The most recent survey by the Consumer Reports National Research Center found that five-year-old vehicles had about one-third fewer problems than the five-year-old vehicles we studied in April 2005. In fact, owners of about two-thirds of those vehicles reported no problems. And serious repairs, such as engine or transmission replacement, were quite rare. (p.15, June ’10, Consumer Reports)
Many of the Mercedes OM617 diesel engines from the 1970's /80's have done more than 500,000 miles.
If we could build cars 40 years ago that did 500,000 miles Then how come cars of today only go between 100,000 to 200,000 miles.
I don't believe that today's cars are getting more reliable.
I believe that the car companies are actually designing the cars to fail somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 miles because they want a fast turnover of business.
Also, have you seen the new Hyndai Sonata? Even bargain basement Hyundai is putting a lot more thought into styling and design. It's not the 1950s again... yet. But it seems like cars are a lot cooler than they were, definately 10 years ago, maybe even 5 years ago.
I parked next to a Sonata yesterday. I'd go so far as to say it was sexy. Crazy, isn't it?
I'm not sure about the diesel hybrid prediction (diesel is actually kind of scarce right now, which is why it is priced higher than even premium unleaded), but I take the spirit of your post to heart. There are automotive technologies that are going to increase mileage greatly, without killing performance.
Another greatly improving automotive measure that you may not know about is horsepower. Like quality, horsepower has increased by about 1/3 on average over the last 5 years. Automakers now sell midsize sedans with 4 cylinder engines that have more horsepower than the V6 engines of as little as 5 years ago.
People decry the fact that CAFE standards have not increased in some time (before Obama increased them recently), but few realize that automotive manufacturers have been exceeding the standards, even as they have been increasing horsepower.
Hybrids will become standard equipment in the near future, as will gasoline direct injection, 8 or 9 speed transmissions, and a technology called Homogenous Charge Compression Ignition, which will essentially make gasoline engines run like diesels, greatly increasing mileage under some driving conditions. Engines will get smaller, but with the use of turbochargers, will make more horsepower. They will use ethanol in a smaller, separate tank to increase performance while getting much better mileage.
There is nothing revolutionary here. This is the simple consequence of a 1% improvement in efficiency per year, or something on that order.
Most cars these days are well-built. We are living in science-fiction land these days with regards to automobiles, compared to 30 years ago when stalled cars with over-boiling radiators were a common sight on highways during holiday travel. The next step in automotive technology will be the emergence and domination of diesel-hybrids over the next 20 years. These will be as reliable as current cars and will offer 40-50 MPG fuel efficiency.
The doubling of the global economy every 15 years might not be so noticeable in the U.S. where things do not look that much different than in 1995. However, the change in places like Shanghai and Guangdong are far more significant. Mexico is much less poor today than it was in 1985.
You aren't denying my claim that people eat more grains, starches, sugars, and fruits / vegetables, and less beef, eggs, and dairy. (Food availability data show this, but you shouldn't need to consult the numbers because the change is so huge and obvious.)
Thanks for the compliment. I'm not sure how I'd separate the more mundane from the "other" posts, although I've thought about doing something like what Paul Graham does and having a list of "essays" that are more complete and "posts" that are shorter.
decent house with access to a good school system, healthcare (set-the-bones and antibiotics variety, not the shyte RH disparages), decent transportation and food.
not to be had in most parts of the country on a single average income.
I understand by some measures the low-rent apartment with speedy internet, Netflix, cable, DVR, etc which can be had on that income could be considered beter.
"In any neighborhood of where you are, exponential growth looks approximately linear"
"Any"? Should be: in some sufficiently small neighborhood that the 2nd-order and higher terms are negligible. Maybe you wouldn't notice exponential growth in standard-of-living on a 6-month or 1-year scale, looking that distance forward and backward from a point in time, perceiving the change to be merely linear.
But if things are supposed to be so much greater today than in say 1987 or 1997, the linear approximation breaks down. That's too much time; if change really were exponential, we'd notice it for sure. Like prevalence of cell phones or the adoption of DVDs. Everyone who was an adolescent or older before and after the switch noticed how rapidly the new things took over.
No one says that about standard-of-living or feeling of security, though, so whatever changes that have occurred weren't that big to the mind of human beings.
