Comment by Fiveplus
1 day ago
The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days.
I still see these running in rural Spain and France, usually held together with wire and hope, clocking like what 400k+ km? The XUD diesel engines are practically unkillable. They have no ECU to brick, no adblue sensors to fail and put the car into limp mode and thankfully none of those DRM locked headlights.
The argument for the countryside need of a modern SUV usually cites reliability and safety, and in 2026, modern complexity is the enemy of reliability. If your C15 breaks down in a field, you can fix it with a wrench. If your Range Rover breaks down in a field because a sensor in the air suspension noticed a voltage variance...you are stranded until a tow truck takes it to a dealer.
> The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days.
I wonder how differently cars would be built, if instead of maximizing for value extraction and crap nobody needs, they instead were optimized for utility and maintenance (and sure, fuel economy, aerodynamics and some sane environmental stuff). Like take the C15 and add 2-4 decades of manufacturing and safety improvements, while keeping it simple and utilitarian.
That would be the absolute dream engineering brief. If I actually sit down and design that vehicle, it would have something like this. List, off the top of my head.
1. You keep the modern metallurgy and the crumple zones. You keep ABS and basic traction control because they are solved problems that save lives without needing cloud connectivity.
2. Instead of a 2000 USD proprietary touchscreen that will be obsolete in 3 years, the dashboard could be just a double DIN slot and a heavy-duty, universal tablet mount with a 100W USB-C PD port. The car provides the power and the speakers and my phone provides the maps and music. When the tech improves, you upgrade your phone, not your dashboard.
3. Nobs and buttons instead of touchscreens like VW has done recently, if my memory serves me right.
The tragedy is that regulations in the EU and North America make this incredibly difficult to sell. The sane environmental stuff you mentioned has morphed into a requirement for deeply integrated electronic oversight. But I genuinely believe there is a massive, silent majority of drivers waiting for a car that promises nothing other than to start every morning and never ask for a software update.
> The sane environmental stuff you mentioned has morphed into a requirement for deeply integrated electronic oversight
Decent catalytic converters require an array of sensors, ECU, and ability to fine control the engine inputs to work - without them most large cities would become smog ridden hells.
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>the dashboard could be just a double DIN slot and a heavy-duty, universal tablet mount with a 100W USB-C PD port. The car provides the power and the speakers and my phone provides the maps and music.
Legally mandated backup cameras make your idea DOA.
In fact, nearly everything terrible about cars in the last decade can be traced to regulations in some way.
Wondering why transmissions are insanely complicated and unreliable now? Manufacturers were forced to eek out an extra couple MPG due to continually tightening environmental regulations. Something has to give.
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My understanding is that ABS in cars has surprisingly little effect on fatalities. It is a huge lifesaver when deployed to motorcycles, and a benefit to reducing non-fatal crashes, but not much for fatals in cars.
(I agree it's a well-solved problem and the reduction in non-fatal crashes makes it worthwhile from a convenience standpoint alone.)
> Instead of a 2000 USD proprietary touchscreen that will be obsolete in 3 years, the dashboard could be just a double DIN slot and a heavy-duty, universal tablet mount with a 100W USB-C PD port. The car provides the power and the speakers and my phone provides the maps and music. When the tech improves, you upgrade your phone, not your dashboard.
Dacia does that. The base sandero comes with speakers and Bluetooth. The rest is up to you, there is no screen no radio.
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We already had basically the solution you suggested with airplay/car play - USB charger with audio out that just is a display. when a phone isn't plugged in it shows super basic radio features like station and song name for AM and FM.
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You should look into the slate truck! This is exactly what they are trying to do
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Maybe Framework could get into the car business.
Please allow me to introduce you to the second gen Toyota Yaris
Incidentally, you're describing my 2020 Subaru Impreza. Under $20k for my dealer demo.
I do wish it supported a later version of Android Auto so that I could run that via Bluetooth. (It does have regular Bluetooth but that's just audio.)
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I have a theory that these environmental regulations at least to some degree defeat themselves. They make engines more complicated, so more fragile and harder for an amateur (edit: or any professional who isn't their own brand repair shops) to service. They encourage smaller-block engines with turbos and compressors which makes the engine more short-lived. They produce stuff like throttle-hang and gear selection recommendations optimized for driving economy, not engine longevity (or driving experience, for that matter).
