I’m doing my part to keep those stats up with a 2015 electric, a 2005 gas, and a 1966 gas. Setting aside the ‘66 as a different category of car usage, the 2005 Honda is quite reliable and low maintenance. It’s bound to last another 10 unless rust gets it first, which seems 50/50 at this point.
Used cars are an incredible deal compared to brand new cars. I’m glad people love that new car smell and feel; otherwise I wouldn’t have any used cars to buy.
> Why it matters: The longer people hold onto their internal-combustion cars, the longer it will take to replace those vehicles with newer, more environmentally sustainable technology.
Continuing to use the ICE car you already have is the more environmentally friendly option over manufacturing a battery powered car and using it.
Not sure how this works out. I mean, if you were throwing your car into the trash, definitely. But presumably you'd instead be selling it to someone who needs one, right?
I had a similar debate about the 'wastefulness' of upgrading phones each year. As long as previous phone is going to someone else, was any more waste necessarily created?
I feel like I must be missing something, because of how prevalent such arguments are.
It's still marginally more wasteful because there's more supply in the used market and with enough of the same decision in aggregate, the used market would go from using phones until they're 5 years old to using them until they're 4 years old, because that's what people could afford with $100. Like if there's so much supply in used market because most people buy new, then there's a lot more people who don't prioritize reselling their used item at all because it's only worth $20 (at the extreme)
When you sell something the price goes down. This trickles all the way down the line, and at the end of the line some marginal product (car or phone in your example) switches from "valuable enough to use" into "it's cheap enough to be trash now".
That's a big "if" though. Phones get held onto for a few years, then just get thrown into the trash (and not even as e-waste) because they're only worth a token amount, if anything at all. Cars, on the other hand, are a) large enough you can't just throw them out with the kitchen waste, and b) have value, even just as scrap or a tax write off.
There is definitely some case where this isn't true. An indestructible 8 mpg truck will definitely be more polluting than an EV using solar electricity that lasts 30 years.
But mostly, I agree, and think the cutoff is somewhere around 25 mpg. Our first priorities should not junking 13 year old 30 mpg ICE, but instead greatly reducing the number of 17 mpg vehicles that are still being sold today, especially with no commercial utility like a 4runner.
I'm not sure if your indestructible 8mpg truck example was facetious, but you've actually, very accurately, described the Grumman Long-Life Vehicle - also known as the truck that delivers mail in most of the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_LLV.
I wasn't aware those are getting 8 - 10mpg in city, wow. Ya, I'm glad they're replacing those soon.
This link referenced a study where hybrids take the equivalent of 325 gallons to produce[0]. This one is 474 for ICE[1] Let's say an EV is 500 - 1,000 gallons of gasoline energy then.
One year of those Grumman LLV on the road, 1,500 gallons at 12k miles/yr is easily out-polluting the entire production and use of an EV replacement.
> I wasn't aware those are getting 8 - 10mpg in city, wow. Ya, I'm glad they're replacing those soon.
Most ICE vehicles will be in single digits MPG if all you did was repeatedly accelerate and brake at a frequency of curbside mailboxes. It's an ideal for EVs scenario.
Hybrids do pretty well. A lot of the hybrid mpg improvement comes from regen. braking and engine stopping during city driving, not highway. Prius would get 40 - 50 mpg in those conditions.
Besides hybrids, this isn't true of at least some gas only vehicles also. I tested this once a few years ago when I had to drive like that for half a day in a non-hybrid 2008 Honda Civic. I filled up before and after to get the MPG and was amazed at how high it was. I think it was high 20's IIRC. The A/C was running the entire time as well.
> An indestructible 8 mpg truck will definitely be more polluting than an EV using solar electricity that lasts 30 years.
I suppose it depends on how many miles that indestructible truck drives, but I presume on the first day of the 31st year, the moment you buy a new EV to replace the old one, the environmental impact flips the other way? Surely everything that goes into manufacturing a new car is dirty enough to offset that 8 mpg.
