The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days.
I still see these running in rural Spain and France, usually held together with wire and hope, clocking like what 400k+ km? The XUD diesel engines are practically unkillable. They have no ECU to brick, no adblue sensors to fail and put the car into limp mode and thankfully none of those DRM locked headlights.
The argument for the countryside need of a modern SUV usually cites reliability and safety, and in 2026, modern complexity is the enemy of reliability. If your C15 breaks down in a field, you can fix it with a wrench. If your Range Rover breaks down in a field because a sensor in the air suspension noticed a voltage variance...you are stranded until a tow truck takes it to a dealer.
> The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days.
I wonder how differently cars would be built, if instead of maximizing for value extraction and crap nobody needs, they instead were optimized for utility and maintenance (and sure, fuel economy, aerodynamics and some sane environmental stuff). Like take the C15 and add 2-4 decades of manufacturing and safety improvements, while keeping it simple and utilitarian.
That would be the absolute dream engineering brief. If I actually sit down and design that vehicle, it would have something like this. List, off the top of my head.
1. You keep the modern metallurgy and the crumple zones. You keep ABS and basic traction control because they are solved problems that save lives without needing cloud connectivity.
2. Instead of a 2000 USD proprietary touchscreen that will be obsolete in 3 years, the dashboard could be just a double DIN slot and a heavy-duty, universal tablet mount with a 100W USB-C PD port. The car provides the power and the speakers and my phone provides the maps and music. When the tech improves, you upgrade your phone, not your dashboard.
3. Nobs and buttons instead of touchscreens like VW has done recently, if my memory serves me right.
The tragedy is that regulations in the EU and North America make this incredibly difficult to sell. The sane environmental stuff you mentioned has morphed into a requirement for deeply integrated electronic oversight. But I genuinely believe there is a massive, silent majority of drivers waiting for a car that promises nothing other than to start every morning and never ask for a software update.
> The sane environmental stuff you mentioned has morphed into a requirement for deeply integrated electronic oversight
Decent catalytic converters require an array of sensors, ECU, and ability to fine control the engine inputs to work - without them most large cities would become smog ridden hells.
There's no reason technology has to be user-hostile. You can still have an ECU and screens and everything. When it breaks the screen can be used to tell you exactly which sensor input is out of range. There's no reason parts need to be serialized and learning a new part can only be done once.
You can build a modern vehicle that's still repairable.
Modules need to be programmed for your vehicle specs and country because there are different laws and functions.
For example rear taillights are different in Europe vs the US.
Another is that higher trims of my car have a rear climate zone which has a different fan and actuators for air flow that the module needs to know exist.
> Modules need to be programmed for your vehicle specs and country because there are different laws and functions.
So are different intervalls of oil change between Australia and Europe - and yet, even in the 90s, people were able to keep that in mind.
We got taught to be helpless by the industry, so they can help us out. If that mindset would have existed in the 60s, 70s, then there would not be a "true to OEM" aftermarket available for car parts. We need to get back to that.
We got taught to be helpless by the industry, so they can help us out.
industry is pretty damn good at figuring out what customers actually want, instead of just what customer say they want and then don't actually buy.
cars are the way they are because that's what the overwhelming majority of car buyers actually want. The average driver doesn't want their car spitting out error codes, they want a check engine light to tell them to take it to a mechanic, and any information beyond that is confusing.
Sure, but the reasons programming requires proprietary software accessible only to the dealer via some kind of online access are depressing: laziness, greed, and crime.
Making software that's usable by independent shops and consumers costs money, eliminates business lock-in to dealers, and boosts the gray/black market for broken or stolen parts, so the only reason manufacturers do it at all is when they are required to by regulation.
That’s just a bunch of “if”s. And they are already programmed. But instead of coming directly built in on the vehicle you need to purchase a very expensive tool that hooks on the port and then tells you what the vehicle should tell you in the first place.
The solution to city air pollution is a different vehicle with a different drive train: an EV. The C15 is a workhorse for farmers and craftsmen not for shopping trips and driving the family to visit granny on the other side of town.
EVs are still heavier than ICE vehicles and will for the next 10-20 years unless one is OK with a tiny battery. And heavy weight means more pollution from wheels that produce particles that ends up in lungs. Note brakes also pollutes with asbestos but EVs typically have regenerative braking so I think brakes pollutes roughly the same in a heavier EV as in ICE car.
I compared the weights of EVs versus ICE, and they were surprisingly close. Most of time, the differences were in the 15% range, and then you find exceptions like the Hummer, which is 30% heavier. I'm sure it comes as no surprise That the heavier the vehicle, the bigger the difference in ICE versus EV weight.
