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posted by
martyb
on Wednesday December 19 2018, @04:34AM
from the now-they're-buying...trucks? dept.
from the now-they're-buying...trucks? dept.
General Motors has announced it's shuttering five production facilities and killing six vehicle platforms by the end of 2019 as it reallocates resources towards self-driving technologies and electric vehicles.
[...] North American car production hit 17.5 million vehicles in 2016, and dropped marginally to 17.2 million in 2017. Interesting, but perhaps not significant.
More telling are changes in driver behaviour. In North America, for example, fewer teens are getting driver's licences. In 1983, 92 per cent of teens were licensed, while by 2014, that number had dropped to 77 per cent. In Germany, the number of new licences issued to drivers aged 17 to 25 has dropped by 300,000 over the last 10 years.
Are we over our love affair with cars?
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @05:05AM (9 children)
Old(er) cars you can work on are fun. The new ones just aren't.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @05:25AM (5 children)
It can still be fun, you need to learn some new skills though.
New cars self-diagnose, which takes some of the art of being a good mechanic away. These days, the mechanic ( or "tech" if you prefer ) tends to just address
what the car's OBD-II system indicates is the fault, most often by simply replacing a defective part with a new part.
Mechanics who can diagnose a car's problems without using a computer are going to be increasingly rare, and the older cars which lack an OBD-II system will require a mechanic to actually understand the systems in the car. Such mechanics are literally "old school" and are retiring or dying off at a high rate. Good luck finding someone to repair an older car in the years to come, because people who have such knowledge will be increasingly scarce. Having said the preceding, there is a real joy in being able to understand the systems and use logic to diagnose problems. Unfortunately most of the people who would be best at such tasks won't end up working in a car repair shop - they will be working as engineers.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @05:45AM (3 children)
Cars without an OBD-II system are probably more than 20 years old now (it's been mandatory in the United States since 1996). Models worth repairing will be at least as hard to find as professional mechanics capable of servicing them. This is just normal market forces at work. Most cars don't last longer than a normal person's career anyway, so by the time all the old professionals die off nobody will be using any cars that require their services anyway. So there's no real problem here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @03:54PM (2 children)
"by the time all the old professionals die off nobody will be using any cars that require their services anyway. So there's no real problem here."
WRONG.
Obviously you don't have a clue about the market for older cars.
Take a look at the Bring A Trailer website.
And next time, when you don't know what you're talking about, shut the fuck up. bitch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @08:22PM
such a passion for antique vehicles!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday December 19 2018, @11:40PM
I just bought a 20year old diesel van. Craigslist. Because it had such an elegant design. So damm simple. The whole engine is pistons, gears, cams, pushrods. The only thing in it actually using electricity is its E4OD transmission, which will fall back to mechanical mode. Just last week, I finally got the powertain control module back online so I get more appropriate shifts. (I had a bad solder connection in the Programmable Speedometer/Odometer Module). This thing just gives me a lot of confidence that I can depend on it, which is a lot more than I can say I have for most of my later tech stuff that needs other permissions before it does what I wanted it to do.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Thursday December 20 2018, @12:51AM
I think he meant the fun to drive, not to maintain it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @08:17PM
Were fun, but with every year, and thanks to every overly irresponsible driver, it becomes a big harder to find somewhere to go out driving and actually enjoy your car.
Personally if it wasn't for the SUV culture in america, I would love to see keicars legalized here, so you could zip around at 55-65mph and find it an exciting drive, instead of boring with narrow lanes and some idiots dipping into your lane on 2 lane highways out in the mountains.
The city, well if you're doing anything stupid driving in the city now, expect an impersonal ticket, or a cop. There are cameras, both automated and realtime on every fourth intersection in my city in California now, and with every street light upgrade they are adding more. Pretty soon driving a car will be like a cell phone and your exact position will be tracked at all times.
I'm personally moving to an electric bicycle with regeneration and exchangable battery packs for long journeys. Expecting any privacy in America is a dead concept today. Just 30 years ago privacy was one of the greatest points of America over Communist Russia too. Thanks Americans, I'm real proud! You won the Battle against Russia and lost the war for Liberty.
(Score: 2) by aclarke on Thursday December 20 2018, @12:09PM (1 child)
I have a 1986 diesel Land Rover with >500k km on it (Mm?). Plus a few '90s vehicles. Much as I love the old truck, I'm getting rid of it. I don't have time to work on it, and it needs work pretty much all the time, being 30 years old. My '90s vehicles have maybe 200k km on them and are all dead at this point (I was given them free so I figured what the heck). On the other hand, my '05 Volvo XC90 has 360k km on it and I know when I get in and turn the key it's going to work. OK there are a few rattles here and there and a couple pieces of plastic trim have cracked. But overall it's been fantastically dependable. My '17 PHEV of course just works, and if it didn't I'd call the dealer and they look after it.
I hope some day to have time to enjoy owning an old vehicle again, but I also see that although new vehicles are much more complex to work on, they're also much more dependable and last a lot longer. That's another reason why people are buying fewer cars: the old ones still work fine whereas a decade ago, an older car from the early '90s was probably utter crap, especially if you were foolish enough to buy something from GM.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 20 2018, @03:30PM
Some makes and models just exceed the norm. '76 Chevy Nova was the cheapest car I ever owned, despite having financed it. Other cars gobble money from day one, while others give you a couple years dependable service, then start gobbling money.
Not only are there exceptional makes and models - even in a family of dogs, you'll find an occasional good car that just shines.
I think that's why when the antique car people go to a meet, you don't see a whole lot of any particular car.