this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
152 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
85043 readers
1952 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This post I saw yesterday on Bluesky is gonna age like fine wine, it seems. It will be 2040 and most of the cars on US roads will still be from 2000's and 2010's because dipshit politicians paid by Ford and GM will ban everything else.
In Cuba the old cars are meticulously maintained, though. In the US it will be all rusty old death traps.
[Seriously though, the bad economy is already turning the roads into this. The number of frighteningly unmaintained and crashed-but-not-repaired cars is noticeably increasing lately.]
This description already applies to new Cybertrucks.
Rusty new deathtraps
They don't rust, they burn.
Do you not have mandatory checks for cars in the US? Here you have to go to a certified mechanic's shop within 4 years after the car is first registered and every 2 years after that. They check brakes, steering, emissions and lights and if you fail any of those checks you are not allowed to drive that car until you get it fixed.
Not in most states. only 13/50. Cars crash on failures, wheels fly off and kill, brakes fail, no one gives a fuck.
My state recently did away with annual inspections. It used to be required before you could renew your annual license plate registration. They’d do exactly what you said: check brakes, lights, emissions, steering, dashboard lights, etc and you had to pass all of them. Now none of that is required, because “small government” or some other BS.
So yeah, now we have a ton of screaming metal death traps on the road, because of course we do. Normally those cars would get failed at inspection if they were missing all of their brake lights. Now it will only be discovered when they get rear-ended. And wrecked cars that wouldn’t otherwise be legal are suddenly driving all over the place, because they can still technically get from A to B… They just don’t do it safely.
Depends heavily on the state, but even inspections in the strictest states do not compare to the ones in Europe. Some states have no inspections whatsoever.
hence for the gas-guzzlers for the small pp, and for soccer mom karens, large suvs.
Depends on the state, and how eagerly and effectively they enforce it.
When I was a kid my state had yearly inspections, but that was stopped like 25 years ago. Occasionally you still see one of the green stickers on the windshield of an old car.
All I can attest to is in Virginia, yes, in Michigan, no.
37/50 states, no. I avoid Michigan highways.
There are different kinds of "old cars", the kind of old cars made before 70s that are really inefficient with gasoline, but might last another hundred years if maintained, and the kind of old cars made up to 90s that are harder to keep from falling apart, and then the kind made later, which is - not really for future generations.
The more optimized their production is and the less luxurious they are as a thing, the closer they are to something that'll only last their guaranteed time. Preferably for the producer - falling apart into rust a couple of days after that.
By the 80s the Mercedes mechanical injection diesel engined cars were capable of a million+ miles if maintained at all, that was a major business mistake (killing your new unit sales because all your customers already have good cars) which they slowly reversed across the next 20 years. Now they make disposables like everybody else.
The whole global auto industry should be incentivized to go back to that "runs forever" design focus of the Mercedes W123 series and improve on it with more longevity, cheaper serviceability. Efficiency and emissions don't mean much when you're scrapping the whole 5000lbs of automobile every 10 years.
That works when the car itself is something produced in small batches and a very capital design and costs accordingly, or when its maintenance makes bank and for the producer at that, or when there's continued growth, so you don't sell new cars to people with old cars.
I mean, of course there's the variant of cars being as modular as PCs and a Mercedes of Theseus being possible. Always profitable for the producer, since from time to time the customer buys spare parts (a law is necessary that it's legal to make and sell spare parts for anyone ; just like with Apple stuff, official things will be more popular), and never just fully going to junk at once. Seems the most realistic variant for me, economically, of the good ones.
There's another variant, a dystopian one, being implemented in fact, where car producers own you via parts pairing, planned obsolescence, parts barely surviving guarantee age and impeded repair and telemetry, all at once.
Without ability to put pressure almost like in war, the modular variant would be the equilibrium, unfortunately we the humanity haven't yet adjusted our societies for computers (no need for a more complex description).