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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

If this were 10yr ago I'd agree. The 80s gave us computers. The 90s gave us good simulation software and the engineers used that to build us reliable cars. The early 2000s gave us plastic interior and exterior trim that didn't rattle and fall apart in short order.

Since then we've tacked more gears onto automatic transmissions, hybrids have become more mainstream, sedans and wagons have been replaced with small SUVs as electronic doodads have proliferated. If you don't mind creaky plastic quality is about the same back deep into the 90s for cars that were on reasonably modern platforms in the 90s.

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Gas mileage is better, backup cams are standard (and required), the average age of a vehicle on the road is 11 years (up from 8 years in the 90s), so they are more reliable and last longer, better airbags (side curtains are standard nowadays), better anti-corrosion technology, adaptive cruise control, lane assist, auto parallel parking, partial autopilot, bluetooth standard, etc.

So marginal incremental improvement in drive-train technology and electronic doodads? That's how I read that list you gave me.

Cars these days don't age any better than cars from 20yr ago or the more modern cars of the 90s.

I guess anti-corrosion has improved but it hasn't improved by that much. You still have plenty of vehicles that repeatedly rust out in some spot because the salt gets flung there and the surface coatings aren't adequate to stop it.

Average age of cars on the road is 11 years vs 8 years in the 90s...which means cars are on average lasting 37.5% longer than 20 years ago. And that might be a lagging indicator.

It also might be an indicator of how deep the 2008 recession was, and of how big the 90s stock boom was.

No, the measure is average age, which is more indicative of used cars than any largess caused by various boom times. Cars don't get salvaged for spare parts and metal until they're no longer useful as vehicles. They otherwise get resold and traded in and put back out on the road.

Are you sure about how this metric is defined? The average age of cars in today's fleet is not the same thing as the expected lifespan of today's new car.

In a growing fleet, new purchases expand the fleet and necessarily lower the average age. On the other hand, if production falls below replacement rates, the average age of the fleet will increase. Couldn't such a change reflect changes in demographics (number of new drivers added to population) or habits (amount of car-based travel) as much as car durability?

Also, wouldn't such fleet metrics be influenced by the lumpy history of natural disasters like hurricanes flooding densely populated coastal regions?

There's a lot of very real safety improvements that have been added (or mandated) over the past decade. They are saving lives. It doesn't matter if you don't value these improvements for whatever reason; the rest of us will still benefit from your vehicle having them, so they are now required.

Gas mileage is a very marginal improvement in any of the vehicles I'm interested in, on the order of 16 mpg then to maybe 20, now. Bodywork is plastic or aluminum, so it is less repairable, but there's the anti-corrosion factor.

Everything else listed I would want to actively avoid in my next vehicle.

> Gas mileage is a very marginal improvement in any of the vehicles I'm interested in, on the order of 16 mpg then to maybe 20, now.

this says more about the vehicles you're interested in than the overall trend in vehicle efficiency. I get ~34mpg out of my hot hatch with a heavy right foot.

Not really. I used to drive an Saab turbo from the 80s that got close to 30mpg. Old civics pushed 40. 34 mpg isn’t really an improvement over that.

sure, but that was probably a much lighter car. I realize I'm moving the goalposts a bit here, but when you consider the improvements in crash safety, engine performance, and efficiency together, cars really are a lot better today than they were 20+ years ago. the one thing that has suffered is the weight and size of the vehicles, but imo it's worth being a lot less likely to die in a car.

I disagree on a few of those.

The backup cams affect my night vision. When I back out of a parking space at night, I'm hit with the glare. I need my vision to drive!

Humans adapt to adaptive cruise control, lane assist, auto parallel parking, partial autopilot, and any other safety feature. So we get more texting while driving and other dangerous behavior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

Would you say that the average age of a vehicle is longer due to cars being pricy and people fixing them up or because they are far more reliable? I could see it going both ways.

I noticed a 2014 camry dashboard creaks like crazy! The older ones do not!

Could be a point defect: maybe the person who did the Takata airbag recall on that car was not a good crafsperson?

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