Other hobbies/Obsessions?

All mod cons.

Less to go wrong. 😁 Originally it didn't come with the clock, but ebay sorted that. No radio, ABS, airbags, rear parcel shelf, rear wiper, third brake light, or even floor mats either. Full "racebase" spec. Which of course the first owner had to pay extra for... Car companies know how to milk petrolhead gobshítes. 😁 Then again they were a loss leader for Honda. They could only build 20 engines a day because things like torquing down bearings were done by hand, pistons, rods and valves weighed and sorted by hand. Mine got a Spoonsport engine transplant at some stage, so even more blueprinted and balanced, so it revs to 9500 RPM. Which even now on the very rare occasions I do it(your honour), still sounds completely bloody insane.

It's coming up on 180K now. Other than oil and filter changes and a timing belt every four years, it's needed a dizzy cap, coil and rotor, brake disks, a front wheel bearing, a cat replaced and just got its first clutch in recently. Then again, 90's Jap car so "my 90's Toyota Corolla didn't start this morning" said nobody, ever. Oh and bushes. It has more bushes than the botanic gardens. Doesn't use a drop of oil and these are normally like two strokes(Oil changes every 4k and never revving it until it reaches full temp is the trick there and being the second owner so it never got thrashed when values bottomed out). It's even gone up in value. 😮 It's handy on juice too. Big boot, though the rear strut brace eats into it and back seats are for kids or people who owe you money. The front seats are sublime, though you have to be under 1.9 Mickjaggers to really appreciate them. I've had the pleasure of driving a lot of cars, including a fair number of exotics and the gearshift in this glorified Civic is one of the finest I've ever experienced. Real oiled rifle bolt stuff. The main expense has been insurance. Try 2k for just third party at one stage. Though it's come down a lot in recent years. I held onto it pretty much by mistake, but now it's like a family member. My "pet car" as my mechanic calls it. ☺️

Technically EV's should last for decades. Far longer than internal combustion cars(without constant maintenence). The motors have only a couple of moving parts, no extreme heat cycling and build up of crud by comparision to engines running on dinosaur juice. I say should last for decades. Cars from early on in the game just after they started to be affordable for the masses became consumer items with built in obsolescence. By the 1940's the head of Chevrolet(IIRC) boasted of looking to get the average car's product cycle down from five years to three and ultimately one. EV's will be little different in the long term. If anything the pace of technological change in things like autonomous driving and increasing range and in car gadgets could increase this speed of turnover and a shorter route from factor to landfill. Recycling will play some part, but outside of metals it's not economic for the industry, or can only be done the once. Put it this way; you could keep the most unreliable 1970's Fiat on the road for life if you could still get parts.

The problem will be spares Fitz. Electronic stuff has a much shorter product cycle, plus you can far more easily machine a part for something like a I dunno a 1950's V8 than replace a modern ECU in a modern Huyundai. Simpler things are easier to keep going, repair and replace than complex things, especially when you're dealing with complex things specifically designed to have a product life. Take something that is currently 'hot' and goes for big money, a top end 90's Nissan Skyline with all the trimmings. Mad advanced stuff for the time. The oily bits are easy enough to sort, but good luck if you can't find working leccy bits for the onboard IT stuff and that's only twenty odd years old. Now someone like Porsche will have a lot more support for your Taycan and for longer than most, but in twenty years time a 70's 911 will still be a lot easier to restore and get back on the road than a current Taycan. That's before we get to things like trim and items like headlight assemblies. Over the years when teh prices bottomed out I got a few bits and bobs as spares for mine, but stupidly didn't source a pair of headlights. If I needed one after a Tesco car park smack, I'll be in trouble trying to source a replacement, unless I get lucky it could take months and it'll hurt the wallet.

Now what might happen is more car companies seeing cash to be had, might do a Mercedes and produce spares for every car they ever produced. Mazda are doing similar in Japan with their first series MX-5. You can basically give them your tired one and they'll rebuild it to as new condition. They're very simple cars mind you. The other avenue is replacing ICE with EV transplants. That's already a growing biz where companies will take out your old ICE and slap in a Tesla motor and batteries.

Rolexes and mechanical watches were designed to be serviced and repaired. They were considered a lifetime purchase for the average man and women. That remains in play as much from a historical influence(though they get their pound of flesh by gouging servicing costs and squeezing independent watchmakers out). The original quartz were similar, but as the tech got much cheaper they became more throwaway consumer items and repairability except in cases like Seiko's top end stuff became the exception.

I have no idea where you're getting the excess of the prolatariat stuff from and nope I'm not offended by all things modern. Quite the opposite in fact. I consider EV's to be one of the best things to happen to personal motoring in a century(they've a bit of a struggle to take over commercial, but in time...). Hell, on this very forum I'm one of those who considers watches running on electrons every bit as good as springs, just different. You seem to see them more as a storer of wealth and status, until something else takes your fancy in that vein, at least that's how it can certainly come across. And that's 100% fine too BTW. As for us being healthier and wealthier. The latter is certainly true(and we're so much safer too), but the former is up for grabs on a few fronts. Lifestyle conditions have never been higher and even allowing for wider diagnosis certain mental health conditions have shown a steady rise in the western world over the last couple of generations. We've also never produced so much waste, even something prety vital like food waste in history and that's one metric that is nowhere close to better and one we certainly should be looking at. This isn't an either/or position, nor should it be.

