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>Other than missing lane assist and adaptive cruise, I see no useful features that have emerged in cars for nearly 20 years. You're forgetting fuel economy and
by Arizhel 9y ago
>Other than missing lane assist and adaptive cruise, I see no useful features that have emerged in cars for nearly 20 years.
You're forgetting fuel economy and crashworthiness. Fuel economy has improved greatly in the last 20 years; I drive a car that 20 years ago with this much power and weight would probably have gotten less than 30mpg on the highway, this one gets 40. Of course, gas prices are low so you might not care about this. But crash protection has also gotten far better in the last 15-20 years. You can walk away from a crash in a modern car that would have maimed or killed you in your 15yo one (even for a car of the same rough size).
>Electric cars are about it, but the environmental impact of effectively throwing away a perfectly good car to get a new electric car defeats the purpose.
Wrong. You're not "throwing away a perfectly good car", you're reselling that car on the used market to someone else, and in the end (assuming the market doesn't expand) this results eventually in some really old POS car somewhere being junked, which is good because it's pouring out emissions and wasting fuel. More people buying new cars increases the supply of newer cars on the used market, which helps push the oldest and crappiest cars out of usage. Of course, there's limits to this, but the point is: don't feel bad about getting rid of a "perfectly good car"; it's going to continue getting used, just not by you, and theoretically results in another car that really isn't "perfectly good" getting finally retired.
The thing that really sucks here is that, in some states at least, you're highly penalized for buying a new or newer car because of personal property taxes. They should just eliminate these taxes for all but luxury vehicles maybe, to encourage people to buy newer cars to improve safety and emissions. There's already a disincentive in higher insurance rates; we don't need to add to that with pointless taxes.
- jwong_ 9y agoThere was fuel economic cars 15-20 years ago, if you've forgotten. My car is 17 years old and gets 35 mpg mixed city/highway. Some got even more (civic HX).
- Arizhel 9y agoThe Civic HX would be illegal to sell now because it won't meet crash safety standards. That's the point: you can get a car now that weighs quite a bit more than that HX, performs far better in a crash, has significantly lower emissions, has much more passenger space, and still gets the same fuel economy roughly (i.e. a larger/heavier class of car is getting the same economy as an econocar that's now too small and unsafe to be sold).
- adrianN 9y agoMotors have gotten more efficient, but new cars weigh more. Those things just about cancel out.
- Arizhel 9y agoNo, they don't. Look at the fuel economy numbers (and then adjust because the testing methodology has gotten more stringent two times, one just recently and one in 2008 IIRC). New cars are a little heavier, and they still get significantly better economy.
- adrianN 9y agoThe last car I drove was built in the early nineties and used about 5l/100km gasoline in the city. There aren't many cars that use less fuel today.
- Retric 9y agoRelatively safe 2002 cars to now is not actually that big a jump in safty. There are some surpingly minor improvemts such as VSA being slightly better at preventing rollover, but that's very much an edge case and generally speaking a rounding error in terms of safety. The only significant new safty feature is automatic breaking but that generally has fairly minimal impact. On the other hand I think many people are more or less waiting for self driving cars, which may not be out soon but make minor improvements seem less relevant.
- Arizhel 9y agoThis is just plain wrong. Car chassis are much better designed now with better grades of steel and better design for managing crash energy. Crash-safety standards have also gone way up in that time. See here: https://www.wired.com/2017/02/watch-terrifyingly-bad-car-safety-just-20-years-ago/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/watch-terrifyingly-bad-car-saf... http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a11201/why-cars-are-safer-than-theyve-ever-been-17194116/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a11201/why-cars-are-saf...
- hueving 9y ago>Wrong. You're not "throwing away a perfectly good car", you're reselling that car on the used market to someone else You're overestimating the market for cars with >150k miles with lots of quirks that don't bother me (bad speakers, etc). There is a strong chance the car would not sell and would be parted out. The manufacturing of a new car has a large impact on the environment that I'm not sure is offset by the improved efficiency improvement to my relatively little driving (<10k yearly).