While I think lighter weight vehicles of all types would be a big win, I fear that ship has sailed. I think we have an opportunity to reset vehicle size both from a desire for cheaper and simpler vehicles. Look at cost and weight of the BYD EVs and the new pickup trucks from Slate and Telos.
Overall, I find the slightly increased weight for an EV to be an acceptable trade-off. Brakes last longer, tires, depending on make, are about 10% shorter life at most and overall maintenance is much less. Since I keep my cars until the body goes toes up, I have a much lower carbon footprint. than the 3yr lease route
If you give the difference in weight as a percentage, it is sort of surprising that the percentage is higher for heavier vehicles, right? Or at least I don’t get it. I’d expect the EV to be a constant factor heavier, a total weight of combustion_vehicle*1.1 or something.
I wonder if it's sorta like the rocket equation. A heavier vehicle requires larger batteries to move the extra weight with a comparable range as a smaller vehicle, but the batteries are heavy too, so you need even more battery to move the heavier batteries.
It's exactly that. Battery = heavy, heavy vehicle = short range. I wonder if ICE vehicle weight is calculated with a full fuel tank? Gas / Diesel is also pretty heavy and large vehicles have large empty spaces to be filled with fuel.
I had a 2010s Civic and moved to a Model 3. The curb weight difference was only ~3-400 lbs (about 10%), but the larger battery capacity, large SUV offerings are significantly heavier than ICE options (the F150 Lightning is about 2,000 pounds heavier than an ICE F150, for example, 5,000 -> 7,000 lbs.).
The tire pollution is true, but the brakes hardly get used on an EV. They are almost for emergency use only. Mine has a special mode to disable regeneration for a while so you can use the brake pads to clean the rotors.
The difference in tyre wear is so marginal it's probably unmeasurable - less than the difference between running at the correct pressure and forgetting to check your tyre pressure.
ICE vehicles also have exhaust pipes which pollute some too...
I love the idea of these tiny EVs. Apparently the EU's making some legislation for them so that they can go without much of the expensive 'safety' equipment such as driver tracking.
Parking cars in cities not designed for them is a nightmare, but getting around with a car is so much faster than public transport, even if your city's is fairly decent.
Hybrids are even better, super tiny batteries with an ICE on standby.
If you scale size as well (like a motorcycle but e.g. as a tricycle for safety), you can realize some major efficiency improvements (doubling or tripling energy efficiency).
Which is why, bicycles should be the focus of transportation improvement.
tangential: people also underestimate the convenience of public transport being a one-way trip, meaning you can go from A>B>C>D>A and never have to go back to a previous spot to pick up a part of your luggage that you left behind.
Personally, when not being a tourist, almost all my trips are home to some place and back again.
Public transport is great, but if you're going to a less good part of the city, or even just a place that's unfamiliar, and less frequented, it might be a bit more difficult to get around.
And public transport travel distances can be patchy based on where the stops are, especially if you're going to the outskirts of your city.
Also when having to be present in the office, that extra 15-25 mins (x2) it takes to get to and from the office adds up quickly.
Engine control alone can be self-contained. The Ford EEC IV of the 1980s had its program permanently etched into the Intel 8061 CPU, and was designed to last 30 years. It did. I finally sold off my 40 year old Ford Bronco, which was still running on the original engine and CPU.
This is my exact same sentiment. I’m cautiously excited about the upcoming Slate Pickup[1] - I can see it being my go-to if I leave NYC, but it still won’t hit like the XJ Cherokee I drove before I gave up cars for the city.
Looks interesting, I wonder to what extent they really want to make cars DIY-able again (as they state). On the one hand, they mention servicing is "easy" — just turn to their partner repair shop chain! On the other hand, there's Slate University and mention of repairability. I haven't followed development of this at all, so I'm genuinely curious. Hope it's not just "you can swap in and out our proprietary modules".
I really want to like the slate but their speakers and tablet holder concept actually are awful. Just a super basic off the shelf din rail hole and aux in and slap the most basic touch screen with physical control stereo you can find in there that does air play and car play works for me.
Who cares. Literally every discussion of vehicles someone has to bring up infotainment systems. You know that getting your dopamine drip is not what a vehicle is for, right?
I like the idea of a slate but the truck bed just makes no sense at that size. I don’t understand why it’s not defaulted to another row of seats or hatchback, with the option to convert to truck. 5 ft bed without extension is kind of pointless as a bed, but huge as a trunk.