A longevity directive will not happen any time soon NJ, or it would be an incredible struggle against the economy and manufacturers. As it stands carmakers make fewer profits per vehicle than they did a generation ago(back then car brands were going bust on a nearly weekly basis). Margins are very tight and the market is entirely dependent on turnover of what is a limited lifespan consumer product. Consumers would have a major say in it too. We've all become used to the market as it stands and has stood for a century. The vast majority of people want a new/newer car for all sorts of reasons and perfectly understandable reasons too. Plus where would the impetus for improvements in range and safety etc come from? It would take a huge seachange across the board and I can't see it happening. I'm not so sure I'd want to see it happening. Maybe one improvement could be a directive that makers have to keep a stock, or ability to make spare parts for say 25 years. That wouldn't impact them or the consumer too much as many already do to some degree and it would keep a proportion of cars on the road for longer.

For me a better directive would be in other areas, household items for one. EG a directive that states a fridge, cooker, washing machine etc has to last for at least ten years, be repairable and with spares for at least twenty years. Items like phones and PC's another area where things have gotten worse, the top of the flops for that being Apple products.

I'd also heavily tax plastics. Since they were first invented nearly a century ago we have produced half of all plastics since the year 2000 and as it stands there is over 150 million tons of plastics in the oceans alone. A significant amount of that is from single use packaging which goes straight into the bin after we do our own personal 'unboxing' minus youtube. 😁 Recycling is largely a sop and one that was driven by the plastics industry itself back in the early 70's so they could get ahead of the legislation they saw coming. China used to take a load of our placcy waste(and a lot of that was just burned in open fires), but they called a halt to that. Less than 10% of all plastics have ever been recycled and today we're lucky to hit 20% a year. Out of the seven label types only two can be usefully recycled and those; polypropylene and PET often aren't. The rest go up in smoke or are buried. In a lot of cases it's just not economically viable to recycle and virgin plastics are simply cheaper.

Yeah, for me anyway it's areas like that which need to be tackled long before cars. Like you say an oven should last way longer than ten years. In a command economy like say East Germany, for all its many many sins and privations, they did make stuff like ovens and fridges that lasted forever. There was apparently a run on the East German fridges come reunification. Now tech improvements come along of course, but the basic carcass of the appliance should be scalable and updateable an repairable. So the basic job of a fridge is to keep stuff cool as economically and environmentally as possible, add ons like it reading barcodes on your food to let you know you've run out of milk is cool, but they should be add ons and I don't see why they can't be. Look at commercial aircraft. They have scary levels of uptime and the basic designs can last for decades with upgrades as they come along.

Again though you'd need a shift of thinking because that kinda thing is much more expensive upfront. I'd be willing to pay, but many wouldn't. Annnyway, this isn't a hobby of mine. Bit of a hobby horse when probed mind you. 😂

Well fair play to them if that's the case. Without Tesla and their very clever roll out the infrastructure at the same time plan we'd be not nearly so far down the road(no pun) as we are with EV's. They made them cool, aspirational and desired. Not quite the impact the Ford Model T had, but that would be pretty much impossible these days and their impact hasn't been too far off that in context. They certainly put the wind up the existing manufacturers. Quality control wasn't the mae west initially, but the few I've been in more recently looked pretty good. OK, not 'premium German' but with Tesla you're paying the extra for the tech, which is still far ahead of the rest of the pack and existing history, name and charging options. IMHO they got the designs pretty right too. Nothing too lairy, a bit staid, yes, but ageless and genderless as far as driver profiles go and resolutely middle class. Even their lack of colour options, which they've gotten static in some quarters from plugs into that(punning like a bastid tonight).

Speaking of hobbies, interests an' that...

Summer last year my clutch gave up the ghost, but luckily I had a NOS OEM one I got for buttons a few years back. Anyway had to drive to my mechanic who lives in the sticks. That was fun sans clutch. Rev matching, heel and toe and prayer to the traffic light deity got me there. Fast forward a couple of days(and a mate's loan car of a Mazda RX8. Jaysus the wankel engine is mad) he rings me to say it's all sorted. Bit of a problem; he had an extended test drive, just to check, as you do... so it was down to fumes and it has a locking petrol cap, which I of course forgot to give him the key for. Cos me. But because of my penchant for industrial design I had this to cover the problem;

A 1943 original 'Jerry' can, as designed by ze Germans - hence the name - in 1937 as part of a military request. It had been an ornament, just another fancy in my cabinet of curiosities, until a client of mine's wife ran out of go juice and she nabbed it from me to get her home. So I knew then it didn't leak(I didn't mention that to her handing it over. If she ever reads this, it was nice knowing ye...). Originally painted panzer grey, in turn nabbed, painted green and pressed into service by the Allies in France as they were crying out for fuel containers, ending up with a farmer in Normandy and thence to me. Recently since mostly superceded by plastic versions, but pretty much all the metal new ones you see are based on this(I needed a nozzle for it and a new one fitted it) though again more recyclable and repairable*. A truly Fantastic bit of industrial design. Every single part of the design has a singluar purpose with no fripperies. Still useful too as it turns out. Vorsprung durch technik as Auto Union might say.

*Though welding a fuel container requires a steady hand, expertise and a possible death wish... 😯😂

Funny enough on the collecting retro tech I've a few bits and bobs myself Fitz. From NASA chips for Apollo, to a Sinclair ZX81, Spectrum and a Welsh built 😁 Dragon 32 and a couple of handheld early 80's LED arcade games. Later stuff would be Apple's first Powerbook(prototype), a couple offirst series iMacs I had a notion to turn into terrariums or something, a first series Newton NOS in box(ohmigooood) and a couple of the school laptops they based on the Newton system, the Emate. This very eve...

Very slick. 🙂 There's a black one lives near me. Very cool dash and the mirrors, or lack of them is cool too and surprisingly easy to get used to. Unreal turning circle.