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Anecdotes are always a mistake in these situations. You might have better luck with your tractor, which isn’t a car, but the average age of cars on America’s ro
by ashtonkem 5y ago
Anecdotes are always a mistake in these situations. You might have better luck with your tractor, which isn’t a car, but the average age of cars on America’s roads has been rising for decades. Your experience is, frankly, an outlier.
Also, comparing tractors with cars is an extremely dubious proposition; these are different vehicles with different engineering constraints, uses, and consumer expectations. How many OEMs for cars still make parts for the 1978 vehicles? Hell, what percentage of Americans have the space, knowledge, and interest to build up a garage to service their own vehicles?
- newsclues 5y agoJust wait until the new generation of cars with touchscreens everywhere instead of buttons and knobs for control are old.
- ashtonkem 5y agoDo you have any actual data to back up the idea that touch screen interfaces are inherently short lived?
- Eduard 5y agoSo many smartphones with digitizers having dead zones after just four years....
- ashtonkem 5y agoCar screens are built to different tolerances than cell phones. In particular they must survive a much more harsh environment than most other consumer electronics. This is precisely why the first Tesla screens were so shocking in their size and so unreliable; when Elon Musk found out that he couldn’t get auto screens that large he demanded they use consumer screens, which yellowed and failed due to the heat cars are exposed to. Car screens and normal screens are not the same, at all. This situation is exactly the same as the tractor example above. You’re taking a similar but different object built for different use cases and different financial and engineering constraints, and declaring that the outcome of one is predictive of another.
- newsclues 5y agoI’m not referring to the big screens but the replacement of buttons and knobs with multiple small ones. Like putting touch screens on the steering wheel!
- ashtonkem 5y agoHow many vehicles do that though? I can only think of Tesla, and they’re already pretty notoriously unreliable straight from the factory. All of the vehicles I’ve been in, including at trade shows, had physical buttons for most of the vehicle functions, and touch screens for secondary and tertiary operations.
- newsclues 5y agoFerrari is the only one I can remember but it’s a trend car reviewers have negatively remarked upon
- nicbou 5y agoWhy do you attribute this improvement to computers? There were many parallel improvements in manufacturing that are fairly well documented and taught about.