That's effectively what it is, but reverse. You buy it as a truck, and can buy seats & cap and turn it into an SUV. I see it as the closest thing you can get to a kei truck in the US without importing. Relatively cheap, good payload capacity, (better than a lot of trucks out there) effectively unable to tow, 5-foot bed, which is the same or larger than most mid-size trucks, and a tiny form factor.
It's certainly a niche vehicle, but it looks exciting if it can fill you niche.
I worry about the Slate truck being DOA with expiration of incentives for EVs. Someone please tell me I'm wrong, because if they do deliver as promised, I'll be excited to buy one.
For me, I'm hoping it fills the mid-90s Isuzu Pup sized hole in my heart.
What do the sensors do? There's not much you can change in the catalytic converter so I assume it's just reading temperature? So I assume it's changing the fuel/air combustion ratio according to the cat's temperature?
Not a motorhead but IIRC a combustion with too little oxygen produces soot (pollution) and one with too much oxygen produces NOx pollution, with a sweet spot in the middle. The exhaust oxygen sensor allows the ECU to adjust the air/fuel mix to hit the minimum pollution spot, instead of estimating it.
There might also be a catalyst temperature sensor or something.
It's not a "whole bunch" of sensors, it's a few sensors and it's not some inscrutable magic, it's somethijg someone could replicate in open-source if they had equipment and time. We really need to get away from the mindset that proprietary stuff contains inscrutable magic. It's often worse quality than the open thing. However, it does have the right connections to be allowed to be put in a car that drives on the road.
This is why late 90s cars are objectively the greatest ever built. You had ECUs, cats, ABS, disc brakes, airbags, power steering, and conventional automatic transmissions. Everything that makes a modern car safe and reliable, but none of the high tech digital BS that has infused things nowadays.
ESC (electronic stability control) didn't become common until about 2010 to 2015. It makes a really big difference for safety -- EU estimates are that it's saved more than 15,000 lives. Let's backport that one too. :)
My 2004 RX-8 had decently solid ESC, but it was a “high-end” vehicle at the time. It’s definitely something we want to keep in our idealized vehicle (but let’s also keep the “disable ESC so I can have fun” button)
I was going to make this exact comment. The RX-8 had excellent stability control. Saved my ass at least once going too fast around a 90 degree corner. It also behaved really well on icy roads. It was pretty incredible for a rear wheel drive sports car, especially impressive at the time compared to every other car on the road back then.
I bought my first real wheel drive car in 2014. Still have it. It's not a race car. About 170hp. It struggles at the smallest curves. Good thing it has traction control and esp. Except all the front wheel cars I had before, one even slightly more powerful and smaller, never needed any of that. Never ever buying a rwd again. (Enthusiast forums of the brand tell me I don't know how to drive RWD. Skill issue. :D)
Rwd is definitely sketchier in certain circumstances, especially going uphill in low traction. Also pretty bad in the snow generally. but I’ve only had issues going around corners when it was very wet and I was driving faster that the speed limit. If you are running into traction issues driving normally (ie not flooring it) I would recommend having your tires and alignment checked, even with RWD that should not be happening in my experience.
In reality many 90s cars are phenomenal rust buckets due to issues in the adoption of water-based paints, cars which actually still have tangible amounts of steel in their panels are basically golden samples.
>the dashboard could be just a double DIN slot and a heavy-duty, universal tablet mount with a 100W USB-C PD port. The car provides the power and the speakers and my phone provides the maps and music.
Legally mandated backup cameras make your idea DOA.
In fact, nearly everything terrible about cars in the last decade can be traced to regulations in some way.
Wondering why transmissions are insanely complicated and unreliable now? Manufacturers were forced to eek out an extra couple MPG due to continually tightening environmental regulations. Something has to give.
> In fact, nearly everything terrible about cars in the last decade can be traced to regulations in some way.
I think the reason we even need backup cameras now is that visibility is so poor on modern vehicles. I think that in turn is due to increasing the height of the bottom of the windows for better airbags. I’m sure it’s great in a crash, but visibility is also a safety concern.
Not all of it is regulations though, but lot of common complaints.
> Instead of a 2000 USD proprietary touchscreen that will be obsolete in 3 years, the dashboard could be just a double DIN slot and a heavy-duty, universal tablet mount with a 100W USB-C PD port. The car provides the power and the speakers and my phone provides the maps and music. When the tech improves, you upgrade your phone, not your dashboard.
