alt Hacker NewsCars only show if they're well made after like a decade? These are not washing machines or something.
Sadly that's also why it's hard to buy a new car, you only know what's a quality car years down the line.
First impression matters though.
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>Sadly that's also why it's hard to buy a new car, you only know what's a quality car years down the line.
Not always. Sometimes the components are a lot older than the car and have earned a bit of a reputation. The powerplant in my car is like 20 years older than the model year. The underlying platform is nearly as old as well. All proven to be boringly reliable.
I guess this changes in the EV era with faster rate of iterations compared to the ICE era. More lessons still to learn with the EV cars I'm sure. Meanwhile a 4 cyl compact car is practically a commodity and aside from safety widgets like backup cameras, have been relatively unchanged for 15 or 20 years.
I think it depends on the car. I've seen VW products fall apart in months after sale, we actually had a Mk5 golf that went back to the dealer three times in it's first year for fuel system faults.
There are a lot of low price bracket Chinese imports (MGs mainly) that seem to have severe rust issues that are present at delivery.
And Toyotas a few years ago had a problem where certain colour cars would have their paint fall off in huge sheets as the primer was incorrect or something.
I do agree in principle that most modern cars should be pretty good for their warranty period/first owner, but I've also seen some egregious edge cases!
> Cars only show if they're well made after like a decade?
Unless you have a wet belt in your Puretech engine that will blow up in 5-8 years...
Mechanics and enthusiasts around here (Spain) call this engines "pudretech" (rot-tech)...
Cars can still show that they're poorly made pretty quickly.
The point is that you can't tell anymore just by looking underneath and counting the wtfs.
I have a friend who's a big Honda fan, amateur racer, a true "petrolhead" but with an intact brain. Runs his own shop. Naturally there was a barrage of jokes when I rolled up in my new Chinese EV, but then we put it up on a lift and there wasn't really much to joke about. The platform looks boring and mature. Things are where you'd expect them, they're the right size and shape, you can tell why they're there.
Obviously, the motor/reducer bearings in my car may fail in a few years (like in the Kona Electric or Škoda Enyaq) or the charging circuitry may fail (like the ICCU in the Ioniq 5) but then we're already comparing it against legacy manufacturers, and that's a pretty good position to be in.