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Comment by thatsamonad | Hacker News Reader

It’s definitely interesting to contrast my experience with that of my child. My parents were completely illiterate when it came to computers and electronics in general, so I basically taught myself how to take things apart and fix them when they broke, figured out how to get a modem set up to connect to the internet, etc. In some ways my experience with technology was driven by necessity as much as it was by curiosity.

Now the devices that my child uses can’t be easily taken apart and the solution when they break is to get a new one. They don’t have any reason to learn about the software internals, either, because everything “just works” as soon as they power a device on and the internet is always available.

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Haha I'm only in my early 30's and I feel like an absolute dinosaur when we have an internet outage and I tell the kids that there was a time when we didn't always have internet access, and even a time when we didn't have internet at all!! It's unfathomable to them.

The same happened with cars. There was a generation before cars, then a generation with cars that needed a lot of maintenance, and now we have cars where it’s not necessary anymore to know how they work.

It's not like cars are dramatically more or less reliable to be fair. It's that they've gotten more complicated to the point where what used to be simple garage fixes anyone could do by following along the haynes manual now require a mechanic to take off the entire front end of the car and hours more labor as a result, and no one has the time, much less the tooling like engine lifts on hand to do that themselves (see most fixes for Audis since the 2000s).

Modern cars are way more reliable than maybe 30 years ago. When I started driving a car with 100000km usually started falling apart. Now you can easily get 200000 and more they also rust way less.

Repairability of modern tech like phones and computers has gone the same way that cars have gone. It used to be pretty easy to open a laptop and even phones but now everything is often glued together.

And I don’t think it’s because they are more complex. I think they are making manufacturing cheaper at the expense of making repair more complex.

When did you start driving? Only getting 60k miles doesn't fit my experience driving japanese cars since the 90s. Our family had a 2000 subaru that clocked 350k miles before the engine finally blew up and we scrapped it. My uncle drives old volvos from the 80s since he can wonk on them in his own garage, and he gets numbers like that too. You look up user forums and you will find the same experiences with these decent old cars.

I started in the 80s and my first few cars were from 70s or early 80s. Back then most engines lasted around 100000km and cars rusted pretty badly after 10 years. That has improved enormously since then. Engine management has also become more reliable. Carburetors needed constant maintenance once they got older, so did the ignition systems back then.

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