On the whole, they seem to be contributing to this movement of taking power away from the end consumer and making your product more and more like a subscription (this goes further than the car industry, of course). I do realize that it's important to cut down on pollution! And maybe this kind of stuff has been studied... although I imagine it would be very hard to do accurately.
Imagine if a car manufacturer would provide service guides, easily-accessible part diagrams and competitively priced spare parts. Imagine if they optimized for longevity and if the handbook that came with the car had more technical details than it had warnings about how doing any kind of maintenance yourself will result in a) your death and b) a voided warranty. That would be pretty nice.
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How about an option just to have one of those old Ford radios with the huge buttons you can push with gloves on? And maybe an aux-in?
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I can unlock my doors with my phone and monitor the cars location with my phone with cloud connectivity.
This isn't required and was offered as a 5 year free plan with optional paid extensions after
How is this bad?
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> I wonder how differently cars would be built, if instead of maximizing for value extraction and crap nobody needs, they instead were optimized for utility and maintenance (and sure, fuel economy, aerodynamics and some sane environmental stuff).
Auto manufacturers already have stripped-down base models of their entry-level vehicles. Many have commercial versions of their vehicles, especially trucks and vans, that are stripped down.
The stripped down base models don't sell well.
Remember how the internet was clamoring for an iPhone Mini? Whenever there were complaints about modern cell phones, you could find what looked like unanimous agreement that a smaller iPhone would be the golden ticket. Then Apple made an iPhone Mini, and it did not sell well.
The same happens with vehicles. Whenever you find threads complaining about modern vehicles it seems unanimous that modern vehicles have too many things consumers don't want and we'd be better off with simple base models. Yet simple base models do exist already and they don't sell well. Real consumers look at their $20,000 Nissan Versa and realize that spending an extra $1-2K on amenities isn't going to change their monthly payment much.
There is a lot of precedent for this. The Tata Nano was an Indian micro car that was small, low-power, and had bare minimum amenities. It was under $5K USD in inflation-adjusted dollars.
It was discontinued due to low demand because sales declined steadily year over year. Nobody wanted it.
I wonder how much of that is due to dealers, who want to upsell. Do they even keep the base model in stock, or does it have to be special ordered (or today, we can give you a "discount" on the fancy model that still has a higher profit margin for us).
I'm just speculating; the same reasoning wouldn't apply to the iPhone mini. But car dealers have a lot of incentive to skew the results. It takes a fair bit of willpower to say "I am buying this specific car I want and will go elsewhere if I can't have it."
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Agreed - check out for example a Toyota rav4 le. This is the base model with effectively zero modern “subscription-esque” fancy features. It’s got a touchscreen and power windows, but otherwise it’s all the reliability/etc of Toyota and that’s it. About half the price of what most rav4s are listed at and $20k+ cheaper than a 4Runner.
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And yet I personally know more people who own iPhone minis (myself included) now in 2026 than that own pixel phones of any model. I think the data is distorted by the fact that most people who want things like that also don’t typically buy new (especially with cars). I did buy my iPhone 13 mini from Apple directly, but I bought it after the 14 line had already been released.
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Econo shitboxes also have very stiff competition from used low-end cars. The economics of them are often rather dubious.
Not easy I would say.
Safety improvement means larger crumple zones, reinforcement, etc... Which mean a bigger and heavier vehicle if you want to keep the same capacity. That in turn means a more powerful engine, brakes, wheels and tyres, etc... further increasing the size and weight of the vehicle. This is an exponential factor.
Fuel economy and environmental stuff (which are linked) come with tighter engine control for better combustion and cleaner exhaust. It means tighter tolerances so simple tools may be less appropriate, and electronics.
And there are comfort elements that are hard to pass nowadays: A/C, power steering, door lock and windows. Mandatory safety equipment like airbags and ABS. Even simple cars like what Dacia makes are still bigger, heavier and more complex than older cars like the C15, they don't really have a choice.
It’s the ford transit connect. Car makers can’t make money on them because a) for personal use they are uncomfortable and b) commercial buyers drive them a million miles before replacing them.
The margin in cars is in the luxury. And for most personal buyers they’ll get as much luxury as they can afford because they are contemplating their monthly cost over total price and leather seats cost $80 more per month on a $600 monthly, they’ll splurge.