My old F150 isn’t very fuel efficient, but it’s used solely to haul things and use the pickup bed. I probably put less than 2000 miles on it a year, which is part of my consideration for tolerating its poor MPG. (18.3 MPG the last time I measured.) I think this is something that has to come into consideration as well. I bought a very old truck and use it sparingly. It uses far less gas than your average commuter car, solely due to how little it’s driven. Given that I bought the truck for $2500 dollars, there is zero chance these days that I could get a comparable vehicle for anywhere near the price. When it finally breaks down, I probably won’t try to buy something ancient again, but I probably also will have spend close to $30k.
I'm going to old onto my old ICE car as long as I can. It has almost no electronics it has no over the air update system and I own it and have full control over it.
It seems every new car out there is a smart, electrified out the wahzoo abomination that needs regular updates. I work enough in software to know I want as little software as possible in my vehicle.
> I work enough in software to know I want as little software as possible in my vehicle.
The old joke about how the only piece of technology software engineers keep in their homes is a 15-year-old printer, and a loaded gun next to it in case it starts making any funny noises ;-)
I have one. It has electronics (that I've added as upgrades), but they aren't critical to function. However, I'm not sure how robust the electrical system is to EMP since it's new enough to have an alternator (which uses diodes for rectification), and needs electricity to operate its ignition system.
Only a vehicle with a mechanically injected diesel would probably qualify for surviving a true EMP event.
EV’s keep getting more environmentally friendly as for example the electricity used to manufacture them come from low carbon sources.
Recycling a X year ICE means ~26 - X year of pollution savings, but you also get ~X years of normal EV usage. Aka your not paying the full cost of an EV just for a few years of savings, your paying a fraction of an EV for that fraction in savings.
Assuming the best case of say high mileage and 100% wind/solar power the savings could be quite significant.
Environmental concerns are not a reason why people own really old cars. Cost is. They'd buy something better but they can't and they are stuck with an old car.
Eventually, you get a trickle down effect with EVs as well. They can last quite long and the new ones are gradually getting cheaper. At some point the cumulative maintenance cost and fuel cost start canceling the benefits of hanging on to your old ICE car. There will be plenty of relatively good ones to swap it with for a while as people abandon their ICE cars with more affordable EVs. So the good news, there's going to some supply of relatively new but cheap ICE cars for some time to come. The better news is that at some point those will be competing with old EVs and the EVs will be the more economical option and you'll have the option to do both.
However, a lot of people with older cars don't have the option to spend on the more economical car though. Old cars are cheap to buy but not to drive. They need repairs, burn more fuel, and can break down on you. It's a form of poverty when that is all you can afford.
In the same way people own fridges or washing machines that are cheap but inefficient and cost them a fortune in energy cost. The fancy energy efficient models would save them money. But it requires having the cash on hand to buy one. Also people are bad at math.
That really is a somewhat incredible statistic to me, not because it's surprising given my own empirical evidence, but because of all the things one does in/with a car for years at a time. My car has been driven across the country multiple times, survived fairly extreme cold and heat multiple times a year, and still it shows no signs of stopping. It's always been amazing to me how long cars last considering what most people put them through.
And with how complicated they’ve become. Pretty much all for the sake of MPG. Although frankly I think we crossed a turning point with the trend towards turbos in everything. A more powerful v6 or v8 is going to be more durable on average than a smaller and more complicated engine trying to eak out performance.
Youll see 20 or 30 year old crown vics. I dont think youll see any turbo charged 2023 Tauruses in 20 years.
> Youll see 20 or 30 year old crown vics. I dont think youll see any turbo charged 2023 Tauruses in 20 years.
The Ford Taurus went out of production in 2019, so surely you won’t see any 23 models now or twenty years from now.
Turbo charged cars typically don’t last long because turbo charging is a harsh process. That being said, I don’t think the Taurus was the kind of car that would be turbo charged.
