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Comment by cyberlurker | Hacker News Reader

Those cars already exist. They are made in China and banned for sale in the US.

Oh don't I know it. I'm currently in the midst of a full blown temper tantrum over the Toyota Hilux being unavailable on the US market. I need an actual real truck for actual real truck shit and there's literally nothing on the market that's serviceable.

You can import a 25+ year old vehicle (so up to the mid-6th generation Hilux) for street usage in the US.

Yeah and that's the other horn of the dilemma facing would-be truck owners right now. If I don't want to take on a 2nd mortgage payment for a vehicle that can only barely perform the tasks required of it (and that poorly) my other option is to adopt all of the maintenance overhead and attendant reliability nightmares and problems with the parts aftermarket usually reserved for classic car projects. It's to the point now that if Edison Motors ever really gets their shit together I'm probably going to just break down and hybrid-swap a 70's era F150 and call it good but in the mean time I still need a work vehicle.

I drove an ‘86 Alfa Romeo from 1995-2008 and 111k miles that I put on it. It broke down exactly once and that was a Bosch distributor that broke internally.

I wouldn’t think twice about driving a reasonably maintained 25-30 year old Toyota if that was the vehicle that best fit your use case.

I think once cars got to closed-loop EFI and electronic ignition (mid-80s), they got way more reliable and low maintenance.

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