Modularity would be great too. Standardized connectors and outer dimensions for engines even between brands. Medium, large, small. You don't need 100 different types. Meanwhile, all this has been overtaken by the need to get away from fossil fuels as soon as we practically can. Oil should not be valued based on the cost of pumping it out of the ground but based on the cost of creating a liter of it from raw materials (CO2, lots of energy).
> Standardized connectors and outer dimensions for engines even between brands. Medium, large, small. You don't need 100 different types.
There aren't 100 different types of engines. At any given time each auto manufacturer only has a couple different engines in production. Different models can get different variations for performance or use targets, but auto manufacturers are very good at standardizing within their company.
Look at the list of Honda engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Honda_engines
Notice how they're grouped by series? All of the engines in each series share a common platform with minor changes from year to year. In many cases you can swap parts between engines within the same series. An engine series lasts 10-15 years. Some times the parts even carry over to the next series.
Swapping between brands is a pipe dream, though. Forcing everyone to fit their engineering into a bounding box that has to be agreed upon by all auto manufacturers around the world would only lead to either unnecessarily large vehicles with wasted space (to leave room for future engineering needs) or unnecessarily complicated engineering to fit everything into the pre-defined allowable engine envelope. All to accommodate engine swaps between manufacturers which is never necessary for consumer cars.
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> Modularity would be great too.
Unfortunately, that wouldn't pad the car companies' margins. What's best for th consumer is generally worse for the company.
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Such a thing exists. It's called a Dacia Duster. Well, certainly for utility and to a lesser extent economy.
Fiat Panda 4x4 too.
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Citroen Berlingo is basically that.
Well, it requires a different way of thinking but that's exactly how cars will be built if you'd use them via a subscription (fuel included).
Companies would make less money because consumers just buy a product and keep it for generations if the product quality is THAT good.
When companies make less money, there's less jobs. When there's less jobs people have less money to spend on things like Rent.
You would get the toyota hilux champ which is not purchasable in rich countries.
By now, we would have reached a quality standard of vehicles that are regularly passed down across several generations before they stop being useful.
You can quickly see what a mortal sin this would be against our Lord and Savior, Capitalism.
But whatever you want Toyota has a 10k truck and a jimmy is 15k, if you need a car a vitz can be had for 12k
This comment shines a spotlight on my issues with the US auto market. None of these vehicles are sold in the US, for a variety of reasons - both economic and regulatory. I hate knowing that the vehicles I want to buy both exist and are affordable, but I just can’t have them. Meanwhile, the cars sold in my market are all egregiously enormous, have giant screens inside, etc.
This is the very definition of a “first world problem,” but it sure is frustrating.
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Yeah, but how do poor VCs make money then?
Definitely not with a car sold for relatively cheap that has a engine who refuses to die...
You think VCs fund the world's largest auto makers?
Modern cars break down less than older cars -- they are more reliable, not less. They generate more power, with better emissions. They have a wealth of creature comforts and features beyond what 1980s cars had.
The reliability of a vehicle isn't just the frequency of breakdowns.
It's the frequency of breakdowns times how fucked you are when it does break down.
So the actual math also depends on your means and where you live.
Yes, and they're still much better.
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yeah, Risk = Probability * Impact
They’re also vastly safer
* For the driver.
Large cars/SUVs are vastly more dangerous for everyone else. Visibility in modern cars is also much worse, regardless of size.
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Modern engines are generally more reliable, yes. And galvanised steel and aluminium has helped chassis' and bodies last longer too. I think the 'sweet spot' has passed for most car categories though, the last being city cars when they got mandatory infotainment systems towards the end of the 2010s.
> They have a wealth of creature comforts and features beyond what 1980s cars had.
I don't want these, I don't want to pay for them. They raise the cost and they're unavoidable. This is a NEGATIVE, not a positive.
For you. Everyone's tastes are different. I remember riding around in cars in the 80s, and I much prefer the comfort of my current modern car, enough to make some trade offs around the annoying computerization of it.
I suspect that there are more people around with my tastes than yours, and that's a driver of sales.
Both are true. New vehicles are more reliable and safer. New vehicles are vastly harder to maintain by a home auto mechanic.
