someproteinguy wrote:
Nothing makes your current car feel old like going and looking at new ones. Things seem to change so much in a few short years; all sorts of fancy new stuff.
Seems as though the car manufacturers have figured out that new/better electronic whistles and bells are actually quite cheap to put into the cars, but add a lot of appeal. I recently spent a few days driving my goddaughter's car due to an "incident" involving a U-haul truck. She has basically a cheap economy sedan (like $20kish new IIRC). What I noticed is that while the pretty display and controls look neat, and there are certainly some features there that my car doesn't have (blutooth functionality is really limited in my car, no backup display, monocolor display, stock radio that clearly wasn't audio tested for the interior of the car, etc), this is often at the expense of the more expensive physical features of a car. She didn't have multi-zone heat/AC, for example. Which I didn't think would bother me much until I had to shift from driving a car where I can just adjust the temperature to a given number (in Fahrenheit or Celsius even!) to one where I was constantly adjusting the dials based on external temperature changes. Also noticed that her car, despite being many years newer, seemed to rattle a lot. Moving parts just felt less solid. I felt constant engine vibration through the floorboards. And that's not counting the more obvious things like interior space, horsepower differences, suspension differences, etc. Then again, at least her car had working steering, so that's a plus.
Dunno. For now, I'll stick with my older, but just darn awesomely built car, even if it doesn't have the new fancy electronic gizmos. And when I do buy a new car, I'll make sure to be willing to spend more on the construction and physical capabilities, and assume that the relatively less expensive new/fancy electronics will come along with it. I guess what I'm getting at is that while including this stuff is nice, it's also something that the car manufacturers are still like a decade behind on (go look at some of the mods people do with electronics in their cars some time). And none of that really makes up for the base quality of the car itself IMO. But many of the manufacturers are basically putting a junk car out there, gussying it up with fancy gizmos, and calling it a day. Not that the cheap cars are any *less* capable than they were without the gizmos, but they're making those things more of the selling point of the car. Which I can't fault them for, but it's something you want to look out for, especially if you intend to own the car for some time.