Dacia does that. The base sandero comes with speakers and Bluetooth. The rest is up to you, there is no screen no radio.
I am happy with Car Play as a decent middle ground. It’s nice to have a large screen, and everything is still done on the phone and not on a shite computer whose components were cost-cut to an inch of their lives.
We already had basically the solution you suggested with airplay/car play - USB charger with audio out that just is a display. when a phone isn't plugged in it shows super basic radio features like station and song name for AM and FM.
Had it and now most manufacturers are abandoning that for some proprietary crap that's much worse and requires a subscription for navigation and music streaming.
I have a theory that these environmental regulations at least to some degree defeat themselves. They make engines more complicated, so more fragile and harder for an amateur (edit: or any professional who isn't their own brand repair shops) to service. They encourage smaller-block engines with turbos and compressors which makes the engine more short-lived. They produce stuff like throttle-hang and gear selection recommendations optimized for driving economy, not engine longevity (or driving experience, for that matter).
On the whole, they seem to be contributing to this movement of taking power away from the end consumer and making your product more and more like a subscription (this goes further than the car industry, of course). I do realize that it's important to cut down on pollution! And maybe this kind of stuff has been studied... although I imagine it would be very hard to do accurately.
Imagine if a car manufacturer would provide service guides, easily-accessible part diagrams and competitively priced spare parts. Imagine if they optimized for longevity and if the handbook that came with the car had more technical details than it had warnings about how doing any kind of maintenance yourself will result in a) your death and b) a voided warranty. That would be pretty nice.
Did I hear right that some new vehicles are claiming 20,000km service intervals?
I know I’ve seen 15,000 service intervals.
This is the minimum to maintain the warranty for the first 3 / 5 / 7 seven years whatever.
If you change the oil at every 5000k and never turn off a cold engine - all petrol engines have fuel wash down at ignition cut, but much worse when the engine is come - you should expect 500,000+ plus kilometres out of an engine barring any metallurgical problems or manufacturing defects.
Petrol makes a poor lubricant for engines, and fucks engine oil. The less of it in engine oil the better.
Modern engines and fully synthetic oils are way better than the their counterparts from my youth, but 15,000+ kilometres service intervals are less about what engines need and more about what the folks over in marketing need.
Edit: I did see a second hand commercial diesel van recently that had met all service requirements for the warranty period, x number of years or 90,000 kilometres.
This meant it had logged exactly two oil changes since new, and the third had just been done at 90,000.
Wireless Android Auto or Carplay generally use BT to setup but WiFi to send the bulk of the graphical data over.
That said, there are adapters to make an existing Android Auto Wireless if you want it. I think some are sold on Amazon too so you could probably try and maybe return. I don't have any experience with them since I'm very happy with my car's built in wired Android Auto and the reliability of cabling but it is something you can try.
Looking at image search for "2020 impreza dash" there's a screen above climate controls in all images. I was asking if there was an option to have no sceen.
Now the car company has a live feed of your location and the ability to unlock your car at will. That's probably fine unless they get hacked, at which point it abruptly becomes less fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35919133
> I wonder how differently cars would be built, if instead of maximizing for value extraction and crap nobody needs, they instead were optimized for utility and maintenance (and sure, fuel economy, aerodynamics and some sane environmental stuff).
Auto manufacturers already have stripped-down base models of their entry-level vehicles. Many have commercial versions of their vehicles, especially trucks and vans, that are stripped down.
The stripped down base models don't sell well.
Remember how the internet was clamoring for an iPhone Mini? Whenever there were complaints about modern cell phones, you could find what looked like unanimous agreement that a smaller iPhone would be the golden ticket. Then Apple made an iPhone Mini, and it did not sell well.
The same happens with vehicles. Whenever you find threads complaining about modern vehicles it seems unanimous that modern vehicles have too many things consumers don't want and we'd be better off with simple base models. Yet simple base models do exist already and they don't sell well. Real consumers look at their $20,000 Nissan Versa and realize that spending an extra $1-2K on amenities isn't going to change their monthly payment much.
There is a lot of precedent for this. The Tata Nano was an Indian micro car that was small, low-power, and had bare minimum amenities. It was under $5K USD in inflation-adjusted dollars.
It was discontinued due to low demand because sales declined steadily year over year. Nobody wanted it.
I wonder how much of that is due to dealers, who want to upsell. Do they even keep the base model in stock, or does it have to be special ordered (or today, we can give you a "discount" on the fancy model that still has a higher profit margin for us).