I don't know enough to say whether realizability requires lower DIYability.
Declining service revenue has been a problem for car dealerships for a long time. EVs are only making it even harder as their maintenance needs are reduced further.
This is another topic where people look back on the past with rose colored glasses. At the risk of downvotes, this happens a lot on HN like in threads where people speak about their pre-SSD era computers as being faster and snappier than modern machines. I recently found my old laptop in storage and booted it up. I remember loving how fast it was at the time and being glad I spent extra for the fastest model at the time, but oh boy was it slow relative to anything I use today.
EVs are not more reliable in general, at least not according to the stats. And a lot of them haven't been on the road for long enough to know how their running costs will look like when they are a decade or two old.
There's just been an article here on HN, that BMW installed a crash safety fuse that triggered on a minor fender-bender and killed the battery. It was WELDED in, and even after getting to it with a torch and installing a new one, the ICU needed to be hacked to accept the new part.
They're also full of proprietary parts, basically you have entire car functions integrated to the same PCB, which are essentially unrepairable.
I hope I'm wrong, but I guess there'll be a major disillusionment with EVs once these cars get to 10-15 years and people find out in mass, that it's no longer economical to fix them.
I'm not an EV hater, I'm more of a pessimist - when it comes to manufacturers, I'm kinda 'pricing in' the worst behavior.
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> If your C15 breaks down in a field, you can fix it with a wrench.
I could. My wife couldn't.
Also, let's not forget the creature comforts of modern cars... rear seats, airbags, sound insulation, power steering, automatic transmissions, 4wd.
Living in the country, tool-vehicles are very useful. This is typically a beat up old 2wd pickup truck (lower is easier to load) with an 8-ft bed (so you can load full sheets of plywood) and a single cab (so you can get an 8-ft bed). My buddy down the street has one and I borrow it all the time. But you'd never take the family anywhere with this thing. It basically spends its entire life going back and forth to Lowes.
>I could. My wife couldn't.
Because she doesn't drive a C15. Believe me, rural french women _will_ fix a C15. There's nothing to break down anyways, the engine is happy to run on distilled corn and melted rubber for oil, the suspension is what suspension, three tires ought to be enough for everyone.
> rear seats,
There's rear benches for you whole family and space for your kids to play around in the back while you're driving, what more do you want ?
>airbags
Useless if you don't crash.
>sound insulation
What do you need to hear except the beautiful sound of the X-Type engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSA-Renault_X-Type_engine) ?
>power steering
Grab a phase 3, it has power steering. Or get stronger arms. Or stop trying to steer while you're not moving forward.
> automatic transmissions
You don't need automatic transmissions, you need to learn how to drive stick. The C15 has the added benefit that you don't really have a proper range to change gears, it'll just go in. Actually you don't even need to clutch, just jam the thing.
>4wd
Absolutely useless for 100% of the usages the average american makes of it. If it can drive through mud while carrying cows, it will handle anything you have to throw at it. 4WD sure is a nice thing to make you pay for more gas though.
>Living in the country, it's very useful to own a tool-vehicle. This is typically a beat up old 2wd pickup truck (lower is easier to load) with an 8-ft bed (so you can load full sheets of plywood) and a single cab (so you can get an 8-ft bed). My buddy down the street has one and I borrow it all the time. But you'd never take the family anywhere with this thing. It basically spends its entire life going back and forth to Lowes.
Alright, all kidding aside though: the US is literally the only country in the world that considers pickup trucks as a good utility vehicle: they are the most dogshit type of vehicle you could own for anything, and that includes your sheets of plywood. Pickup trucks are not used by anyone serious anywhere else in the world. Need to carry a bunch of crap ? Buy a busted Renault Master (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Master) and it has the added benefit of you being able to buy your plywood in crazy situations like the tiniest bits of rain.
The US's obsession for pickup trucks is the sign of a deeply unserious society.
The Toyota Hilux makes for a good vehicle to mount weapons in the back, but please see a lawyer about the legality of mounting an M60 at the back of your car if you're not living in Afghanistan
> Pickup trucks are not used by anyone serious anywhere else in the world.
Excuse me?! Pickup trucks are the sole foundation of motorized defense in some regions! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_(vehicle)
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> The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool.
