Hacker News Reader

Comment by abainbridge | Hacker News Reader

> Complexity is always the enemy, but only if you have to deal with it. My car engine is very complex and I don't ever think about it.

That's a bad example. My BMW E90 has a gasoline direct injection system, which was state of the art when the car was made 9 years ago. It is very complex and the parts it is made from are very expensive. The BMW specialist tell me the misfire my car has will therefore cost more than £2500 to fix, and even then they'd be guessing.

It would be better if car engines were simpler, like they used to be before they had to start passing artificial emissions tests that don't measure the impact for the whole life-cycle of the vehicle.

View on HN

It's actually a very good example. I drive a 1978 GMC pickup. Once a year I drop it off at a place and the guy does maintenance. That and adding gas are all that I do.

When I travel, I get a rental that somebody else worries about.

These things are as complex as we will tolerate. I love new vehicles and have a blast driving them while traveling, but frack if I want to have to update and reboot my car. What kind of living hell is it where everything we touch is complex like this?

This is ridiculous. I have a pretty new car (2015), with GDI, and I sure as hell don't have to "reboot" it. It's been perfectly reliable. The infotainment system does have a few issues, but it has nothing to do with the driveability of the car (the engine, and other critical systems are not tied to it).

Modern cars are FAR more reliable than anything made in 1978, this is a simple fact proven by mountains of data. Cars last far longer than they used to; you can easily go 200k or 300k miles with basic maintenance, and I'm sorry, but despite what you might want to believe, that was just not the case in 1978.

And BMWs are terrible examples; those cars seem to be designed for expensive and necessary maintenance, so they can extract more profit from their owners. Japanese and American cars aren't like this.

A modern car is far safer, far more reliable, far more efficient, far more powerful, and far better than the environment. The added complexity only makes things better, in this example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com