One of the reasons I love my 1985 Supra is for its mechanical and electrical simplicity. There's no CANBus. Wires and switches operate all the electrical (not e

One of the reasons I love my 1985 Supra is for its mechanical and electrical simplicity. There's no CANBus. Wires and switches operate all the electrical (not electronic) components directly. The tailgate has a mechanical lock. The door locks are mechanical with electric actuators. The only electronics are in the engine controller and the beautiful digital dashboard (with VFD meters for speed, fuel and temperature, and LEDs for the tachometer). Probably a very good reason why the car's electronics are still working 30 years later is because they are very isolated. The engine ECU doesn't need to talk to anything, just receive signals from the engine sensors and send fuel/spark data to the components. The dashboard sends a simple speed signal to the cruise control ECU and nothing else. In isolation, any of these components can fail and it will only disable the related systems. I have had a complete failure of the engine controller, but that turned out to be a very simple electrical relay cutting all power intermittently. I can trace any failure with nothing more than a multimeter. Modern vehicles are not just computers on wheels, they're entire networks of computers on wheels. And all these systems are intrinsically interlinked. A failure in any one system can be enough to either stop the car working, or forcing it into limp-home mode. And you as the owner have no hope of fixing it. Even if you can plug a diagnostic computer into the OBD interface, the best you can usually do is poke around the engine controller. You need specialist hardware to interface with the other systems such as brakes and airbags. My Supra is long past the point Toyota will support it (although to their credit, I can still get a surprising number of parts). Looking at smart devices these days, manufacturers stop caring the moment the product is even released. Support gets pushed to one side and the successor takes priority. Cars have a lot more established history with this, but I'm sure that, with almost every major manufacturer having their cars purely electronic (even the ICE-powered ones), by the time the car gets to be the age of my Supra, there is going to be no hope for maintaining them. Some people view any consumer product more than a few years old as 'antiquated'. I don't get this mentality; the sign of a quality product should be longevity. Sure, there needs to be improvement, but as manufacturers basically tell us 'no, only we can support this car for you, and it's going to be expensive', and then five, ten, fifteen years down the line, 'nope, we don't care any more, buy a new one', people who like to get the most out of their vehicles are going to hate living in this era.