I don't think that's true, the car as mere tool is romantic anachronism. Back then, cars were central identitarian elements to the post-war, western promise of salvation. Whole cities were torn down and rebuild to fit the car. The car had ideological significance. I think, identitarian attachment to the car is actually less today, but due to the historic importance and focus, cars have become unconditional necessities in many places.
I think the reason, you frequently see "old cars as tools" in southern Europe still, is the fact most regions there only started industrialization after 1970 and were/are still greatly underdeveloped/relatively poor, compared to eg. early industrialized nations like Germany, which are super car-centric. They suffered less car adaptation at the time and as a consequence e.g. SUVs would be rather impractical in some places with extremely narrow streets. Additionally, (remaining) farmers in e.g. Germany are almost exclusively rather rich entrepreneurs managing industrialized food production on flat, boring lands, than "poor peasants" caring for traditional farms in remote villages living off tourism somewhere pretty.
Probably less due to zeitgeist/mentality, but rather geography, historic economic abilities and availability.
Can you give an example of a European city that was "torn down and rebuilt to fit the car?"
In my experience, even cities that suffered a lot of war time damage (Hamburg, Dresden) were rebuilt with every street in exactly the same place with the same narrow width.
It's a bit hyperbole, of course, and I was speaking to the sentiment of the time. In Germany Cologne would be an example of heavy car-centric development, coming to mind, but pretty much any city in West-Germany suffered this fate to some extent. I think there are far more drastic examples in America, but I am not knowledgeable about that.
> Das Konzept der autogerechten Stadt wurde in West-Deutschland beim Wiederaufbau der im Krieg zerstörten Städte umgesetzt, beispielsweise in Hannover (durch den damaligen Stadtbaurat Rudolf Hillebrecht), Dortmund, Köln und Kassel, aber auch in kleineren Städten wie Minden und Gießen. Dabei wurde in großem Umfang auch erhaltene Bausubstanz abgerissen. Vielfach wurden Stadtteile ohne Berücksichtigung sozioökonomischer und kultureller Faktoren zur Anlage von Durchgangsstraßen zerschnitten.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogerechte_Stadt
My driving skills are probably below average. I really like that my car warns me of zebra crossings and can follow the car in front of me with a safe distance.
Many of the modern car features are just useless marketing fluff, but there is some really good progress too.
I’ve got two cars that I drive regularly, a modern day BMW with all the bells and whistles, and an almost 20 year old Honda Acty Van. It’s 660cc, doesn’t have rear seat belts, or a radio, it does have power windows though.
I enjoy driving both for different purposes, but I have to agree with you. On long distance driving (>200km), the BMW is safer. Cruise control, lane keeping, auto distance. It really makes long, multi hour drives less tiring.
I wouldn’t drive my Acty to the next town.
I drive a 20-year-old Civic.
On a trip about 18 months ago I had some Kia soft-roader hire car. I bloody hated the lane keeping (unfamiliar narrow twisty roads are bad enough without the car tugging on the steering wheel).
Conversely the auto-distance thing with cruise control is fantastic - it makes CC usable at way higher traffic densities.
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> The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days.
The same cancer that turned technology from a tool to an ad delivery machine is affecting vehicles.
Because of the growth imperative. With essential things like ICE cars, phones and personal computing, we long satisfied need, those core business products are simply essentially finished/perfected. It's market, and therefore regulatory, failure to have gigantic corporations in positions enabling rent seeking and market shaping, instead of pushing true innovation. If Apple can't come up with something innovative, they need to be forced to downscale instead of creating artificial demand for essentially the same phone 5 years in a row. If VW repeatedly missed the chance to get off their obsolete engine platform, they need to fail.
I think, Cory Doctorow's idea for regaining digital resilience, by "simply" opening up artificial software restrictions through regulation, is widely applicable and would also push for adequate downscaling and actual innovation: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/
A 1984 Ford Ranger with a bed cap would compare favorably to the C15.
I wonder what it would take to convert a modern diesel (e.g. an EA288 TDI) to mechanical injection.
You'd have to fit a mechanical injection pump, which has a different sized pulley, for a start. And injectors and lines adapted to fit.
Pretty much infeasible, I suppose.