Turbos are everywhere. My Honda CRV has a turbo. Ford puts turbos on so many of their engines, and indeed, for several of the model years before it was discontinued, the Taurus had a turbocharged engine.
I'd say more complexity has been added for the sake of perceived safety and convenience. Sure a lot of complexity was added for efficiency but there no reason the entire car down to the turn signals needs to operate on a databus with a single point of failure who's replacement averages 10% of the price of the car.
People often complain that modern consumer goods don't last as long as they used to but that's certainly not true for cars. Modern cars last dramatically longer than cars from the 20th century. It's kind of amazing.
They can last longer but then die more abruptly, because they were designed with a more definite planned obsolescence and many people didn't bother to maintain them correctly before so the designers optimised for that. To make an extreme car analogy, it's like an engine that will last 200k miles with no oil changes but slowly destroys itself irreparably in doing so, instead of one that needs an oil change every 5k miles but will last 10-20x longer before only a mild overhaul with cheap replacement parts (mainly soft ones like seals) is necessary.
Any statistics to back this up? It would be incredibly difficult to in aggregate increase the average lifespan of cars dramatically and consistently while reducing the long tail of the lifetime. So this claim smells like a negativity bias / rosy retrospection.
Improvements in corrosion management, better machining, better materials, and competition from automakers providing longer and longer warranties has driven up the number of miles you can expect a new car to drive before encountering major problems. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/automobiles/as-cars-are-k...
...but when you do encounter major problems, they are definitely major.
That's the point I'm trying to make: new cars are lasting longer because they were designed with a more definite lifespan (and all the "improvements" can be seen as a way to make that lifespan more definite.) Parts being made to tighter tolerances means far less margin and variation. The "bathtub curve" is being made sharper at both ends.
The components that fail most often in gas-powered cars are timing belts, alternators, brake pads, radiators, gearboxes. Electric vehicles don't have any of these (well, they have brake pads, but they don't use them). There's reason to suspect that EVs should last much longer, on average, than ICE vehicles. The only component that EVs have that ICEs don't is the battery, and the cells, while in high demand, are dead simple. They're all just standard li-ion 18650s wired together.
Which is to say, who needs to buy a new EV? Refurbish your old one by changing the battery once a decade, and once in a while your suspension will need replaced.
Tesla bought a battery startup and made grand claims as to revolutionary new battery chemistry, but last I checked (a few months ago) they had yet to actually ship anything other than the same batteries they always have.
Batteries are in the top, if not the top, failures in an ICE. The role it plays is different but it’s definitely still there and is even replaced as it starts showing signs of aging.
> The average electric car will need a new battery by then
No it won't. Some will, but most won't. EV's have been around long enough to have longevity data, and a 200,000 mile batteries are averaging well over 80% capacity. (Unless you have a Leaf).
I’ve got a 13 and 25 year old truck. They don’t seem to make cheap, simple cars anymore. I have the money to buy something newer, but each time I get excited I look at l the electronic crap in new cars, the insane dealer markups, and the general rising price of new cars. I think I’ll just make these last as long as I can.
Mine is almost 25 as well. When I read stories like this [1] from 3 days about Toyota leaking car location data and videos, it reinforces my desire to have as few computer chips in my car as possible.
I don't know what your definition of "cheap" is, but a brand new Kia Rio is $17k base. That would be approximately $4.5k in 1980, or just a bit higher than a base Pinto.
The problem with "simple" is that everyone uses a different definition and there's a dramatic asymmetry in how people treat missing vs extraneous features. You probably won't reject a vehicle for having Bluetooth, but many people won't buy a car without it for example. A simple car also won't convert someone who wants a truck, nor will it convert the person who wants to fix it in his garage with only a wrench set because it still has to comply with safety and efficiency regs that require electronics.
Another issue is that you're not actually paying the full development cost of your vehicle. Development costs are amortized over multiple trims, models, platforms, and even manufacturers. It's likely that a "simpler" vehicle would wind up costing more due to more custom development and fewer economies of scale.
