Blog

The modern car is an abomination. These once glorious machines have been covered in so many needless hoses, cords, sensors, and plastic shields that a man cannot just open his hood and look at his engine. They are full of other invasive features due to persistent regulatory creep combined with the desire to find ways to charge more for every model. The primary culprits are gas and emissions requirements—based on the hypocritical desire to constantly harangue us about energy use—and the competing demand that cars become ever safer typified by insane government initiatives to get down to zero traffic deaths.

The root of the problem is that the best way to get better gas mileage is to make cars lighter, while the best way to make cars safer is to have heavy frames. Thus, cars have been filled with devices seeking to square this circle which inevitably make the cars more expensive and harder to work on. On top of this, cars constantly become more “online” in nightmarish ways and thus easier for the government or other malicious actors to track, hack, and disable. Unless something changes, for the paranoid and curmudgeonly among us, the only solution will be to adopt an ethos like the Cubans and keep pre-2010 cars running for the rest of our lives.

There is an internet meme that says something like, “Cars manuals used to tell you how to adjust valve lashes and now they tell you to not drink antifreeze.” While I don’t doubt the average American man has less skill at car repair than he did forty years ago, this has more to do with the cars than it does with us: cars that have that in the manual were designed to be user-serviceable. The car is supposed to be a great symbol of liberty and independence in America, but now cars have been designed in such a way that make you wholly dependent on others to keep them running, while being loaded up with new things to break. It is true that some features are popular and that people like good gas mileage, but consumers have also been given few choices as auto companies have been required to include endless add-ons. Plenty of old little cars get better gas mileage than modern SUVs, itself a category invented to skirt gas mileage regulations. Further, many safety features do not make cars meaningfully safer because most deadly car accidents are caused by catastrophic operator error and are not remediated by a myriad of minor features. What they instead do is make cars more annoying.

Gas mileage requirements are especially egregious, as they rely on a fifty year old scarcity mindset which didn’t anticipate the awesome increase in oil production in the United States and worldwide. As safety and environmental busybodies are more motivated than normal people who like cars—also the automotive companies like excuses to add expensive and complicated features—there has been almost no push-back to these changes to our cars. New manual transmissions are all but disappearing, which is framed as a consumer preference but also reflects the fact that modern automatic transmissions get slightly better gas mileage. Thus it becomes hard to produce many models in a manual transmission while meeting MPG requirements; of course, automatic transmissions are less reparable, far more reliant on computers, and when they go out the car is commonly permanently off the road, whereas replacing a clutch is normal maintenance and can be done at home if one is so inclined. All of this has the impact of getting you stuck with a newer car full of features you don’t need and may not want as the used car listings fill up with high mileage automatics no experienced person would buy due to the risk of sudden death.

Keep reading