I'm just speculating; the same reasoning wouldn't apply to the iPhone mini. But car dealers have a lot of incentive to skew the results. It takes a fair bit of willpower to say "I am buying this specific car I want and will go elsewhere if I can't have it."
Just as an anecdote - When I was buying my last car I went in and asked for just the base model with nothing added onto it, ie not even the "eXtra Special" designations, and the dealership said they probably won't have any for a long time and if I'd like to pay 50% more for one with some features added on.
I declined and kept looking at the inventory of the 4-5 dealerships nearest to me. For six months they never had a single base model.
I started looking at another maker and they seemed to have base models that just wouldn't sell, stuck on lots for that same time period.
> and the dealership said they probably won't have any for a long time
In my case, I told the dealerships I was okay with waiting up to two years to get the exact trim I wanted. I told them whichever dealership could get me an allocation first got the sale. Then I literally stood up to leave.
And like magic, they went to the computer and found the exact trim I wanted and got my allocation a month out. I was extremely picky on color and options, though. If I had been flexible on color it would have been sooner.
The sales people at dealerships will pressure you into upsells. They’re not going to turn down an easy sale if you demonstrate that you know what you’re doing. They were trying to upsell you.
That seems unlikely as I literally left and did not buy a car with more options and stayed in contact afterwards but I have seen that technique before where they suddenly "find" one in inventory after they realize you aren't going to take the option that gives them more comission.
>> When I was buying my last car I went in and asked
> In my case, I told
Exactly.
When you’re paying, you don’t ask, you tell.
This is what I want, and this is what I’ll pay.
Don’t get me started on fucking real estate agents either. Parasites. Real estate sells itself. Conveyancers / Solicitors do all the real work, and typically charge a set fee. Real estate agents typically charge a percentage and they literally don’t do anything.
The sales folk at a car dealership aren’t there to help you.
There is literally no situation bad enough that a car sales agent or real estate agent can’t make worse. Incapacitated pilot? Fucking useless. Need a dental cavity filled? Fucking useless. Got a problem with your Goggomobil? fucking useless.
Packing peanuts are more effective at their claimed benefits than car sales agents and real estate agents are at theirs.
Sometimes real estate agents do a lot. Anecdote of course, but my real estate agent spent a few hours basically every weekend with us for like 2-3 months as we toured 25 houses, went over ~10 inspection reports, and made 3-4 offers. And he and his team got roughly 20k. In a better housing market I think they do a lot less, but I know ours did a lot of work.
Anecdotally: I helped someone look for a cheap car recently and the base models are everywhere on my local lots. YMMV and I'm sure someone will respond that their area doesn't have any, but in my recent experience it wasn't hard to find a base model at all.
It's driven by consumer demand: If you can pay $30/month on your 5-year loan and get heated seats and a nicer navigation system, that's $1/day for 5 years and then you own it. It's easy to talk yourself into stepping up to something nicer that you're going to use every day.
I really wish there were an even cheaper car for that use case. Perhaps billed as a second car for families, where one is used just for commuting and errands, and the other is the general purpose one with a longer range. Say, with an 80 mile battery, two seats, and under $10k.
I gather that they exist in China and might be allowed into the US. I'd buy one.
I was hoping secondhand Nisan Leaf’s would fit those criteria by now.
The Nissan Leaf’s biggest problem is it’s the only vehicle in its class worth considering, or available at all, so secondhand ones are sold at whatever the market will bear.
There’s the Prius, but whoever is responsible for its styling will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Agreed - check out for example a Toyota rav4 le. This is the base model with effectively zero modern “subscription-esque” fancy features. It’s got a touchscreen and power windows, but otherwise it’s all the reliability/etc of Toyota and that’s it. About half the price of what most rav4s are listed at and $20k+ cheaper than a 4Runner.
My point was you can buy a car that is primarily safety+capability and not luxury+subscription. My rav4 has a touchscreen and power windows but that’s literally it as far as convenience/luxury. ~28k a couple years ago, no subscription.
Anything heated, remote, touch to start, etc is in the luxury category what gp was asking about avoiding.
This comment section went from “I don’t understand why car makers don’t sell a cheap stripped down car without luxuries” to “Heated mirrors and seats are very important” very quickly.
HN comments discovering in real time why the stripped-down base model vehicles don’t actually sell. People like those luxury features and they choose to pay extra for them.
And yet I personally know more people who own iPhone minis (myself included) now in 2026 than that own pixel phones of any model. I think the data is distorted by the fact that most people who want things like that also don’t typically buy new (especially with cars). I did buy my iPhone 13 mini from Apple directly, but I bought it after the 14 line had already been released.