Even in the last 10 years, new car prices have skewed higher. It’s not as if there are _zero_ cheap cars left, but the field is heavily narrowed. We almost had a cheap pickup truck, but 1) it’s got a 4.5’ bed, and 2) no one can actually buy one.
WRT to simplicity, I hear you. Given modern regulations and cost margins it may not be possible to see a simple, basic car or truck ever again. I’m not suggesting this is the manufacturer’s fault, but simply that they’re not offering anything I want to buy.
Engine control and monitoring is the only place I want electronics. If I want more, just give me a smartphone holder that integrates with the car. Maybe there is an app for the car but even that might be too much, IMO.
1) those electronics don’t age well.
2) my smartphone already does all of the things I could possibly want a touch panel to do and I’m already familiar with it.
3) why does my car need software updates? At most, it’s a peripheral.
4) just give me nice unique knobs and buttons for critical things like environmental controls, signals, wipers etc. I don’t ever want to look/tap/swipe/etc to do these things.
5) shiny things I can’t easily move/remove in my field of vision are horrible while driving.
EV battery is degrading over time - a replacement costs ... between 5000-20.000$ [1]. I am not sure that we have objective data on the scale of this issue.
I always found it hilarious that sci-fi movies set in the late 21st and later centuries would have late models 90s-2000s era automobiles in them. Scene: The year is 2080, the protagonist pulls up in a 2013 Camry, with "sci-fi bits" bolted on. Obviously this is due to production budget constraints. But it did snap you out of the distance of this future world.
But I guess if the article is correct a car built in 2020 may still be drivable in 2050+.
There will probably still be a handful of '80s-'00s cars running in 2050+. There are some bulletproof Toyotas and Hondas out there.
You might have to replace the frame every few decades as it rusts, but that is possible with body-on-frame construction. They're also simple enough to be maintainable and repairable until their ECUs croak - maybe even then, with something like speeduino.
If you want, you can still pick up a cheap one from a dry, warm area and make your own car of Theseus. It's not cheaper than running a new car after the initial purchase price, of course.
All things considered, my mid 2000's scion gets 30mpg and I barely use it in the summer. Great car, fits lots of stuff in the back and the 100mm X 4 bolt pattern gets me a cheap wheel platform to swap out winter and summer wheels (Killer feature for the midwest).
I drive a nearly 20 year old Subaru Legacy. It was less than $8,000 when I bought it, has leather seats, a sunroof, and a 6 speed manual transmission. Aside from the inevitable Subaru head gasket failure, it has no foreseeable major failure points with regular maintenance.
Every time I consider going back to a newer car, specifically an EV, I’m reminded that in the Australian market, the entry level seems to be around $50,000 with only one or two low quality options lower than that.
I just can’t stomach $50,000 on a car the same quality as my $8,000 one when it still runs and I enjoy driving it, and I’m not willing to sacrifice comfort and quality to buy something cheaper, so I’ll need to wait for a used market to develop.
At the same time I worry that when the new EVs reach similar prices used, they’ll be waste due to prohibitively expensive battery replacements.
All this is to say I hope hydrogen fuel cells become a thing because in Australia with the distances I regularly drive, a range-compromised used EV is not much good to me.
I own a 16yo VW Golf 5.
235000 kms and still has original clutch.
Internal buttons and textile are falling apart, but mechanically speaking my Golf 5 is better than same price level Golf 8. For example, I have multilink rear suspensions with a 102hp engine, now you must buy 150hp engine version at least. Hood now is kept open with a simple manual stick, my Golf has an automatic hydraulic one.
Yes, I don't have all those fancies electronic stuff etc, but I drive a car, not a smartphone, if I have to pay more to have less, mechanically speaking, no thanks.
Fearmongering PR for the auto industry to drive new car sales.
Using an old car is better for the environment than making a new one, electric or not. And you still have to get the energy for an EV from somewhere. All the tech does is change the supply chain a little bit and centralize the power production so that governments can better steer a shift to clean energy.
