I have a Mirage G4. It has a five speed transmission. It does not have internet connectivity, it doesn’t have a touchscreen, it doesn’t have keyless ignition, it doesn’t even have a fourth cylinder. It’s as reliable as a hammer, it still gets me over 40 mpg, and it’s paid for.
Dream vehicle? Any motorcycle. I have one, and I ride it sometimes, but I have a family that cares I’m alive and a lot of you seem to need a phone in your face to drive a car…
8 that they will admit to, anyway.
And once people who fix their old Camry umpteen times instead of buying a new one, there will be even more lobbying for anti-repair.
I have a 65 HP 4x4 with sealed beam headlights…
Maybe if they had a line of them hooked together? A train of some sort?
I once impulse bought a motorcycle but I can explain why I did that so…
For the purposes of this thread, I think buying a Mini-2 SE drone is the purchase to talk about. I’ve always been interested in radio controlled flying things, and I had the extra money, and it was on sale, so I bought it. I don’t regret it at all, though, because it turned out to be incredibly useful and fun. I had it for a couple of years until two weeks ago, when I flew the poor thing camera-first into a steel beam, which didn’t destroy the drone but put it firmly in the “cheaper and easier to get another drone than to fix this one” territory.
Now I have a license and people pay me to take pictures sometimes.
Sometimes a strange car will gain a sort of “cult” following, and that’s when you sometimes end up with a situation like you describe, where parts are made by many different 3rd parties. I have an old Japanese 4x4 that was so awesome that Mopar had to team up with consumer reports and the government to kill it. It’s 30+ years old and I can get parts for it as easily as I can an F150.
Notable past and current examples of this include:
Chevy Corvair
Geo Metro
Harley-davidson anything
Jeep wrangler
Suzuki Samurai
Toyota Supra
Edit: formatting are hard
It depends on the new car, I’ve found. A Mitsubishi Mirage is considerably easier to deal with than a BMW anything, because the people who designed the mirage had an eye toward maintenance because of the type of car it is. The BMW will go to the shop, while the Mirage will get it’s clutch changed in the driveway.
There used to be a car like that, could get a manual and you could fix it yourself - on the rare occasion it needs work.
It was the 2014-2024 Mitsubishi Mirage, and the entire US made fun of it. That’s what happens when someone makes a cheap, dependable, simple car in the US, people act like it’s the worst vehicle ever made because you can see exposed screw heads when you open the door.
“Porcelain transmission” sent me.
Don’t forget the oil pumps driven by rubber belts that need half the engine disassembled to replace it.
The one that had the biggest effect on me was getting past the gay=bad nonsense that I was raised with. Which allowed me to come out to my wife as bisexual a while back.
That’s interesting, $2.99 is what it costs right now in Oklahoma.
Maybe YOU can’t remove the light.
You know that you can leave your phone at home, right?
EDIT: Also, another Defeatist reply.
Unless you’ve got some expensive whiz-bang Harley or BMW.
One side of the tire. I did not have to remove the tires from the rims, and I didn’t have to balance them.
Have you met people? Do you think that battered old Chevy is driven by someone who cares about the TPMS light? They can ignore it as effectively as the check engine light.
It certainly doesn’t require removing the tire from the rim. I removed each wheel, broke the bead on the side that has the valve stem, pried the tire back away from the rim, remove the sensor (mine had a convenient little part you can push to release them) then air the tire back up and put the wheel back on the car. Didn’t even have to re-balance them.
If we want to take steps to protect ourselves from such tracking, we cannot afford to simply say “It’s ToO hArD!!!1!” with a multi-paragraph reply that took more time to type out than it took for me to remove one sensor. Can’t do it? Learn how. Defeatist replies belong on Reddit with all the other propaganda.
1.) Lol, no I won’t. That light can be removed. Or if it’s a Ford, you can access the vehicle with Forscan and turn off that functionality.
2.) How did we ever survive before 2008? Were there disabled cars with shredded tires every 20 feet? Was it an apocalypse of failed tires? People who don’t bother to check tire pressure won’t bother for yet another warning light on their dash.
This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but like you… Money.