Comment by adrian_b
1 month ago
I am not so sure that modern cars are more reliable.
My father has used a traditional (European) car (which had no electronics except the rectifier diode bridge for the alternator) for 35 years (1973-2008), during which the car has been used every day for commuting to his job (an almost 2-hour round trip in a city with very crowded traffic) and during vacations it was used mainly on difficult mountain roads. He stopped using the car when he was too old, not because the car became unusable.
The car has been repaired from time to time, but almost all the repairs were done by my father himself, alone and in a short time (he had the service manuals for that car, but he was not any kind of mechanic by profession, he was a physicist). In the very few cases when the car was taken to a repair shop, that was for replacing some rusted parts of the car body, and once for machining the cylinder block, after several hundred thousand miles.
And this was not some unusually good car, many others were like this, if their owners took good care of them.
I doubt that a Tesla would live that long, in similar conditions, though it would have the advantage that the owner would not have to be skilled in using his hands in order to avoid to waste time and money for minor repairs, like with that "analog" car.
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