Odd aside, these days "low tech" (minimal effort, low cost) cars are going to have screens and control by wire interfaces for many things - it's 2024 and touch screens are a throw away disposable item compared to physical controls, tension cables, routing looms for every physical switch and interface light bulb, etc.
In a sense the ideal notion of a "low tech car" is now a hand crafted artisan object.
It's pure nostalgia.
Open source code, no phone home or hidden backdoors, optionally no wireless or external connectivity other than by on board physical port, etc.
Cars of yore have car manuals, manifolds and heads can be replaced with official parts or scrap yard parts or third party vendor alternatives, etc.
I use EV's for work related applications, I'm still holding off a personal EV until I can find something in Australia that fits my list. Until then I do most local area travel via walking, electric scooter, or homebuilt EV trike with basket for shopping - there's a Land Cruiser for the rural trips and hauling loads but that's more a once per week driver.
No, most cars of yore only had manuals available to dealership technicians, and no one else. Genuine manufacturer-made manuals were difficult or impossible to find.
Everyone else bought Haynes or Chilton "manuals" which were really done by reverse-engineering.
> Everyone else bought Haynes or Chilton "manuals" which were really done by reverse-engineering.
They did the job and it was hardly difficult to access dealership manuals .. which were more often than not close to the Haynes manuals.
There's a healthy trade in manuals and photocopies of such. The nearest city had an entire shop soley devoted to car manuals back in the 1980s .. it might still be there or not (given the torrents of manual PDFs kicking about today).
I currently live in a town with a large motor museum (rocket cars and steamers and all sorts) and a wealth of machines from 100+ years of agriculture .. plenty of sheds with shops; old tractors, the last holden V8's, even one iteration of the sheep shearing robot we built (in the 1980s).
It's not that difficult to maintain old cars, the parts can be hard to scrounge at times, failing that it can be a wait on a machinist to fab a replacement, but overall there's less mystery than with more recent vehicles.