own empirical evidence, but because of all the things one does in/with a car for years at a time. My car has been driven across the country multiple times, survived fairly extreme cold and heat multiple times a year, and still it shows no signs of stopping. It's always been amazing to me how long cars last considering what most people put them through.

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People often complain that modern consumer goods don't last as long as they used to but that's certainly not true for cars. Modern cars last dramatically longer than cars from the 20th century. It's kind of amazing.

They can last longer but then die more abruptly, because they were designed with a more definite planned obsolescence and many people didn't bother to maintain them correctly before so the designers optimised for that. To make an extreme car analogy, it's like an engine that will last 200k miles with no oil changes but slowly destroys itself irreparably in doing so, instead of one that needs an oil change every 5k miles but will last 10-20x longer before only a mild overhaul with cheap replacement parts (mainly soft ones like seals) is necessary.

Any statistics to back this up? It would be incredibly difficult to in aggregate increase the average lifespan of cars dramatically and consistently while reducing the long tail of the lifetime. So this claim smells like a negativity bias / rosy retrospection.

Improvements in corrosion management, better machining, better materials, and competition from automakers providing longer and longer warranties has driven up the number of miles you can expect a new car to drive before encountering major problems. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/automobiles/as-cars-are-k...

...but when you do encounter major problems, they are definitely major.

That's the point I'm trying to make: new cars are lasting longer because they were designed with a more definite lifespan (and all the "improvements" can be seen as a way to make that lifespan more definite.) Parts being made to tighter tolerances means far less margin and variation. The "bathtub curve" is being made sharper at both ends.

And with how complicated they’ve become. Pretty much all for the sake of MPG. Although frankly I think we crossed a turning point with the trend towards turbos in everything. A more powerful v6 or v8 is going to be more durable on average than a smaller and more complicated engine trying to eak out performance.

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

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

The Ford Taurus went out of production in 2019, so surely you won’t see any 23 models now or twenty years from now.

Turbo charged cars typically don’t last long because turbo charging is a harsh process. That being said, I don’t think the Taurus was the kind of car that would be turbo charged.

Turbos are everywhere. My Honda CRV has a turbo. Ford puts turbos on so many of their engines, and indeed, for several of the model years before it was discontinued, the Taurus had a turbocharged engine.

I'd say more complexity has been added for the sake of perceived safety and convenience. Sure a lot of complexity was added for efficiency but there no reason the entire car down to the turn signals needs to operate on a databus with a single point of failure who's replacement averages 10% of the price of the car.

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