I loved the iPhone 4 format factor, but prefer more recent and larger editions for battery life and battery longevity.
My only gripe with the 6.7 inch form factor would be solved if someone would just sell me a bigger hand. I can’t hold it one handed and reach the far corner of the screen without some obnoxious accessory like a Popsocket bolted to the back thereby making it impossible to use on a flat surface or fit in a pocket.
Come to think of it, Zaphod might have been on to something with that third arm.
I am aware. My point was basically that the people who wanted them weren’t lying, they really love them, and are willing to keep them for years even though they are getting slightly old now. I’m imagining this doesn’t show up in first year sales numbers in a similar way to how the things people say they want in cars typically drive used market buying not new market purchases.
I’ve tried to validate this hypothesis, but run into problems finding the data. Do you know where to find currently active numbers by model? I’m think something like browser market share charts. I’ve only been able to find numbers from the year they were released, and even that was as a percentage of total sales, not raw numbers.
My hypothesis is that minis (13 mini and 12 mini) are over represented in active phones compared to other models of that generation.
Safety improvement means larger crumple zones, reinforcement, etc... Which mean a bigger and heavier vehicle if you want to keep the same capacity. That in turn means a more powerful engine, brakes, wheels and tyres, etc... further increasing the size and weight of the vehicle. This is an exponential factor.
Fuel economy and environmental stuff (which are linked) come with tighter engine control for better combustion and cleaner exhaust. It means tighter tolerances so simple tools may be less appropriate, and electronics.
And there are comfort elements that are hard to pass nowadays: A/C, power steering, door lock and windows. Mandatory safety equipment like airbags and ABS. Even simple cars like what Dacia makes are still bigger, heavier and more complex than older cars like the C15, they don't really have a choice.
It’s the ford transit connect. Car makers can’t make money on them because a) for personal use they are uncomfortable and b) commercial buyers drive them a million miles before replacing them.
The margin in cars is in the luxury. And for most personal buyers they’ll get as much luxury as they can afford because they are contemplating their monthly cost over total price and leather seats cost $80 more per month on a $600 monthly, they’ll splurge.
Modularity would be great too. Standardized connectors and outer dimensions for engines even between brands. Medium, large, small. You don't need 100 different types. Meanwhile, all this has been overtaken by the need to get away from fossil fuels as soon as we practically can. Oil should not be valued based on the cost of pumping it out of the ground but based on the cost of creating a liter of it from raw materials (CO2, lots of energy).
> Standardized connectors and outer dimensions for engines even between brands. Medium, large, small. You don't need 100 different types.
There aren't 100 different types of engines. At any given time each auto manufacturer only has a couple different engines in production. Different models can get different variations for performance or use targets, but auto manufacturers are very good at standardizing within their company.
Notice how they're grouped by series? All of the engines in each series share a common platform with minor changes from year to year. In many cases you can swap parts between engines within the same series. An engine series lasts 10-15 years. Some times the parts even carry over to the next series.
Swapping between brands is a pipe dream, though. Forcing everyone to fit their engineering into a bounding box that has to be agreed upon by all auto manufacturers around the world would only lead to either unnecessarily large vehicles with wasted space (to leave room for future engineering needs) or unnecessarily complicated engineering to fit everything into the pre-defined allowable engine envelope. All to accommodate engine swaps between manufacturers which is never necessary for consumer cars.
Why don’t we start with computers and software first? Let’s eliminate all these different laptop options and force every manufacturer to use 3 government-mandated chassis sizes: Small, medium, and large. Make parts interchangeable with standard connectors and power budgets. Nobody is allowed to innovate or customize because we must be standardized.
Where do you think we’d be now? Typing on our highly optimized MacBook Pros, or working on a clunky box with the fans whirring like a hair dryer because everyone had to fit a standard lowest common denominator design and changing it required years of regulatory work?
Or how about software and operating systems? We allow two OS types: Server and Desktop and they all have to work together within standardized interfaces. Nobody is allowed to innovate unless it’s within the regulated specs.
Doesn’t sound so good when it’s applied to topics we’re most familiar with.
In any industry with high performance machines like CNC machines, pick and place, or precision equipment you will find that the parts are not modular or interchangeable across manufacturers either.
You do this by standardizing interconnection at both the physical and protocol levels, and leave everything else alone. Then you allow both to evolve at a reasonable rate (maybe 10 years for the physical interconnects, maybe less for protocol since back compat is much easier there).
This leaves people free to tweak form factors, energy efficiency, system capacities etc. etc.
