Aotearoa / New Zealand

With cars you need to use even more lube!

I'm not sure what the appropriate emoji response is, but I'm confident an emoji is the right response. One of these? 🤨 🫢 😑 🥴 😲 😖

but seriously though I’m not looking forward to when these cars get old enough to be the ones I buy.

I'm curious about that. I'm guessing some will go the distance and some won't, and the only ones that end up in the second hand market at 20 years old will be the old reliable ones.

To be fair, other than some chaos around ABS and traction control, having all the other systems fail has zero impact other than those features not being available. I suspect that in another 20 years (or maybe 3 😆) this car will be for sale, second hand, as a perfectly functioning normal car with the only odd thing being that a bunch of fuses have been pulled to make it work normally.

It's worth noting that many of the features are about safety. The one that automatically brakes before you drive into someone (I've never triggered it so not sure if it works), or the traction control and ABS brakes, the lane departure warning, etc. Even the one that dips headlights automatically could be considered a safety feature. I'll happily encourage this technology if it gets us to cars that talk to each other, and even better cars that drive themselves (I've never driven a Tesla, but I have driven a car with lane-centering where it steers to keep you in the centre of the lane. It did an ok job, but it was disappointing how incapable it was, regularly asking me to take over steering because it didn't know what was happening).

Probably worth noting I don't actually drive the car that much. It's pretty much our long distance driving car, and I like playing with the bells and whistles. Adaptive cruise control is my favourite (cruise control but it senses the car in front and slows you down to follow at a set distance).