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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Car quality is suffering because people treat their cars like junk. Too many people lease. Too many people are driving cars they don't actually own. Too many people see cars as temporary. A growing number see them as "necessary evils" and treat them like a bad habit that we all should kick asap. That attitude means people don't care about their vehicles. Cars are no longer partners that you trust year after year. People once grew attached to their cars. People remembered important life events based on which car they were using at the time. When you don't care about something you aren't going to take pride in it. You aren't going to maintain it yourself. You aren't going to demand proper engineering or design. Cars are now just a commodity, something to be used and tossed aside. Current design reflects that attitude.

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> Too many people lease. Too many people are driving cars they don't actually own. Too many people see cars as temporary.

To paint this as a consumer problem is hilarious to me because I used to work for a rental company that was owned by a big automaker and the way you describe consumers looking at cars is EXACTLY the way we did as a business. Why? Because cars are rapidly depreciating assets that carry high maintenance costs, and if you’re not paying attention to the age of your fleet, you’re completely SOL on you operational expenses.

Whatever “partnership” you used to have with your car was cooked up by a talented marketing and sales team to convince you that your car was more than just a car, and it clearly worked.

>> Whatever “partnership” you used to have with your car was cooked up by a talented marketing and sales team

Have you ever listened to county music? Every other song is about a truck. None of them EVER mention rental cars. Rental care are soulless.

Anyone who doesn't recognize some sort of "partnership" with a car either doesn't drive much or has only driven rental cars. Wait until you are in a snowstorm in the mountains, at night, in fog, and you run into an emergency situation. Then all those little features designed by engineers kick in. Things like traction control/ABS, tire design, weigh and balance ... the engineering becomes your partner through a dangerous situation. If you only drive a few miles between an apartment and a office job every morning it is understandable to treat a car as a nothing object. But anyone who has done a multi-day drive covering 1000s of miles, especially across mountains, quickly learns that every model has a unique personality.

When I come home from a long trip or overseas deployment, it isn't always family greeting me at the airport. Often, the first sense of being "home" is retrieving my car out of long-term parking.

> A growing number see them as "necessary evils" and treat them like a bad habit that we all should kick asap.

This is the correct attitude to have.

> Cars are now just a commodity

Henry Ford literally invented commodification so when exactly, in your opinion, was this not the case?

Edit:

This comment is actually really funny. Starts out strong with a kind of a "back in the my day" tone that's actually backhanded victim blaming (the consumer) and then completely jumps the shark and somehow ropes in commodification as if that's all in the control of consumers.

Ford made cars cheap, at least cheap enough for the average person. But those cars were never disposable. Every Model-T was a serious investment in both money and time on the part of the new owner. And owners kept them going for a decade or more. Back then it took knowledge and work to keep a car on the road, to deal with inevitable roadside breakdowns long before cellphones. People took pride in such car-related skills. Henry Ford did not invent cars to be fixed only at the dealer and then be thrown away after the lease/warranty expires. That is a very modern phenomena.

Model T 1918 price: $680

680$ in today's money: $14,732

>Henry Ford did not invent cars to be fixed only at the dealer and then be thrown away after the lease/warranty expires. That is a very modern phenomena.

Henry Ford invented assembly line manufacturing. A product manufactured on an assembly line is the textbook definition of a commodity.

> Back then it took knowledge and work to keep a car on the road, to deal with inevitable roadside breakdowns long before cellphones.

I'm sorry but am I to believe you were around "back then" to know what it took to keep a car on the road "back then"?

Henry Ford sent inspectors to junkyards to find out what parts could be made cheaper.

I think the kinds of quality issues people are taking issue with are primarily with the power-trains. No doubt some other features have seen disappointments especially the infotainment systems like you said though.

Toyota only recently introduced a brand new Truck engine which replaced their previous 5.7L naturally aspirated V8. Presumably because they sell a lot of smaller cars they were able to keep the 5.7 for so long, it got worst-in-class gas mileage. But their clients loved that engine and there's only one reason you completely ditch a SKU the vast majority likes, emission standards. It's all being driven by emission standards. I'm not saying that's a totally bad thing either, I'm hoping to one day walk down a busy street and not have to breath in toxic fumes. But I think we all should know what the actual cause is that's helping drive car prices up and predictability/dependability down.

It's a good point. Where a larger normally aspirated engine would have sufficed manufacturers have shifted to smaller turbocharged engines that are significantly more complicated, more mechanical strain on the core engine, more mechanical parts, more cooling, more hoses, valves and electronics to control it all. Due to emissions.

And hybridization on top of that.

ICE is at the end of the road. Consumers and manufacturers are between two stools - a huge course correction. It'll take at least another decade, probably two before it's completed.

It’s really about fuel economy, not emissions, unless you’re counting CO2 as an emission. Idle-off that makes it so you can’t steer while stopped at a red light, unreliable CVTs, sloppy gas pedals in eco-mode that you have to disable every time, the list goes on and on, and no driver ever asked for it. In general the CAFE fleet average rule makes it so that each manufacturer gets to build 1 or 2 interesting cars and the rest have to be weak econoboxes. Maybe the whole point of ratcheting fuel economy standards so high is to make ICE cars worse and eventually illegal.

The average age of US vehicles has increased 11 years in 2011, to 13 years in 2022 [1]. Americans are holding onto their cars longer than before, not treating them like junk.

I don’t know why we’re seeing more technology in cars, but s based on my observation that no one says they like the change tells me that it’s not consumer driven.

[1] https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/avera...

Sounds like enshittification comes for cars.

It’s a death spiral too. Cars get less reliable -> people lease and don’t care about cars -> cars get less reliable.

Enough people still buy a car and it's one of there first big purchases.

In my opinion it's more about land vs city and company car vs self bought

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