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Comment by iamnothere | Hacker News Reader

Sure, buy a bike. AND buy an older (but maintainable) vehicle for hauling, transporting multiple people, and traveling long distances. It’s not either or.

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Entirely this.

I have a wonderful cargo bike (urban arrow - splurge purchase for my 35th birthday and second kid) - I use it for most in-city transportation tasks, including picking up kids from daycare/school, groceries, trips to restaurants, etc.

I also have a 2011 truck with ~200k miles on it. It's well take care of, and shows no signs of stopping any time soon. It hauls stuff from home improvement stores, help family move, and takes us on vacation.

I've been debating getting bumper stickers for each of them along the lines of:

"My other ebike is a truck" - for the bike

and

"My other truck is an ebike" - for the truck

I wish I had the use for a cargo bike. They're so cool.

I had such an older vehicle until a couple weeks ago when the fuel tank supports rusted to the point the tank wasn't supported. There was just more maintenance needed than I had time to do - it would cost about what I paid for a modern 3 year old vehicle just to get it running and who knows what it will need next year from parts I wouldn't replace. (the new car is also electric so much cheaper to drive, though it doesn't have the capacity of the 1 ton truck it replaced so I'm stuck when I need that)

Just be aware that newer vehicles often have more things that can and will fail, and parts seem less standardized these days, so you may not be able to keep it running past the expected service lifetime.

Older vehicles (depending on the platform) often use common parts that are shared even across manufacturers. And third party manufacturers keep cranking out new stock for them.

I am hoping that this type of system develops for simple no-frills electric vehicles over time. Although laws like the one mentioned here keep piling up, increasing vehicle complexity and cost of maintenance.

Parts were mostly never standardized. The difference is when a production run ends they would sell all the tooling to a third party that makes parts under their own name. (and even before production ends parts that break often are worth duplicating). With computers when the production run of the LCD, CPU, ... ends nobody is making more. Even if you could get the software to install, nobody makes the computer at all at any price.

Fair, standardized probably isn’t the right term. Maybe common usage is a better term? I saw a video where someone was modifying a Dodge Viper and found that it used a Ford branded control switch or relay, not even the same company! Although that is a bit of an outlier.

Relays were standardized.

Other parts were sourced from outside suppliers, which also supplied the same or similar parts to other automakers. Some of them were direct replacements, some were easily modified to work, and some could be robbed for components to refurbish your old part.

I know someone that installed an aftermarket touch screen in their Cadillac.

The OEM part arguably has a flaw where it dies when it gets too hot (Cadillac didn't do a recall though).

I think there were more than one third party options.

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