I personally will never drive an EV, if they come with all this extra crap like reverse cameras and connectivity.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadUsed cars are an incredible deal compared to brand new cars. I’m glad people love that new car smell and feel; otherwise I wouldn’t have any used cars to buy.
Continuing to use the ICE car you already have is the more environmentally friendly option over manufacturing a battery powered car and using it.
I had a similar debate about the 'wastefulness' of upgrading phones each year. As long as previous phone is going to someone else, was any more waste necessarily created?
I feel like I must be missing something, because of how prevalent such arguments are.
You may not do it yourself, but somebody is going to eventually throw that car away.
But mostly, I agree, and think the cutoff is somewhere around 25 mpg. Our first priorities should not junking 13 year old 30 mpg ICE, but instead greatly reducing the number of 17 mpg vehicles that are still being sold today, especially with no commercial utility like a 4runner.
This link referenced a study where hybrids take the equivalent of 325 gallons to produce[0]. This one is 474 for ICE[1] Let's say an EV is 500 - 1,000 gallons of gasoline energy then.
One year of those Grumman LLV on the road, 1,500 gallons at 12k miles/yr is easily out-polluting the entire production and use of an EV replacement.
[0]https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/green-life/2013/10/ask-mr-...
[1]https://www.motorbiscuit.com/how-much-energy-to-build-a-car/
Most ICE vehicles will be in single digits MPG if all you did was repeatedly accelerate and brake at a frequency of curbside mailboxes. It's an ideal for EVs scenario.
I suppose it depends on how many miles that indestructible truck drives, but I presume on the first day of the 31st year, the moment you buy a new EV to replace the old one, the environmental impact flips the other way? Surely everything that goes into manufacturing a new car is dirty enough to offset that 8 mpg.
I've seen links for 500 gallons gasoline for car production, let's say safely 1,000 for an EV.
8mpg at 12k miles/year is 1,500 gallons, and over 30 years, 45k gallons of gasoline.
An EV will be produced at 1k and then for the foreseeable future be charged with excess solar energy during the day mostly. That doesn't seem close.
It seems every new car out there is a smart, electrified out the wahzoo abomination that needs regular updates. I work enough in software to know I want as little software as possible in my vehicle.
The old joke about how the only piece of technology software engineers keep in their homes is a 15-year-old printer, and a loaded gun next to it in case it starts making any funny noises ;-)
Only a vehicle with a mechanically injected diesel would probably qualify for surviving a true EMP event.
Recycling a X year ICE means ~26 - X year of pollution savings, but you also get ~X years of normal EV usage. Aka your not paying the full cost of an EV just for a few years of savings, your paying a fraction of an EV for that fraction in savings.
Assuming the best case of say high mileage and 100% wind/solar power the savings could be quite significant.
You can't build your way out of congestion, and you can't buy your way out of car pollution.
Eventually, you get a trickle down effect with EVs as well. They can last quite long and the new ones are gradually getting cheaper. At some point the cumulative maintenance cost and fuel cost start canceling the benefits of hanging on to your old ICE car. There will be plenty of relatively good ones to swap it with for a while as people abandon their ICE cars with more affordable EVs. So the good news, there's going to some supply of relatively new but cheap ICE cars for some time to come. The better news is that at some point those will be competing with old EVs and the EVs will be the more economical option and you'll have the option to do both.
However, a lot of people with older cars don't have the option to spend on the more economical car though. Old cars are cheap to buy but not to drive. They need repairs, burn more fuel, and can break down on you. It's a form of poverty when that is all you can afford.
In the same way people own fridges or washing machines that are cheap but inefficient and cost them a fortune in energy cost. The fancy energy efficient models would save them money. But it requires having the cash on hand to buy one. Also people are bad at math.
Youll see 20 or 30 year old crown vics. I dont think youll see any turbo charged 2023 Tauruses in 20 years.
