Lol & its only 2 ft longer than my Excursion. My city would have a field day with that.
Your not the only, Iām sure there are many that would agree with you. However, Iām not one of those people. While the variety of cars is so large now of days, we still have many Iconic cars that bring the drool. It just isnāt the cars we are often driving everyday. Look at the huge range of awe inspiring exotics on the market.
I also find suggestions on modern classics being restored on the Extreme Car Detailing youtube channels, like AMMO NYC.
Personally, I really enjoy some of the modern vehicles on the market. Really enjoying my current RAM 1500 truck with all the tech it has. Made hauling chems in a 30 hour round trip to Arizona and Back incredibly comfortable and enjoyable. I think @Lampy would corroborate the experience. Also, my 05 Mustang GT will be a forever memory for me. Just awesome and it only cost me $27K new and an additional $20K in tickets and legal fees. 
You canāt steal those memories from me.
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$7k more and itās actually a $54k Mustangā¦
As the credit card ad says,
ā¦pricelessā¦
I think the price means much more than calling it priceless. It cost me what it cost me and I wouldnāt trade it away to save that money. So the better ad might say,
It cost what I was happy to pay for the experience, memories, and time.
Is that the one with the home of the ā10,000$ detailā?
I drive a current newish vehicle for work. Never over 6 years old or 150,000 miles. A little over 2 years & 73,000 miles. Not really impressed, I donāt need all the whiz bang gadgets. My rental 2 years ago was a Ram 1500, not really impressed with it either other than it didnāt have my current 75MPH govenor. I drove an Infiniti QX60 for a few days last year. It literally took me 20-30 minutes to figure out the stereo before I got mad & gave up for the time being.
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I wouldnāt be surprised if they had a service like that. To be honest what these channels are calling Detailing is more like a full car restoration when you look at the higher cost ones. We are talking refinishing nearly every surface of the vehicle to as good as factory new or in many cases better. Kind of like @nickdangerous and I would try to do with the pinball machines we restored.
I doubt you drove the RAM 1500 I have. I have the small block Diesel and the full Lux Truck options. 4x4, Air ride with constant load leveling, all the amenities, Storage boxes on the bed sides. Iām loving it. Plus, Iāll never give up the rear view camera. Being able to back up and lift a trailer onto the ball without a second person or getting out of the vehicle is a heck of a trick. Still have to hop out and lock the ball, hook up lights, brake and chains. But still fun.
Also, short term living with cars that have tech options is just a setup for disaster. All the cars do things a bit differently. No one is going to know every bell and whistle when they first jump in. It took me a bit to get the auto setting figured out on my truck. Now, my seat, pedals, and side mirrors are programmed to where I like them and I can go back to those setting with one button press, even if someone else moved everything. My head lights and wipers turn on and off automatically with the conditions around the vehicle. Mirrors dim when hit with bright lights. Even the high beams auto turn off when the car notices on coming vehicles, this was one of the best things about the Arizona trip. Because the high beams where very helpful, saved me from hitting a coyote, but would of just stayed off the whole trip if I had to flick them off with every on coming car.
That doesnāt mention the Remote start with Active climate control. When it is cold, my remote start turns on the heater, seat warmers and steer wheel warmer. When it is hot, it kicks on the AC and seat coolers. I donāt have to remember to set the AirCon to heat or AC when I get out of the car, it just works. PS, Cooled seats for a big man like me is the one feature I will never give up in the future. Never worrying about a sweaty back at any length of drive is just great.
Iām sure people will give me a hard time for having all the tech. But, it doesnāt hurt my feelings. Iāll continue to enjoy it.
Though the celica is 19 years old, I would bet Tim still considers it one of those modern crap cars, given the cars you would compare it to in the thread.
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Lol. I do have a 2000 Excursion. Itās got 290,000 miles. My wifeās 96 honda, gift not bought, has 290,000 miles & my Jeep 2007 has 52,000 but I canāt really work on it which sucks. I have put a lot of physical parts into it, no tuner ect. Still have the factory air filter in it.
Realistically, no one will have any modern cars or older cars in a few decades, because dinosaur squeezings are going to be entirely gone or relegated to the track.
