This makes me think of the new toyotas, the rav4s, 4runner, and land cruiser. Through government regulations, they were forced to create smaller more fuel efficient engines. To get the same power, they overstrain them, and put huge turbos on the engines. The outcome is a strictly worse engine, that essentially uses the same fuel as older engines.
The demand for older vehicles in certain segments is actually increasing
The new models have engines that are smaller turbos, that part is true — but they get >30% better fuel economy, and they output more power.
The reliability might become an issue down the road especially in hybrid engines but the data so far don’t seem to support your assertions. The one exception is maybe the Tundra 3.4L but that seems to still be ambiguous as to the root cause, and may just be mfg process error.
I wonder if this notion comes from the 80s, when engines with turbos had lower compression ratios for reliability. Today's turbocharged motors have higher compression ratios than in the malaise era, and the turbos have a lot less lag. Turbos no longer mean you have to sacrifice fuel economy for performance (unless you have a lead foot).
>Turbos no longer mean you have to sacrifice fuel economy for performance (unless you have a lead foot).
That's incorrect. Virtually every turbo'd gas car runs slightly richer than stoich to use the unburnt fuel to manage temp/knock. Diesels, you actually get more efficiency out of with a turbo for free. With gas you're practically guaranteed to be throwing fuel out the pipe.
That isn't some turbo specialty, the effect is the same in both NA and turbo engines. And AFAIK it isn't really feasible anymore. I don't know about other manufacturers, but for example Volkswagen Group's EA211 EVO2 engines run pinned at lambda 1 no matter what.
All I know is my last turbo'd vehicle was always running at 13.8, and that was a 2013 Nissan with a turbo'd L4, and it annoyed the piss out of me. Pretty much guaranteed only getting 26 MPG at highway speeds. This was despite claims in the manual saying the AFR was fuel octane dependent & would automatically vary (which I found out through experimentation was full of shit). It just stayed pinned to 13.8 whether you ran 87 or 91.
Nope, just engineering to do not much more for warranty. Turbo engines arent inherently unreliable (tho you might need to replace the turbo itself every 100-200k so still more expensive to maintain), just need to build extra strong block and components if you want it to run for a long time.
And why would company do that if that would put it far over warranty period?
I've got a 1995 FZJ80 and I am counting the fucking minutes until I can rip that goddamn forklift motor out and replace it with the 1HZ + HX30 + 1HD-T rods mashup I have in store for it :P
> overstrain them, and put huge turbos on the engines
This doesn't really mean anything. You can build an engine at any point of the spectrum from naturally aspirated to turbocharged, to turbo-compound, to actually not having any pistons at all (e.g. the "turbofans" that we put on airliners). What you want is to match the engine to the machine and build it out of the right materials.
Most people don't know shit about engineering and have weak intuition about materials, stress and physics in general. What the common person thinks about a random engineering topic literally does not matter, because they are 90% wrong about everything. Regarding cars, it's more like 99%. People still recite torque figures like they mean anything, ffs. That bad boy with 200 Nm at the crank? Cool, I make 150 Nm pedalling a bike.
My previous car before an EV had a 1-litre 3-cylinder engine, a 1.0 TSI. Pure gas, not a hybrid. That's an engine that's rated for 81kW (it actually delivers a bit more than that) and that can do 60 mpg on country roads (regularly). When it came out in 2015, "car enthusiasts" were laughing hysterically at the idiots who'd buy the car and have to replace the engine every 2-3 years. 11 years later, the cars are driving around just fine. The 1.0 TSI, just like the entire EA211 family, is a good engine with no major reliability issues.
tl;dr engines today are not the same as an early 2000s Subaru EJ25 with a massive turbo bolted on.
> they overstrain them
Debatable. Materials science and engine construction science have advanced significantly since the V6 and V8s of the 1980s and 1990s Toyotas. Almost every auto manufacturer on earth is capable of getting >100hp/L out of a gas engine reliably. Toyota is certainly not the only OEM doing this reliably at scale. This stuff is no longer exotic. Gas engines today are designed from the ground up to be turbocharged and direct injected (and in Toyota's case, both direct and port injected), and built with the cooling systems to match.