This article is comparing a C15 new in 1984 vs a secondhand one today. Really, the C15 represents a time when taxes were ~20% lower and there was a workable steel industry in Europe (which destroyed certain environments, especially around the Ruhrgebiet, whether the exact location was in France, Belgium or Germany). Oh and one major problem the C15 does have is that despite those stats, it is considered to NOT meet emission standards (due to age), and so you cannot enter many cities in one. You can enter with a Berlingo.
There is still a "C15" by the way. It's even less ugly. It's called the Berlingo [1]. Cheapest version is 24000euro + tax, or 35000 + tax for the hybrid version. Let's say in practice it'll run you 30000 euro.
In other words, after tax and counting inflation, let's summarize that since 1984, European cars have about doubled in price. Wages in the EU have gone up about 2x, after inflation.
You have to work 30000/2600 (avg wage per month, euros, in France) = just shy of an entire year of work if you invested 100% of your wage into the car. So let's say 2 years of work.
(due to the EU strongly opposing equal wages across the EU, there is a very large difference between average wage in France and, say, Greece. VERY large, more than 100%)
In 1977, you would have 4900FF average wage in France (in French Francs), and the C15 cost 62000FF. So, just about 12 months at 100% average wage, or let's say 2 years or work, saving up.
So, it even costs about the same.
And, sadly, one is forced to admit that when it comes to European cars, this is a pretty damn good result for that company. Most EU brands have done far worse.
[1] https://www.citroen.fr/vehicules/utility/Berlingo-Van.html
> Oh and one major problem the C15 does have is that despite those stats, it is considered to NOT meet emission standards (due to age), and so you cannot enter many cities in one.
At least in Germany, due to it's age it would classify as a historic vehicle (number plate with an H) and be exempt from emission standards.
> modern complexity is the enemy of reliability
There are years-long threads dozens of pages long on priuschat.com with data files posted by wizards just to figure out the 12v charging pattern.
The vehicle itself will probably stop running before any of these wizards ever figure that out, or even understand the algorithm it uses to occasionally run the engine in EV mode.
And yet, I speculate the total runtime of any year of that vehicle will match what you see for the much simpler Citroen C15-- essentially, bounded only by however long the wizard wants to drive it.
Edit: preemptively-- the Prius driver can drive their Prius on roads appropriate for that type of vehicle for as long as they want. Citroen obviously can go more places-- my upshot is just that the glaring complexity of a Prius doesn't seem to have gotten in the way of its reliability as the author assumes it should have.
> If your Range Rover breaks down in a field
Do they go there?
I mostly see those in parking lots occupying two spaces (a white one 4, once) or cruising slowly in narrow high streets.
Century of the Self. Products aren't life-improving tools anymore they're a way to express yourself.
It's not just vehicles. It's everything, as it's caused by changes that happened to the highest-level command structures of our economy.
C2V ?
I can't believe we're still waiting for an open source car!
The open source washing machine and printer still aren't here either... :(
I think chances are vastly better now with EVs, you probably could reuse the crowdfunded opensource washing machine. Combustion engines are simply way, way too complex. Although I presume the real showstopper is control electronics and regulatory approval for ICEs and EVs alike.
Many of the things are also there because of regulation.
eg: https://www.forbes.com/sites/edgarsten/2024/07/01/mandated-a...
You have cameras, sensors, gps, maps, that need to be updated... and all that would easily be solved by a few policemen with radar guns and writing fines.
What really makes me mad is how bumpers were made to protect the car and now they are these expressions of design that you have to protect at all costs from scratches even.
You don't HAVE to. In a no fault case you can just take the insurance payout and live with the damage.
> What really makes me mad is how bumpers were made to protect the car and now they are these expressions of design that you have to protect
Bumpers today are made to protect the car's occupants, not the car.
They are the start of the crumple zone, whose purpose is to absorb and release most of the energy transfer of the crash by deforming, rather than transferring it to the passenger compartment.
>They have no ECU to brick, no adblue sensors to fail and put the car into limp mode
Which means they are some of the most polluting and wasteful cars available. ECUs are good. They make cars safer, more reliable and more efficient. Car manufacturers had to be dragged kicking and screaming to add adblue, because the Diesel engines are pretty toxic otherwise.
The apologia for old cars is just insane, they are not what you think they are.
>If your C15 breaks down in a field, you can fix it with a wrench.
