4 ms·

I've been driving a 27-year-old Range Rover for a year. Sometimes I need to hold the ignition key close to the receiver in the rear window for it to lock. Somet

I've been driving a 27-year-old Range Rover for a year. Sometimes I need to hold the ignition key close to the receiver in the rear window for it to lock. Sometimes I need to jiggle the steering lock a little for the flappy door to close and tell it the key is out, before it will lock. Sometimes I need to poke the "petrol flap" button a couple of times before the flap will open. Sometimes the radio doesn't really get a good signal on Radio 4 and I need to press the SEEK button on the steering wheel. The dashboard displays were fuzzy and hard-to-read, but I wiped the dust off and they were fine. They did go totally dark once when I was fiddling with the brightness control, but I turned them back on. It has never need rebooted. It has never forgotten how to be fuelled up. It has never just turned off all its electronics at speed on the motorway. The UI doesn't show any information beyond speed, engine RPM, coolant temperature and fuel level, unless there's some sort of fault indication up. I am really not convinced about buying a modern car. (My last car was also a 27-year-old Range Rover, which I still have)

callalex 4y ago
The crash safety of a modern car is just not even in the same world as older cars. That’s why I put up with all the jankiness. You can drive perfectly and still end up in a bad collision that was someone else’s fault.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  This is sufficiently new that it meets modern crash safety standards, but is much safer than modern cars because it doesn't have all the distracting crap in it.
txdv 4y ago
I drive a basic 2014 jetta with an old analog media center, I really never faced an issue where the car got into a faulty state.
doctor_eval 4y ago
Any ICE vehicle can blow a belt, take out the power steering and brakes, and leave you struggling to maintain control, at any time. Let’s not get overly nostalgic for the incredible mechanical complexity of ICEs.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  There are no cars where the brakes are powered by the drive belt. Not even the very old hydropneumatic Citroëns, with a belt-driven hydraulic pump - because they could go for 20 or 30 miles on the stored pressure in the brake accumulator. If you can't control a car with dead power steering, you can't control a car. Power steering only makes a difference at parking speeds.
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    If you blow a belt or one of another thousand things go wrong, and the engine quits, then there’s no power to drive the steering. In a relatively large vehicle - say, a VW Amarok - power steering provides significant moment on the steering that is immediately and unexpectedly removed when motive power is lost. While the car is arguably controllable, I was shocked at how difficult it was for me to maintain directional control when it happened to me, and I’m a pretty big guy. In fact, in my case I just stalled it. The twin turbo 4cyl engine had a very steep power curve and it was easy to pull the clutch at just the wrong RPM, before the turbo kicked in. Especially if I had been driving something else. So - there’s a failure mode triggered by simple ergonomics. The combination of an unexpected stall during acceleration also presents a heavy driver workload, as I discovered more than once. The brakes are also powered by the engine and it requires very significant additional force to stop a large car whose engine has just quit unexpectedly. I’m not sure that everyone who drives such a vehicle could recover if the failure happened, say, at a busy intersection. All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t be nostalgic about ICEs. There are far more failure modes for them, all of which can lead to engine failure and subsequent controllability issues.
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      My car is a second-generation Range Rover that weighs around 2.5 tonnes. Without power steering it's very hard to steer at parking speeds, and absolutely no different at all above about 20mph. No vehicle has brakes "powered by the engine". I'm not sure if you're maybe not quite explaining what you mean clearly there.

callalex 4y ago

The crash safety of a modern car is just not even in the same world as older cars. That’s why I put up with all the jankiness. You can drive perfectly and still end up in a bad collision that was someone else’s fault.

Gordonjcp 4y ago
This is sufficiently new that it meets modern crash safety standards, but is much safer than modern cars because it doesn't have all the distracting crap in it.

txdv 4y ago

I drive a basic 2014 jetta with an old analog media center, I really never faced an issue where the car got into a faulty state.

doctor_eval 4y ago

Any ICE vehicle can blow a belt, take out the power steering and brakes, and leave you struggling to maintain control, at any time. Let’s not get overly nostalgic for the incredible mechanical complexity of ICEs.

Gordonjcp 4y ago
There are no cars where the brakes are powered by the drive belt. Not even the very old hydropneumatic Citroëns, with a belt-driven hydraulic pump - because they could go for 20 or 30 miles on the stored pressure in the brake accumulator. If you can't control a car with dead power steering, you can't control a car. Power steering only makes a difference at parking speeds.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  If you blow a belt or one of another thousand things go wrong, and the engine quits, then there’s no power to drive the steering. In a relatively large vehicle - say, a VW Amarok - power steering provides significant moment on the steering that is immediately and unexpectedly removed when motive power is lost. While the car is arguably controllable, I was shocked at how difficult it was for me to maintain directional control when it happened to me, and I’m a pretty big guy. In fact, in my case I just stalled it. The twin turbo 4cyl engine had a very steep power curve and it was easy to pull the clutch at just the wrong RPM, before the turbo kicked in. Especially if I had been driving something else. So - there’s a failure mode triggered by simple ergonomics. The combination of an unexpected stall during acceleration also presents a heavy driver workload, as I discovered more than once. The brakes are also powered by the engine and it requires very significant additional force to stop a large car whose engine has just quit unexpectedly. I’m not sure that everyone who drives such a vehicle could recover if the failure happened, say, at a busy intersection. All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t be nostalgic about ICEs. There are far more failure modes for them, all of which can lead to engine failure and subsequent controllability issues.
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    My car is a second-generation Range Rover that weighs around 2.5 tonnes. Without power steering it's very hard to steer at parking speeds, and absolutely no different at all above about 20mph. No vehicle has brakes "powered by the engine". I'm not sure if you're maybe not quite explaining what you mean clearly there.