Collectibility and repairability arenāt the only dimensions of consideration for a vehicleās value. Autos today are faster, safer, better-handling, and more durable than theyāve ever been before. You have pony cars for under 40 grand making power and lap times that were limited-run Ferrari territory 20 years ago, and trucks that can carry payloads over one ton while making better mileage than a Tacoma did in 2000. This comes at the cost of requiring additional sophistication and complexity of power train systems. Features like VVT require complicated and delicately-balanced systems to manage properly. This isnāt even getting into things like materials science which have advanced enormously since 2000. Iāve got an '01 Range Rover that outmasses the lighter F-150s out today.
Now, I will say I loathe the modern infotainment trend. Same goes for ADAS, which I believe creates a moral hazard by providing false confidence regarding attention required on the road. There are companies doing this right, though, like Mazda and Cadillac.
I also disagree about disposability of newer cars. They last drastically longer with less maintenance than the cars of yesteryear, and they really arenāt that much harder to work on if you pick up the right software package. My 2013 Subaru doesnāt even need that. Itās a dead-simple vehicle to work on and itās six years newer than an '07 Jeep.
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I suppose if you consider the incipient supremacy of EVs to be āpeak oil,ā then yes. Itās going to be awhile but I fully expect that by the time I am in my 60s they will be an artifact of history not modernity.
For being an in-bread pigeon, he has a pretty good vocabulary.
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EVās are gaining market share, albeit not at a particularly world-beating pace. Anyone who insists theyāre destined to dominate within an intermediate term is suffering from an exuberance that Mr Greenspan could best describe. They have their use cases - commuter cars, short-haul freight, delivery vehicles, road trip drivers for the extremely patient - but canāt be everything to everyone. But man that cost problem isnāt solving itself as fast as the market would like.
Despite my interest in the subject I opted not to go with anything EV-ish in 2017 - the Volt was expensive and weird, the Leaf is fugly, the Bolt wasnāt quite available in TX at the time, Iām not gambling >$50k on Teslaās erratic quality problems, the BMW i3 Rex was stupid expensive and weird-looking, all the other PHEVs had less than half the EV range of the Volt, and other compliance-mobile EVs are difficult-at-best to obtain in TX. I wanted to want the Volt but just couldnāt for that kind of money and that many compromises.
Would such a method suffer from the dismal economics of hydrogen internal combustion engines where the fuel is just too expensive to burn in an engine at ~25% nominal efficiency whereas a PEM fuel cell - itself a questionable engineering and economic proposition - manages almost double the efficiency? Also, since weāre not making meaningful quantities of hydrogen via electrolysis (less efficient and markedly more capital intensive than steam reformation of hydrocarbons) one wonders if weāll bother doing the same for more conventional hydrocarbon fuels since the same energy put into a battery to spin a motor is going on 3x as efficient with less economic/industrial moving parts in between.
What will make EVs common is some kind of a standardized swappable battery pack.
Nobody owns their battery. You pull into a ārefillingā station, a robot removes the old battery and replaces it with a freshly recharged one. You drive away in mere minutes. The big problem to be solved is making it economical somehow for the station to stock and recharge enough batteries.
or super fast charging that is able to fully charge up in 10 minutes (the link is longer than that, but in 20 years, stuff will improve). Makes much more sense than forcing the entire industry to use one type of battery which would competition in that field and therefore innovation
I like this topic. I think about it a lot. I work for a major automaker.
In terms of technologies, I think itās best to be agnostic. The USA, Europe, China wonāt implement a carbon tax, so its hard to be agnostic. We tend to make policies that āforceā toward the ācorrectā answers. Weāll keep seeing more and more fuel efficient vehicles over time because of this. The simplest solution that would get rid of all the CAFE regulations, electric generation plant strangleholds, and green new deal crap is to implement a price on carbon. Alas, politics makes that less palatable than the ridiculous smattering of regulations I have to put up with now. Thank human nature I suppose.
On the point of repair-ability and durability, new cars win by a landslide. The average age of autos keeps going up. There isnāt an automaker around who considers anything under 175k on the odometer a full lifespan. We design consumables for easy replacement. Weird failures are the ones where you end up having 3,4,5 hour jobs. I would challenge you to try to run a modern day NYC taxi company with 1950ās tech while your competition uses Priuses.
Every single day, the new vehicle engineers (I am one) work really hard to balance durability, purchase cost, infotainment, and other things consumers care about to come up with what we think is the best balance for a given pricepoint and product. Sometimes, we get it wrong. But, overwhelmingly, we get a little bit better year by year and product launch by product launch. I would take (from an emissions, safety, fuel economy, durability, and comfort) anything produced in the last three years over anything you could give me from the 30s-80s. With the exception of cool sports cars or other collectibles, nothing from that era matches what we stamp out today.
