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Comment by from-nibly | Hacker News Reader

You can pry my late 90's early 2000's cars from my cold dead hands. I have a mechanic and I'm going to go find the fountain of youth so I can keep him alive forever.

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The trouble with people who like us who want cars to not suck is we also don't buy new cars, because only suckers do that. So manufacturers don't care about our wants and only build cars for people stupid enough to buy new ones. Hence touchscreens, automatic transmissions, pickup trucks, and battletank-sized vehicles.

(If they're the stupid ones, what does that make us...?)

This is the move

Analog Knobs and buttons

No spyware

You can even do gas to electric conversion cheap and easily if you’re not about that petro life

There’s more than enough usable vehicles in the world some just need more maintenance than others.

The last thing we need is more cars to be produced.

No no no. Need to keep producing! Capitalism baby!

You mean consumerism, I don't think anyone would produce if it wouldn't be bought.

China is practicing a very different form of "capitalism" where huge amounts of capital are invested into maglev and such. (Something you can't do here because people have property rights and getting the right of way is almost impossible.)

So what people will do after saving time by fast travel using maglev. I would've guessed spending time on leisure, food, shopping, entertainment. But since it is China all saved time will go towards spiritual fulfillment not consumerism.

I mean, if we don't I have a feeling that a large chunk of us on HN would be unemployed very quickly.

An interesting Catch-22 situation most of us find ourselves in.

My son needed a car in a hurry to commute to his job. He hates the aesthetics of newer cars and badly wanted a boat from the 1970s but I did some searching and we wound up with a 1996 Buick Park Avenue. He has had to put quite a bit of money into repairs (brake lines, fuel lines, lots of gaskets) but we think it is likely that we'll soon have replaced everything that rots out over time. The cost of newer used cars is astronomical so we don't feel bad about our repair bills yet.

I admire the spirit but I question your definitions of cheap and easy. Most conversions I've seen are neither and a scant few are one of them but not both, though I'd love to be proven wrong.

What’s easy and cheap for me might not be easy and cheap for other people

More details, please. What did you do? How did you do it?

That era is dramatically less safe than say, 2010+ though. That’s why I ended up upgrading, the survivability stats are stark

Vehicle design or operator usage?

Do new cars appear to be safer because new car owners drive more defensively?

Perhaps bad drivers can only afford old cars and smash them up?

Data is a slippery fish

No? I mean there might be some of that (although I doubt it), but you can just look at test data which has nothing to do with the driver. Crash tests, rollovers, crushing , glancing, etc all dramatically safer with modern improvements.

Yep, plus in the end properly maintaining older vehicles is considerably better for the environment than mining, processing, and building new vehicles from scratch.

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