We don't need to care about the final results ("small medium large"), we need to care that you can connect things together (which also means "replace one component with another"). Same for automobiles and most other consumer technology products.
> Then you allow both to evolve at a reasonable rate (maybe 10 years
Automakers already get 10-15 years or more out of their platforms. The same series of engines will be used across the their lineup for a very long time. Transmissions are shared across car makers, and so on.
That’s not a problem. The request above was for all auto manufacturers to have to fit into a standardized format.
It would be like telling Intel, AMD and Apple that they all had to use the same CPU socket for 5 years and they all had to be interchangeable.
Do you think we’d have MacBook Pros with all day battery life that also have 500MB/s of memory bandwidth if the company was forced to use a standard CPU socket that all manufacturers agreed on? Definitely would not. Some other country without such requirements would be enjoying them, though.
It’s a demand that makes less sense the closer you are to the subject matter.
Despite 36+ years as a programmer at more or less every level of computing, I don't know that much about CPU sockets. However, my impression is that we'd not be particularly limited by a requirement that a given physical CPU socket design (size, pinouts, power supply) was used for 10 years. As a self-builder, and thus periodic (re)purchaser of motherboards and cpus, my sense is that the majority of the changes to CPU socket specs are gratuitous and unnecessary.
You are purposefully obtuse and I'm not sure what joy you derive from it but just to take your silly strawmen:
Laptops for the most part are put together from standardized parts and you can exchange the major ones (CPU, RAM, storage and often even the displays) from one brand to another and it will work. And if you go to desktop computers the range of parts that can be swapped out between manufacturers increases even further (power supplies, graphics cards, etc).
The 'highly optimized MacBook Pro' is as closed as apple can make it because they are trying to emulate car manufacturers, including 'model years'.
As for OS types, we have a basic common denominator, the boot environment and some abstractions which allow us to run a wide variety of operating systems on the same hardware.
And on that hardware you can run applications, which either talk to the OS directly using a standardized interface and there usually are a number of emulation options and VMs that allow you to run other operating systems and/or their applications, usually with some penalty but for the most part it works.
CNC machines use a lot of standardized tooling (I had a machine shop at some point, founded a CNC machine company, and I think I'm still in touch enough with this domain to be able to do it again if I want to today). Sure, you can't pull a board from one machine and stick it in another, but the G-code they use is for the most part backwards compatible to 1966 or so and it isn't rare at all to see a machine upgraded to the latest controllers and motors but keeping the frame, tooling and such.
Cars are over optimized to the point that the cost to society (in terms of landfill and recycling) is immense, there is most likely a point where a better balance between up front profits and cost to society can be found.
I'm sorry, but I'm not being obtuse nor making strawman arguments. I'm trying to explain an industry I'm familiar with. If you're going to start with personal attacks or calling my input "silly" I don't know why I bother, but here goes:
> Laptops for the most part are put together from standardized parts and you can exchange the major ones (CPU, RAM, storage and often even the displays) from one brand to another and it will work. And if you go to desktop computers the range of parts that can be swapped out between manufacturers increases even further (power supplies, graphics cards, etc).
You cannot swap CPUs between laptops, obviously, unless you get the exact same generation CPU with the same footprint. This fact helps basically nobody. It is true that some laptops are built around the same CPUs from a common vendor, but the same thing happens in cars too!
Major parts like transmissions are shared across many vehicles and vendors. The popular ZF 8HP transmission can be found in cars from Dodge, Audi, Jaguar, BMW, Porsche, Land Rover, Jeep, Volkswagen, and others for example.
This patterns repeats across many major components like Bosch ECUs. Automakers aren’t dumb. They’re not custom making every part for no good reason.
Many of the sensors and small pieces used in cars are generic and interchangeable. They're also available across a range of generic vendors.
Common parts like wheels and tires are standardized with small variations, much like the different RAM speeds in computers. Windshield wipers are generic. Cars take generic fuel and oil.
The point is: There are a lot of shared and common parts in the automative world already. Like your CNC example, there are some common parts where it makes sense, but you can't take the motor controller board out of a Haas and drop it into Mazak. You're familiar with this industry so I think you can see why demanding that all CNC vendors standardize their motor controllers and everything else would be a silly proposition. Likewise, I'm familiar with the automotive world and I'm trying to explain that cars do share a lot of parts already, but demanding that everyone conform to a single set of standards is a silly proposition.
