Irrelevant to whom? Toyota, Honda and Subaru all have lifelong customers and for good reason. The cars often last for 20+ years with minimal upkeep.
The current crop of Chinese electric car makers are all trying to fake it until one of them makes it and the money spigot keeping them afloat will eventually get turned off at some point.[0] Good luck keeping that flashy EV running when the company goes bust.
All cars last 20+yr if you give a crap unless they have some fundamental engineering or execution Achilles heel (ecoboost water pump, Toyota frame rust, Hyundai engine problems, etc) that will manifest as a comically not-economical repair when the vehicle is old enough in age to be of fairly low value.
Premium cars that aren't so premium as to be disposable (i.e. not a luxury car you're gonna trade in every 3-5yr like clockwork) always last really well because people who can afford nice things can generally afford to maintain them.
This is pretty clearly borne out when you compare same cars across brand e.g. Ford Lincoln Mercury panther platform cars) or look at the exceptions like all those objectively terrible northstar caddilacs and v12 Jags and whatnot that are in impeccable shape because they got used and maintained nicely for a decade before being "retired" to the garage of the owner's vacation property on Cape Cod or perhaps the Hamptons or compare airport people moving vans that were retired to church group service to work vans that got sold down the river to even harder service.
It's really easy to "well we really should sell a water pump while we're in here for your 100k timing service" on a Subaru owned by someone who can afford a Subaru vs selling a preventative transmission fluid change to the guy who could barely scrape together the down payment on a Sentra.
I'm being a little sloppy and leaving some loose ends and room for nitpicking jerks to wedge in but I think the point here is pretty clear.
Easily the biggest killer for most people in the continental US is winter road salt. You go to California and a decent fraction of people people are still driving the same 80s and 90s corollas in whatever condition at this point. That car was totalled decades ago in the northeast, and if it still exist you are liable to fall through the floorpan.
I have driven nothing but pre-2008 Nissans for about 20 years.
Not a single major failure across 6 vehicles, except one Nissan Silvia (1992) that I used to race. Not really it's fault, I blew the motor pushing it hard for 3 years. I also crashed my first Silvia into a tree at 16, but it was running fine before that. That's how it got to the tree!
Even the 2007 Pathfinder and current 2003 Stagea are rock solid, and I consider them post-peak for Nissan.
They have lifelong customers, but those also don't live forever and can change their opinion, and if the carmakers don't adapt, they won't survive. For the last 19 years we have been buying Toyota, but I'm slowly starting to look for a new car and it has to be an EV and Toyota is currently very underwhelming in that regard in our market.
Prime example: we leased 3 Nissans in a row (dipping our toes in with an Altima and then 2 Rogues in a row), so 9 years worth, but prior to the last turn-in, they released a new Rogue that was smaller on the inside (but I believe may have been slightly larger on the outside), sapped the power out of the base engine (our Rogues had some pep in their step), and as the final nail in the coffin, raised prices by 15% or so and lowered the lease residuals- the net effect was a worse automobile with a ~30% higher monthly payment.
Going from under $350/mo to over $500/mo on a 36-month low mileage lease made what had been an easy decision one way (just get another Rogue) into an easy decision the other way (get a different vehicle from a different manufacturer).
When you venture into the pricing tiers of higher-quality automobiles, you need to be equipped to play in that market. Nissan wasn't, at least in our situation, and it cost them a loyal customer.
For example, the formerly beefcake Landcruiser went from a beastly guzzling v8 in 2021 to a weaker v6 in 2022-2023, and now, in 2024, a weak 2.4L supercharged 4-cyl sipper.
R.I.P. Landcruiser of old, you were an ultimate vehicle in your category.
If you drive a new Tundra or 4runner with a lead foot in the city, you're probably going to get 10-ish mpg. Of course, that's just talking about stock vehicles. Plenty of modifications you can do a car to make it less fuel-efficient ;-)
A car getting 10 MPG consumes, in just 60 miles of driving, the energy equivalent of a household's monthly electricity usage, and can travel less than 200 meters on the energy generated by four hours of running on a treadmill.
Please explain to me how thinking that this is absolutely atrocious speaks to my limited worldview?
Sorry, I didn't state that very well. Permit me to retry.
For a lot of people (I'm not actually one of them; I don't even have a car, but I know many of them), the energy efficiency of their vehicle isn't one of the top concerns — or even a concern at all.
Gasoline is available everywhere; they make enough money that the cost of gas doesn't matter to them. They care more about things like: How comfortable is the car to ride around in? How fast can it go from 0 to 100kph? What is the top speed? Does it look cool? Is it bulletproof? Can it connect to my phone without me fiddling with it? Does it have a premium sound system? And so on.
Their response to your comment would be something like, "Whatever, hippie."
It's literally something that a lot of people don't think about even once. This forum doesn't skew that way, I reckon, but I'm pretty sure sure that the vast majority of people who care about fuel efficiency of vehicles care because their financial situation means they have to think about the cost of gasoline (and that is a lot of people, perhaps most). Then there are some people who care about it because that's just their nature, or because they've thought through the consequences and external effects of these inefficient vehicles (a small sliver of people, although energetic about expressing their opinions).