The Ford Taurus went out of production in 2019, so surely you won’t see any 23 models now or twenty years from now.
Turbo charged cars typically don’t last long because turbo charging is a harsh process. That being said, I don’t think the Taurus was the kind of car that would be turbo charged.
That's the point I'm trying to make: new cars are lasting longer because they were designed with a more definite lifespan (and all the "improvements" can be seen as a way to make that lifespan more definite.) Parts being made to tighter tolerances means far less margin and variation. The "bathtub curve" is being made sharper at both ends.
Which is to say, who needs to buy a new EV? Refurbish your old one by changing the battery once a decade, and once in a while your suspension will need replaced.
For now, at least... but hasn't Tesla already moved on to bigger cells?
No it won't. Some will, but most won't. EV's have been around long enough to have longevity data, and a 200,000 mile batteries are averaging well over 80% capacity. (Unless you have a Leaf).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35919133
The problem with "simple" is that everyone uses a different definition and there's a dramatic asymmetry in how people treat missing vs extraneous features. You probably won't reject a vehicle for having Bluetooth, but many people won't buy a car without it for example. A simple car also won't convert someone who wants a truck, nor will it convert the person who wants to fix it in his garage with only a wrench set because it still has to comply with safety and efficiency regs that require electronics.
Another issue is that you're not actually paying the full development cost of your vehicle. Development costs are amortized over multiple trims, models, platforms, and even manufacturers. It's likely that a "simpler" vehicle would wind up costing more due to more custom development and fewer economies of scale.
WRT to simplicity, I hear you. Given modern regulations and cost margins it may not be possible to see a simple, basic car or truck ever again. I’m not suggesting this is the manufacturer’s fault, but simply that they’re not offering anything I want to buy.
1) those electronics don’t age well.
2) my smartphone already does all of the things I could possibly want a touch panel to do and I’m already familiar with it.
3) why does my car need software updates? At most, it’s a peripheral.
4) just give me nice unique knobs and buttons for critical things like environmental controls, signals, wipers etc. I don’t ever want to look/tap/swipe/etc to do these things.
5) shiny things I can’t easily move/remove in my field of vision are horrible while driving.
> Their average age fell from 3.7 years in 2022 to 3.6 years in 2023, in part due to an upswing in new purchases.
[1] https://www.cars.com/articles/how-much-do-electric-car-batte...
But I guess if the article is correct a car built in 2020 may still be drivable in 2050+.
You might have to replace the frame every few decades as it rusts, but that is possible with body-on-frame construction. They're also simple enough to be maintainable and repairable until their ECUs croak - maybe even then, with something like speeduino.
If you want, you can still pick up a cheap one from a dry, warm area and make your own car of Theseus. It's not cheaper than running a new car after the initial purchase price, of course.
All things considered, my mid 2000's scion gets 30mpg and I barely use it in the summer. Great car, fits lots of stuff in the back and the 100mm X 4 bolt pattern gets me a cheap wheel platform to swap out winter and summer wheels (Killer feature for the midwest).
Every time I consider going back to a newer car, specifically an EV, I’m reminded that in the Australian market, the entry level seems to be around $50,000 with only one or two low quality options lower than that.
I just can’t stomach $50,000 on a car the same quality as my $8,000 one when it still runs and I enjoy driving it, and I’m not willing to sacrifice comfort and quality to buy something cheaper, so I’ll need to wait for a used market to develop.
At the same time I worry that when the new EVs reach similar prices used, they’ll be waste due to prohibitively expensive battery replacements.
All this is to say I hope hydrogen fuel cells become a thing because in Australia with the distances I regularly drive, a range-compromised used EV is not much good to me.
Using an old car is better for the environment than making a new one, electric or not. And you still have to get the energy for an EV from somewhere. All the tech does is change the supply chain a little bit and centralize the power production so that governments can better steer a shift to clean energy.
I personally will never drive an EV, if they come with all this extra crap like reverse cameras and connectivity.