This reminds me of the power series approximation to the exponential function: In any neighborhood of where you are, exponential growth looks approximately linear, i.e., exp(t+h) ~ exp(t){1+h}.
Yes, but it was really the introduction of flying cars in 2006 that made such a vast improvement in our lives.
By the way, my 93-year-old father was employed by a consulting company working for a flying car company in 1938. They ended up building about 20 three-wheeled flying cars before the government declared them unsafe, at which point they sold the remaining stock to Japan.
1970s or early 1980s, when the government and experts scared everyone away from animal products and back into a starving peasant diet of grains, starches, and sugars.
Uh...what? Corn is the top crop for subsidy payments, and much of that goes to feed livestock.
I was going to write a comment, but it ended up turning into Progress, extra time, efficiency, and consumer goods. But that started because I remembered that John Scalzi recently wrote:
You have to get to about 1997 before there’s a car I would willingly get into these days. As opposed to today, when even the cheap boxy cars meant for first-time buyers have decent mileage, will protect you if you’re hit by a semi, and have more gizmos and better living conditions than my first couple of apartments.
Too much aggregation and abstraction. One must provide more granularity than mere "change" in general, and talk about "improvements in consumer items to include quality, choice, availability, price, etc.."
Change in terms of major shifts in life patterns - those can create difficulty in terms of adjustment and adaptability. But progress in consumer goods? That's readily assimilated. Increased purchasing power of the modal household income? That's welcomed eagerly, if not universally expected to the point of entitlement in some quarters of the world.
And it's asymmetric. Dramatic and rapid improvements are instantly absorbed, but stagnation is irritating, and decline is immensely irritating - even though it is less "change" than restoration of the (presumptively familiar) status quo ante.
Forgot to add: a lot of variance in utility is in the general culture of a place. E.g. Happiness in Latin America is vastly larger than in Russia, despite equal GDP per capita. In Latin America they are poor but they know how to have a good time, obviously. And this gets them almost to the top of the happiness charts. See, e.g. this chart, with Colombia beating Austria, Germany, Japan, France in happiness but trailing by a factor of 4 (!) in income per capita.
Many of the Mercedes OM617 diesel engines from the 1970's /80's have done more than 500,000 miles.
If we could build cars 40 years ago that did 500,000 miles Then how come cars of today only go between 100,000 to 200,000 miles.
I don't believe that today's cars are getting more reliable.
I believe that the car companies are actually designing the cars to fail somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 miles because they want a fast turnover of business.
Also, have you seen the new Hyndai Sonata? Even bargain basement Hyundai is putting a lot more thought into styling and design. It's not the 1950s again... yet. But it seems like cars are a lot cooler than they were, definately 10 years ago, maybe even 5 years ago.
I parked next to a Sonata yesterday. I'd go so far as to say it was sexy. Crazy, isn't it?
I'm not sure about the diesel hybrid prediction (diesel is actually kind of scarce right now, which is why it is priced higher than even premium unleaded), but I take the spirit of your post to heart. There are automotive technologies that are going to increase mileage greatly, without killing performance.
Another greatly improving automotive measure that you may not know about is horsepower. Like quality, horsepower has increased by about 1/3 on average over the last 5 years. Automakers now sell midsize sedans with 4 cylinder engines that have more horsepower than the V6 engines of as little as 5 years ago.
People decry the fact that CAFE standards have not increased in some time (before Obama increased them recently), but few realize that automotive manufacturers have been exceeding the standards, even as they have been increasing horsepower.
Hybrids will become standard equipment in the near future, as will gasoline direct injection, 8 or 9 speed transmissions, and a technology called Homogenous Charge Compression Ignition, which will essentially make gasoline engines run like diesels, greatly increasing mileage under some driving conditions. Engines will get smaller, but with the use of turbochargers, will make more horsepower. They will use ethanol in a smaller, separate tank to increase performance while getting much better mileage.
There is nothing revolutionary here. This is the simple consequence of a 1% improvement in efficiency per year, or something on that order.
Most cars these days are well-built. We are living in science-fiction land these days with regards to automobiles, compared to 30 years ago when stalled cars with over-boiling radiators were a common sight on highways during holiday travel. The next step in automotive technology will be the emergence and domination of diesel-hybrids over the next 20 years. These will be as reliable as current cars and will offer 40-50 MPG fuel efficiency.