Do you consider the electrical power usage of your computer's GPU? Given your comment, I suspect you might. There is likewise a sliver of GPU users and enthusiasts who compare the efficiency of GPUs, and think about that when building, say, a gaming PC. But most gaming PC builders do not think about that much, and certainly not enough to sway their purchase (let alone feeling "ashamed"). They just care about how many frames per second they can get in their game, and if the drivers are going to be reliable and games will run well.
That's just how it is. Most people don't care about power efficiency until they have to care, because of the money.
Having said all that, now that I have been forced to think about it, yes, a brand-new vehicle that gets only 10MPG is, in fact, atrocious. Absurd, even.
If I did have one, "ashamed" might be overstating it, but I would at least be a little embarrassed — if I ever thought about it. But most people don't, and I think that is the answer to your question.
New car purchasing behaviour follows the law of double jeopardy. ie. Toyota has high repeat purchase rates because it has high market share, not because of loyal customers.
At least until the last 10 years people would try and sell Toyota on safety and reliability. People who wanted to extract every cent out of the cars life would get a toyota because it would legit go the distance without failure. Dealer told me that it doesnt hold true anymore due to electronics. But old corollas are still legendarily reliable first cars for teenagers. And I recall the used market for old hiluxes is beyond belief.
I'm only in my thirties, but I've been hearing this exact (!) sentence, about every single brand, throughout my entire life. Surprisingly, most of the brands are still fine and selling cars.
I keep hearing that too and it feels like a huge attribution error: the cars die because of the electronics because they are the new component with the shortest lifespan, so people blame them. Yet people fail to notice that the longevity of cars is on average, trending up while the amount of electronics in them has exploded. And it makes sense if you think about it for more than a second: which would you rather die first, the cheap electronic board/sensor or the expensive mechanical part?
My theory is that a lot of auto mechanics are very mechanically minded, so if the problems start being electrical they don't have the equipment or the skill set to solve the issue beyond simple power.
I saw a video the other day where a Ram truck was having issues on the CAN bus after driving 33 miles and would settle down after 10-15 minutes. The tech was pretty much stumped and pretty much only figured it out by brute force. A capacitor on one of the CAN terminators failed making its capacitance higher than spec and screwed up the filtration harmonics after charging for those 33 miles.
There's also two sides to "reliable" where either it's simple to fix or never breaks down. Always keep that in mind whenever someone is talking about reliability because it's never obvious which definition someone has in mind.
Eh tbh I think "electronics" is code for "DPF" tbh. Hiluxes had to be recalled to be fitted with a DPF manual burn toggle from memory, or they would just hit a wall and die.
Second hard markets for second hand cars a little bit different, reliable cars end up having higher loyalty through selection bias since they simply exist longer though.
Toyota doesn't really make money on a Hilux after the first sale though.
In my experience it has more to do with quality and affordability. If you like your Toyota Camry, you're probably going to get another Camry. Subarus are slightly different in that they have cornered a niche (snowy mountain driving) that many owners swear by.
Subaru has the snowy country people and gays down. Nissan used to have the same type of affinity with black customers - when treating alienated customers with respect is a novelty, people demonstrate loyalty.
Amazing you feel that EVs are somehow more maintenance than ICEs. There exist EVs that have never had any manufacturer/dealer input since the day they rolled off the lot.
Tesla/Nio are a bad examples - many EVs were built to be sold and essentially ignored by the manufacturer.
After that EV company goes out of business, how are you going to replace that bespoke {$random_part} that broke? Any Fisker Ocean owners want to chime in?[0]
Do the big companies really have a commitment to parts delivery anymore, or are they following the same trend? Took my friend 9 months to get a part for his C8 Corvette when it got rear ended at 5mph. Tons of other GM owners have been waiting months to nearly a year for many common parts for repairs. Selling parts doesn't make these companies money, so why should they care? As long as they're making enough to sell the new cars first.
* my Ford Focus EV had a very short lead time for parts because it was based on a platform (Focus) shared across many vehicles. Also repair cost was very low for a multi-car accident ($2k).
* Similarly, when common tech is spread across many vehicles (Kia/Hyundai eGMP or GM Ultium) those components are often easier to acquire.
Buying low-volume vehicles or from smaller manufacturers is a recipe for long wait times and expensive repairs. How many Corvettes does GM sell?
Funny thing with Fords is you can pretty much swap parts between models even if they are not officially in the same platform. Lots of overlap. Got a sync unit from a transit for a fiesta, works fine after updating the settings to match the vehicle.
Corvettes are niche cars, with only tens of thousands sold a year. Plus, I don't know when your friend got in that fender bender, but post-Covid supply chain issues meant that anybody in any newer car (with lots of electronics) who got in an accident in the past few years waited a while for parts.
Last week, I finally got my second key fob which was absent because of a chip shortage. So even until last year, we were still seeing the effects of the supply chain disruption.
The current crop of Chinese electric car makers are all trying to fake it until one of them makes it and the money spigot keeping them afloat will eventually get turned off at some point.[0] Good luck keeping that flashy EV running when the company goes bust.
[0]https://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-evs-losses-widen-des...