> I wonder how well my car will age when miscellaneous sensor all over the car start failing.
I predict that 50 years from now there will be more functioning cars from the 1960s than from the 2020s. With the combination of quickly obsoleting technology that won't be fixable and overly interconnected electronics that become impossible to diagnose after a while, there's not much hope for current and future cars to be anything but disposable.
Old mechanical cars though, can be kept running essentialy forever by just someone with access to a machine shop and some patience.
every month I'm breaking a sensor in my 2004 dodge. It's been about $300 every other month in mechanic fees. I've got two new ones right now. They got rid of relays and are using some kind of FET for some sensors, lights, switches. Some of the sensors are catastrophic (won't drive or drives extremely dangerous). For whatever reason dodge decided to get rid of the throttle cable and go with a two sensor and servo. If it fails, no mechanic will touch it. I took it out and cleaned it, and it just started working. Ghost in the machine.
It's really ashame that we'll never see versions of those mechanical cars combined with the manufacturing precision and quality control available today.
Sure there are one-offs and some drop-ins available, but they'll never get dialed in the way cars do after a year or two of mass production.
> It's really ashame that we'll never see versions of those mechanical cars combined with the manufacturing precision and quality control available today.
The car that makes me cry a little every time on the what-could-have-been topic is the Honda CRX HF. 54 MPG in 1988. Most cars can't match that today over 30 years later.
If Honda was allowed to do a modern version with some use of carbon fiber for even more lightness and all the advances in fuel injection tuning and engine manufacturing, surely we could have a ~70+ MPG CRX by now.
I predict that 50 years from now there will be more functioning cars from the 1960s than from the 2020s. With the combination of quickly obsoleting technology that won't be fixable and overly interconnected electronics that become impossible to diagnose after a while, there's not much hope for current and future cars to be anything but disposable.
Old mechanical cars though, can be kept running essentialy forever by just someone with access to a machine shop and some patience.