> The outcome is a strictly worse engine
No one makes or has made a perfect engine but there's a lot of romanticizing engines from the past. These newer engines make more peak torque, their torque curves start much lower in the RPM band and remain more useful through whole rev range, they burn significantly less fuel when not under load, and the hybrid electric drivetrain mean the gas engine spends less of its life idling or lugging at low speeds and high loads. Whether some of these tradeoffs are worth it is debatable, but in no way are these engines "strictly worse".
Private equity, and computers, optimized all the profits which drove profit quality down. We all have lower quality products to enrich a few finance individuals
Or more likely consumers vote with their dollar and cost matters over quality. PE is just a bad scape goat, there are obvious outliers but largely companies make products that consumers want.
Companies are incentivized to sell the worse, most expensive version of a product that they can convince someone to buy. Many companies sell with huge margins, meaning there is significant slack to allow quality to increase for the current price point - there just isn't enough competition to matter. Many manufacturing companies also have complex supply chains, making this problem worse as everyone along the chain tries to maximize their own margin.
It's not at all rare for a company to sell a quality product at a low margin for some years, building up a reputation, and then start decreasing quality to increase profitability once the quality branding is established.
Of course, optimal companies maximize for margin. Buyers have their own optimization mental model and maybe is surprising but a vast majority are thinking mostly on cost. Buyers and sellers do a dance and in the perfect long run you hit the optimal balance.
Consumers/buyers still play a large role in this, it is easier to put all the blame on PE or Big business.
This is the conventional thinking, but it ignores a huge factor - marketing. The major function of the gigantic advertising industry is to deceive consumers about the real qualities of a product, leaving price as the only only signal that they can detect through the noise, in most cases.
And advertising works in multiple ways to promote slop. Sometimes, it is directly by marketing bad products as cheap but high quality bargains. Sometimes it is, as I said, by using previous high quality products to sell low quality ones at the same prices. Sometimes it works by creating a huge pressure to consume more (such as the pressure on fashion trends), wiping out any care about durability (if it's considered poor taste to wear the same T-shirt two seasons in a row, why pwuld you buy a durable T-shirt?). Sometimes it works by mudding the waters, making consumers distrust any reviews that praise the quality of a product, leaving price and directly visible looks as the only signals that rational consumers can base their decision on.
So, overall, the blame for this state of affairs lies far more with the way the modern market was designed, than with consumers specifically.
It’s a dance between consumers and business. Sure some markets are heavily influenced by ads or simply what’s in fashion but ultimately it takes two to tango.
How do you come to that conclusion? It is certainly a luxury that not everyone can afford but for the average consumer in America it’s possible but folks still opt out.
This is going to grow into a sophisticated platform, and is what will eventually compete head on with saas. I dont think companies will build their own agents, aside from looping in tools. As the models improve, there will be less hand holding. This could end up competing with AWS/GCP
Anthropic is very far ahead on agentic engineering. There is more to getting it to work than it looks, and their models might be directly trained to know how to use the claude code harness.
But beyond that, AWS is a very complex platform. Agents simplify saas, the agent itself manages the api calls, maybe the database queries, more of the logic. As software moves into the agent, you need less cloud capability, and a better agent harness/hosting. Essentially, this makes the AWS platform obsolete, most services make much less sense.
I think even code bases will have self improving agents. Software is moving from just the product code, to the agent code that maintains the product. Engineering teams/companies that move in this direction will vastly out produce others.
I've had to really shift how I think about building code bases, alot of logic can go into claude skills and sub agents. Requires essentially relearning software engineering
People dont fully know it, but alot of capital in society gets accumulated by people with the right look, instead of with actual ability. In many cases, these startups start out as fraud, and hope to become real. VCs know this.
But the tragedy is that there is a fixed pie of capital to be allocated, and so when they allocate to people like this, it steals opportunity from someone else
The demand for older vehicles in certain segments is actually increasing
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