4 ms·

The quality argument is a bit irrelevant because a 1990 Camry would be illegal to sell if it were made today. Obviously it's a good thing that safety, efficienc

The quality argument is a bit irrelevant because a 1990 Camry would be illegal to sell if it were made today. Obviously it's a good thing that safety, efficiency and emissions standards are going up, but those things aren't free.

jfoutz 5y ago
I can only recall 3 forced upgrades, passive passenger restraints, which turned out to be airbags. Minimum MPG, across all cars sold (SUVs could be worse as long as other models improved). and crash survival, which turned out to be crumple zones. I wouldn't say irrelevant, but maybe "weak signal". I agree wholeheartedly that there are other aspects (like those regulations) that were not free. But a bunch of other stuff came along that was probably about the same price. Better paint. Plastic bits more resistant to being out in the sun. Navigation. I would claim, Corolla targeted the same market. Inexpensive sedan, probably a family's first car, and you could plan on that car being one of the kids' first car. So it probably targeted the same proportion of budget. On the other hand, the size of that market wasn't constant. There are a zillion confounding factors. I thought a little about gas itself, which I don't recall much regulation change around (but I might be forgetting) but I'd think gas in 1990 is about the same as gas in 2021. Seems like it was about 90 cents? just about 3 dollars now? (hand wavy numbers). Of course there was a war in the interim, and oil shale became feasible for a while. So that has its own confounding factors. Everything is changing all the time. Inflation seems like a thing, but it kinda feels like using epicycles to describe movements of the stars. It kinda works, but there is more going on in underlying system. I'm far from an expert, hell, this is mostly me relying on my selective memory. It feels like stuff is more expensive. but younger me might have had more energy and lower standards. I dunno. I guess this comment is just armchair observations. I think there is something going on, but it's a really complicated system, and I'm not Kepler.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >I can only recall 3 forced upgrades, passive passenger restraints, which turned out to be airbags. Minimum MPG, across all cars sold (SUVs could be worse as long as other models improved). and crash survival, which turned out to be crumple zones. This is a bad way to frame it. All of those things have dozens to hundreds of downstream effects on the rest of the system. Large components (say nothing of sub assemblies) of a 1990 car could not be used in any practical way to build a road legal 2021 car (without comically inefficient workarounds) because the design revisions needed for modern regulatory compliance between then and now are so extensive. Heck, the physical dimensions of a typical 1990 car probably preclude compliance with current pedestrian safety requirements. There were also dozens of minor revisions to the regulatory standards cars must meet in that time (headlight performance, noise emissions, etc).
  - dghlsakjg 5y ago
    FYI, In North America there aren't pedestrian safety standards from the NHTSA.
- lostapathy 5y ago
  Maybe illegal is too strong of a word, but in practice "the market" demands much safer cars than it did 3 decades ago, and that costs money. If you build cheaper cars but nobody can insure them economically, for example, you're not gonna get a lot of takers.
imtringued 5y ago
You can buy used cars and keep maintaining them. The car I bought is so cheap it barely even makes financial sense to repair it after 10 years, it's financially better to get the latest model once they hit the used car market.

jfoutz 5y ago

I can only recall 3 forced upgrades, passive passenger restraints, which turned out to be airbags. Minimum MPG, across all cars sold (SUVs could be worse as long as other models improved). and crash survival, which turned out to be crumple zones. I wouldn't say irrelevant, but maybe "weak signal". I agree wholeheartedly that there are other aspects (like those regulations) that were not free. But a bunch of other stuff came along that was probably about the same price. Better paint. Plastic bits more resistant to being out in the sun. Navigation. I would claim, Corolla targeted the same market. Inexpensive sedan, probably a family's first car, and you could plan on that car being one of the kids' first car. So it probably targeted the same proportion of budget. On the other hand, the size of that market wasn't constant. There are a zillion confounding factors. I thought a little about gas itself, which I don't recall much regulation change around (but I might be forgetting) but I'd think gas in 1990 is about the same as gas in 2021. Seems like it was about 90 cents? just about 3 dollars now? (hand wavy numbers). Of course there was a war in the interim, and oil shale became feasible for a while. So that has its own confounding factors. Everything is changing all the time. Inflation seems like a thing, but it kinda feels like using epicycles to describe movements of the stars. It kinda works, but there is more going on in underlying system. I'm far from an expert, hell, this is mostly me relying on my selective memory. It feels like stuff is more expensive. but younger me might have had more energy and lower standards. I dunno. I guess this comment is just armchair observations. I think there is something going on, but it's a really complicated system, and I'm not Kepler.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>I can only recall 3 forced upgrades, passive passenger restraints, which turned out to be airbags. Minimum MPG, across all cars sold (SUVs could be worse as long as other models improved). and crash survival, which turned out to be crumple zones. This is a bad way to frame it. All of those things have dozens to hundreds of downstream effects on the rest of the system. Large components (say nothing of sub assemblies) of a 1990 car could not be used in any practical way to build a road legal 2021 car (without comically inefficient workarounds) because the design revisions needed for modern regulatory compliance between then and now are so extensive. Heck, the physical dimensions of a typical 1990 car probably preclude compliance with current pedestrian safety requirements. There were also dozens of minor revisions to the regulatory standards cars must meet in that time (headlight performance, noise emissions, etc).
- dghlsakjg 5y ago
  FYI, In North America there aren't pedestrian safety standards from the NHTSA.
lostapathy 5y ago
Maybe illegal is too strong of a word, but in practice "the market" demands much safer cars than it did 3 decades ago, and that costs money. If you build cheaper cars but nobody can insure them economically, for example, you're not gonna get a lot of takers.

imtringued 5y ago

You can buy used cars and keep maintaining them. The car I bought is so cheap it barely even makes financial sense to repair it after 10 years, it's financially better to get the latest model once they hit the used car market.