> the lifetime of a modern car is only 12 years on average This is the number you'll find, but I don't think it's actually fair to modern cars as it's dragged

> the lifetime of a modern car is only 12 years on average This is the number you'll find, but I don't think it's actually fair to modern cars as it's dragged down by older cars. I can't find anything that provides a good prediction of modern car lifetime based on failure rates, but given that the average car age has been slowly increasing for a while, I expect newer cars to have longer lifetimes than older cars (and while I expect this is due to the cars being built in ways that improve lifetimes, there could be all kinds of other reasons for that increase: better maintenance, higher tolerance for old cars, lower affordability of new cars, cars seeing less use, etc).