This is just delusional.
> If your Range Rover breaks down in a field because a sensor in the air suspension noticed a voltage variance...you are stranded until a tow truck takes it to a dealer.
No, you just reset the ECU and get on with your day.
With all due respect, you are confusing a software race condition with a hard fault in a safety critical system.
Resetting the ECU only works if the error is a transient glitch in the code logic. If the failure is a physical sensor reading out of range?
Furthermore, modern automotive architectures store permanent diagnostic trouble codes in non volatile memory specifically to prevent people from "just resetting it" to bypass emissions or safety checks. You cannot clear those with a battery pull. You would need a proprietary manufacturer tool to force a relearn or adaptation.
But more importantly, your argument accepts a terrifying premise. That a 2.5 ton kinetic object moving at highway speeds should have the reliability profile of a consumer router. If I have to treat my vehicle like a frozen windows 98 desktop to get home, the automotive engineering has failed me. Physics doesn't need a reboot.
Yet despite the appliance-ification of cars, they are, on the whole, much safer and quite a bit more reliable than they were decades years ago, despite being forced to work a lot harder for emissions compliance.
It's true that you can't fix them with a spanner, paperclip and pair of tights any more, but it's so much more rare that you have to.
In many ECUs I've worked on, most faults are treated as transient until they're seen across multiple cycles. Resetting often does genuinely help. Sensors do see weird transients and physically impossible values for all sorts of reasons.
> If the failure is a physical sensor reading out of range?
Then you buy a new sensor and put it in, just like you would any other failed part.
> You would need a proprietary manufacturer tool to force a relearn or adaptation.
You can do almost anything you need to do with a non-proprietary Autel tool.
I mean, I get it, the manufacturers are absolutely doing their best these days to lock up repair and maintenance. But so many folks seem to throw their hands up and over-exaggerate the inability to fix modern cars. I've always worked on my own cars, from a 1960 Triumph TR3 to a 2025 Audi A3, and everything in between. Maybe once every four or five years have I hit something where I needed to take the car to the dealer, and that was true in the 1980s as well as today. Repair information for newer cars can be somewhat difficult to obtain (looking squarely at you, BMW) but with a bit of sailing the high seas, you can get all the shop manuals.
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This. I think the entire argument and comparison is a fallacy because you can't just compare vehicles on utilitarian factors when many (most?) people are buying primarily based on fashion/aesthetics. Through my American eyes that C15 is dog shit ugly and I don't even care to read through how it measures up on utility because it's style is already a dealbreaker.
Personally-I know I don't need a big truck, and don't have farm/ranch/heavy duty requirements, but SUVs are quite useful for normal city life in most of the US. Several times a month I am fully loaded for some reason or another. May as well be fashionable and handle well too since this is also the vehicle I commute in and valet at a fancy restaurant occasionally.
I noticed that people often treat cars as they treat clothes. It's their largest and most expensive costumes.
This means that fashion and looks start to play a major role, utility be damned. This also means that relatively minor details, like the exact shape of headlights, become a major stylistic and thus market niche differentiator.
I don't think it's a new problem with cars. But it maybe relatively new in the utility / light truck space.
Not new at all in the US. Trucks are and have been some of the most frequent recipients of after market customization. It’s so common I can think of a dozen or so sub/niches. I’d say it’s only second to Jeep Wrangler.
But yes you’re absolutely right, in our car dominated cities people certainly see the car you drive as a fashion choice, a signal of your personality, and social status/net worth so it does get complicated. I like driving nice cars on occasion but am rather modest and practical with my daily driver.
I’m in a social circle with several dads who probably have similar net worths and generally have a lot in common. There’s a lot of chest pounding, bragging, and one upping going on. Not negatively, but in a sense of “you need to try this ridiculously priced thing” (whiskey and wine and travel are all common topics). I tend to be the contrarian of the group (I don’t drink alcohol at all, don’t watch sports, drive a clunker car). Anyway They’ve been all getting Rivian SUVs and geek out on them. Trying to talk me into getting one next. I just can’t see why I want to spend 6 figures on it when other very similar and decent looking alternatives exist for half the price. I don’t find anything it offers interesting enough. However, its overall utility of being a SUV of that size is very appealing to me so I’m not really questioning that part.