The doubling of the global economy every 15 years might not be so noticeable in the U.S. where things do not look that much different than in 1995. However, the change in places like Shanghai and Guangdong are far more significant. Mexico is much less poor today than it was in 1985.
You aren't denying my claim that people eat more grains, starches, sugars, and fruits / vegetables, and less beef, eggs, and dairy. (Food availability data show this, but you shouldn't need to consult the numbers because the change is so huge and obvious.)
Keep your eye on the ball kid.
Thanks for the compliment. I'm not sure how I'd separate the more mundane from the "other" posts, although I've thought about doing something like what Paul Graham does and having a list of "essays" that are more complete and "posts" that are shorter.
lifestyle. not income.
decent house with access to a good school system, healthcare (set-the-bones and antibiotics variety, not the shyte RH disparages), decent transportation and food.
not to be had in most parts of the country on a single average income.
I understand by some measures the low-rent apartment with speedy internet, Netflix, cable, DVR, etc which can be had on that income could be considered beter.
But for family formation, it's crap.
"In any neighborhood of where you are, exponential growth looks approximately linear"
"Any"? Should be: in some sufficiently small neighborhood that the 2nd-order and higher terms are negligible. Maybe you wouldn't notice exponential growth in standard-of-living on a 6-month or 1-year scale, looking that distance forward and backward from a point in time, perceiving the change to be merely linear.
But if things are supposed to be so much greater today than in say 1987 or 1997, the linear approximation breaks down. That's too much time; if change really were exponential, we'd notice it for sure. Like prevalence of cell phones or the adoption of DVDs. Everyone who was an adolescent or older before and after the switch noticed how rapidly the new things took over.
No one says that about standard-of-living or feeling of security, though, so whatever changes that have occurred weren't that big to the mind of human beings.
This reminds me of the power series approximation to the exponential function: In any neighborhood of where you are, exponential growth looks approximately linear, i.e., exp(t+h) ~ exp(t){1+h}.
Yes, but it was really the introduction of flying cars in 2006 that made such a vast improvement in our lives.
By the way, my 93-year-old father was employed by a consulting company working for a flying car company in 1938. They ended up building about 20 three-wheeled flying cars before the government declared them unsafe, at which point they sold the remaining stock to Japan.
1970s or early 1980s, when the government and experts scared everyone away from animal products and back into a starving peasant diet of grains, starches, and sugars.
Uh...what? Corn is the top crop for subsidy payments, and much of that goes to feed livestock.
Your blog is a gem. You should put posts like that Progress one and ones like this random selection: http://jseliger.com/2008/02...
into a separate blog where they're not buried by your more mundane posts.
I was going to write a comment, but it ended up turning into Progress, extra time, efficiency, and consumer goods. But that started because I remembered that John Scalzi recently wrote:
You have to get to about 1997 before there’s a car I would willingly get into these days. As opposed to today, when even the cheap boxy cars meant for first-time buyers have decent mileage, will protect you if you’re hit by a semi, and have more gizmos and better living conditions than my first couple of apartments.
Too much aggregation and abstraction. One must provide more granularity than mere "change" in general, and talk about "improvements in consumer items to include quality, choice, availability, price, etc.."
Change in terms of major shifts in life patterns - those can create difficulty in terms of adjustment and adaptability. But progress in consumer goods? That's readily assimilated. Increased purchasing power of the modal household income? That's welcomed eagerly, if not universally expected to the point of entitlement in some quarters of the world.
And it's asymmetric. Dramatic and rapid improvements are instantly absorbed, but stagnation is irritating, and decline is immensely irritating - even though it is less "change" than restoration of the (presumptively familiar) status quo ante.
Which middle class income? From the 1950s or the 2000s?
Forgot to add: a lot of variance in utility is in the general culture of a place. E.g. Happiness in Latin America is vastly larger than in Russia, despite equal GDP per capita. In Latin America they are poor but they know how to have a good time, obviously. And this gets them almost to the top of the happiness charts. See, e.g. this chart, with Colombia beating Austria, Germany, Japan, France in happiness but trailing by a factor of 4 (!) in income per capita.