No doubt.Tortoise wrote: ↑Mon Sep 16, 2019 3:28 pmAnd some of those landboats looked really cool!Kriegsspiel wrote: ↑Mon Sep 16, 2019 3:16 pm I'm guessing that the lack of ease in home maintenance is a trade off the car companies make in order to achieve optimized aerodynamics and weight. That would help explain why back when people worked on their own cars, they were landboats.
Worth it to the car companies? How would they profit from easier maintenance? The service center mechanics are employed by the dealerships, right? So the car manufacturers wouldn't see any labor savings that way.Aerodynamics are an important part of fuel efficiency, but if you drastically reduce maintenance costs with a simplified, standardized, modular design it might be worth losing some aerodynamics.
That's true.
Well, no arguments that those are the two things that cost people the most money. It's compounded when people spend too much on either when they don't have to. Seeing the average buyer spends $34,000 blows my mind. You know Nissan makes a sub-$10,000 vehicle? They don't sell it in America. At one time I was excited for Elio Motors, who were going to sell what amounted to a 3-wheel enclosed motorcycle for like $8,000 but they're having problems bringing it to market.We need affordable simple cars as badly as we do affordable housing in this country. The combination of horrible trends in these two sectors of our economy are causing people to bascially bankrupt themselves.
It frustrates me mostly because other than finding an old car and stripping it down and rebuilding it, I'm forced to choose from a lineup of cars that are all full of crap that I don't want and cost twice as much as I want to pay for something that takes me from A to B.
That said, it's pretty easy to find a good vehicle for under $10,000 used. Like you mentioned earlier, it's the demand that isn't there. Not many people seem to want a cheap 4 cylinder econobox in America these days.
