As a person operating decades old equipment I see trade offs here. Old machines are reliable and cheap to operate, but they are also NOISY, steering require quite some muscle strength and cabin without ac and filters is not pleasant and most importantly good for your health.
Once you want to add AC you need to add more support systems making whole machine more complex and more expensive to operate.
There are actually tractors like that, but those brands are failing unable to compete with high tech tractors like JD or New Holland on one side and with simple old tractors on another.
Yup. I also put large household appliances in this category. They've been getting more expensive and more fragile for decades, without much real progress other than energy efficiency which is unrelated to the fragility afaik.
Do you think normal gas powered cars have have been getting less reliable?
I agree with what many others here have said about how hard it is to service new vehicles. After he died, I kept my grandpa's 1970 Chevy C-10 pickup going for years. It was simple and very easy to fix/work on.
But it needed a lot more attention than modern cars, and I think that while the age played a factor, it was just inherently less reliable.
Key points: that Chevy needed an oil change every 3-4000 miles. New cars need oil changes every 8-10000 miles, give or take. Old cars also needed tune-ups.
The individual parts have been getting more reliable, but they keep adding more points of failure.
Like airbags. First, there was an airbag on the steering column. Then, there was one added to the passenger-side dashboard. Then they added side-curtain bags for head and hips. If you move the air bag reliability from 95% to 99%, but then add six more air bags, that's a 93.2% chance none will be bad. And if you cut the price of one airbag to 30%, but then add six more, that's still spending twice as much on airbags total. In some cars, an airbag deployment event totals the car. Cheaper to buy a new one than to replace all the air bags. Never mind the body damage.
If you made a car with 1980 features out of 2020 parts, it would be lighter, cheaper, and more reliable. But it would also have 1980 gas mileage and safety features, and you'd be back to hand-cranked windows.
Some of the newer features are worth the weight and complexity. Others are not. There could definitely be a market for a $5000 new car that requires little servicing, that can all be done at home without special tools, and 30 miles to the gallon--not from complex engine designs, or tricks like shutting down 2 cylinders in a 6 cylinder engine, but just from being lightweight with a good engine design.
Anyone else remember when the car radio only had one speaker? When you could see around the A columns without moving your head? When the automatic part of the transmission was just pneumatically controlling the clutch for the paddle-shifted manual?
We have the technology now to make a crapbox deathtrap that only needs to slow down to under 15 mph somewhere near a quicklube every 15000 miles, in order to last 500000 miles. The stripped-down car concept is explored by Polaris with the Slingshot, which is legally classified as a motorcycle, in order to build to a lower passenger safety standard. You're going to wear a helmet in your car, right? [wink]
older cars were more repairable. reliability is harder to make a blanket statement about.
the most important difference IMO is that older cars are now dangerously unsafe by modern standards, by orders of magnitude. crumple zones, multiple airbags, pedestrian scoops, and now driver-assists like emergency braking.
Cars are a bit of an anomalous category here. Driving is a pretty dangerous activity, so it's pretty sensible to give up some reliability & repair-ability in order for a safer road-coffin.
This is much less true for something like a fridge/thermostat/tractor.
It is related to some extent. Things like brushed DC motors can be very reliable if you’re willing to replace brushes on occasion, but they’re wildly inefficient. Better motors need more complicated circuitry, and it’s easy to cheap out and make that circuitry unreliable. It’s certainly harder to repair.
Pretty much all audio equipment falls into this as well. A vintage marantz stereo is going to sound better than nearly anything on the floor at best buy today, and if something goes wrong you either pop in a new part and take the thing to someone who can solder a wire and read a schematic.
Unlike a modern stereo that's a hunk of junk if a piece of critical plastic snaps in half or a cheap quality solder on the silicon board cracks out of warranty, not to mention the sound quality.
But how does the "vintage marantz" sound compared to something you can buy with, say, an hour's research with an internet search engine? Including price?
I don't know the answer to that. But I do know from experience that while your average $15 headbuds are total, absolute, utter garbage, that if you do your research there are $15 headbuds that sound pretty good. They may not be $100+ quality headphones, but for something that fits in my pocket they're quite credible. Don't just buy whatever one has finagled their way into Best Buy or the checkout counter at your grocery store, but that's not necessarily everything the market has to offer.
> But how does the "vintage marantz" sound compared to something you can buy with, say, an hour's research with an internet search engine? Including price?
Considerably better in the sub $300 range, and depends at the $600+ range. I'd personally go with the Marantz still, but I'd want to do some serious a/b testing.
Amen.
It is true that there is always someone saying "Things were better back then."
But that doesn't always mean that they are wrong.