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Can charging times be shortened by cooling the battery pack? The charging connection might include a couple of hoses for this purpose.
As much as I like classic muscle cars, they were pretty much junk at 100K miles. Today, with reasonable maintenance, they are just getting broken in.
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A decades-old concept thatās been tried and has failed. Better Place tried it at some scale in Israel and failed. Tesla famously live demoāed it with the Model S but that seems to have been no more involved than dressing up some factory floor equipment for the promo video.
The biggest problem as youāve identified centers around the staggering expense of the battery pack. Batteries are the single most expensive component in electric cars. If you have packs on hot standby for the subset of customers that demand them thatās a decidedly nontrivial capital expense; sell N cars with battery packs then maintain some quantity M packs along with bespoke quick-change stations distributed across the nation. Of course, customers demand arbitrary availability where ever they go, thus you need to overprovision locations and move packs around on the backend.
Who pays for this? The users of this service naturally. A market accustomed to recharging their batteries at home, overnight, for markedly less than the per-mile cost for gasoline/diesel probably isnāt going to pay anything close to the cost of amortizing hot-swap battery packs among a small pool of users. Sure, Teslaās Supercharger network was a free benefit for Model S users, but those are far cheaper to deploy and see immensely more users-per-dollar-spent CAPEX/OPEX than hot-spare battery packs ever will. Tesla never fully fleshed out their hot-swap station proposal, but one key condition they did stipulate was that theyād hold your original pack at the beginning hot-swap station and you were expected to swap it back in within some time period; if you failed to do so theyād ding you for whatever depreciation difference existed between the original and the swapped pack in your vehicle.
And that doesnāt even get to the problem of the lack of a universal battery pack, something I doubt weāre going to see within the next 20 years, if ever.
Hereās the problem with trying to fast-charge an EV battery at āgas stationā speeds:
From an electrical infrastructure standpoint I doubt youāre going to see the neighborhood gas station install a dozen 10-minute fast chargers for 100kWH vehicles and requisite 7.2 megawatt service to handle a dozen vehicles that start charging all at once. Itās possible to buffer that demand in various ways to reduce the - big onsite battery banks, flywheel generators - but thatās a lot of capital relative to how filling stations presently work to adapt to whatās effectively a corner case for the BEV market accustomed to slow-charging overnight at home.
Thereās a nontrivial amount of waste heat involved in fast-charging as Iāve calculated in the chart above. Probably going to take more than just forced-air to keep things nice and chill within the battery pack, to say nothing of enormous contacts and conductors.
And what āproblemā are we solving with fast charging when most privately-owned cars spend the overwhelming majority of the day parked in predictable locations generally near electrical power?
Agreed. Politically difficult to put it mildly no matter what particular method is proposed - even revenue-neutral āfeebatesā are seen with suspicion and hostility.
From my perspective, the idea behind modern car design is to bake reliability into the design and make them easier to assemble at the factory. Add tight packaging to the equation and what used to be simpler and easier maintenance can be an unforgiving knuckle-busting job requiring removal of numerous components superfluous to the task at hand. My most recent two cars - 2008 Mazda 3, 2018 Subaru WRX - have made changing headlight bulbs rather challenging; the Mazda was a knuckle-buster and the Subaru mandates removal of the air box on one side and the battery on the other ā¦ and thatās not saying anything relative to even tighter vehicles that mandate access through the wheel well. Spark plug replacement on the Subaru looks to be a āpull the engineā task thanks to the cylinder heads nestling up against the wheel wells - Iām hoping they used d_mned good spark plugsā¦
Not that these are particularly new phenomena. I had to replace a crank position sensor (or something similar that was basically an inductance sensor) on a friendās 1997 BMW 328is. If I recall correctly I had to remove the oil filter, a solenoid, some other component, and the pigtail conveniently terminated halfway under the manifold. The same car had a bad trunk design that demanded millimeter tolerance fitment from the frame to the hinge to the trunk sheet metal to the strike plate to the latch ā¦ as opposed to a more standard design that can tolerate many millimeters of misalignment and self-clearance once outside of spec ala the typical conical X arrangement and use of a Y bar to latch onto. I was strangely relieved when they wrecked that car since I did not relish future requests for assistance maintaining it.