You say that 'there are not 100's of different engines' -> but there are 100's of different engines, even within the same manufacturer and in spite of the core being the same it is often extremely hard to swap an engine of the same basic geometry because of the different sensors, bolt patterns and so on. It would be trivial to require those bolt patterns to be standardized and for ECUs to be standardized to the point that they could be swapped between vehicles. It is the - in my opinion ridiculous - differentiation that leads to vendor lock-in resulting in the fact that even though the underlying component is supplied by Bosch and it is absolutely identical you still can't move it from one vehicle to another because they spliced a different plug onto it and other lock-in increasing tricks.
The automotive world is full of such bullshit and given that there is no need for it (wouldn't it be nice to be able to swap an engine from any brand into any other based on a generic form factor and standardized interface) it is clearly all about protecting the profits.
When you go to a VAG garage with an Audi the exact same part from Bosch will be 1.5 times as expensive (as will the mechanic that puts it in) as when you go there with a VW. And if you go there with a Porsche the difference will be even larger. And of course there will be tricks to make sure that the cheap parts don't fit the more expensive model. And that's within what is essentially one company, once you go outside of that your ability to swap parts without access to a machine shop drastically diminishes.
That transmission you mention is a great example: you could swap it out in theory, but in practice the manufacturers have made it impossible to do so, parts have their own identity, talk to the ECU using custom protocols and so on.
I had a Panda from the early 2010s and that was my exact thought reading this thread: sounds like a fiat panda. Surprised to see this downvoted. Did they change so much?
This comment shines a spotlight on my issues with the US auto market. None of these vehicles are sold in the US, for a variety of reasons - both economic and regulatory. I hate knowing that the vehicles I want to buy both exist and are affordable, but I just can’t have them. Meanwhile, the cars sold in my market are all egregiously enormous, have giant screens inside, etc.
This is the very definition of a “first world problem,” but it sure is frustrating.
Modern cars break down less than older cars -- they are more reliable, not less. They generate more power, with better emissions. They have a wealth of creature comforts and features beyond what 1980s cars had.
Sorry to go against the C15 French circle jerk, but a good modern SUV is safer for everyone despite being heavier, and a SUV.
First, a good SUV is an electric SUV. Whoever had the experience to be behind a C15 without HEPA filters, something you can find in a good SUV, knows that the C15 will kill you with its air pollution.
It’s worse if you are doing sport on a bike or running. And trail running may not save you from those C15, as they are pretty capable off road vehicles and are used by hunters and farmers.
Also, the C15 has no ABS and ESP. Pierre is a lot less likely to crash into you with a modern SUV than a C15.
Finally, the C15 has no active security. It will drive full speed into toddlers playing on the road while a good modern SUV will stop automatically. Same for cyclists and other vehicles.
Visibility is indeed worse because the industry decided that a solid A pilar was more important.
I'm not sure how useful it is to argue based on comparisons of that ancient car and new ones. Yes yes I know that's how it started, but I think it is obvious that a useful discussion is about looking at the principles behind that old car, and then to apply "what if" to modern ones.
I'm making this assumption based on how utterly useless it is to try to have a serious discussion that's really about that old car vs. a new one. I mean, would anyone even think about producing those same old cars with their old technology? Obviously not.
I think, in my discussions, not just this one, it would help us all A LOT if we didn't try to win an argument and limit ourselves to interpret the other people's comments in the most restricting way. Let's assume we are here to learn something other than finding ways to be "technically correct".
Not quite. The statement was that the C15 is safer for people outside of the car than the modern SUV.
If I had to get hit by a car, I'd much rather it be the C15 than the modern SUV. I'm much less likely to survive the SUV hitting me.
Now you can make the argument that other modern safety features make it less likely that the modern SUV would even hit you in the first place (given automatic emergency braking, etc.), and I suspect you might even be right, but I think that requires some data to back it up.
When I wrote everyone, I meant people inside and outside.
The statement wasn’t specific to collisions but you are free to prefer being hit by a C15. As for myself as a pedestrian, I am not sure. The modern SUV is bigger but modern cars have improve safety for pedestrians. Mostly much softer and taller bumpers. It’s not perfect but from the ncap YouTube videos, I may prefer the modern SUV.
If we go with empirical data, I suggest test crashing all those C15.
Modern engines are generally more reliable, yes. And galvanised steel and aluminium has helped chassis' and bodies last longer too. I think the 'sweet spot' has passed for most car categories though, the last being city cars when they got mandatory infotainment systems towards the end of the 2010s.
For you. Everyone's tastes are different. I remember riding around in cars in the 80s, and I much prefer the comfort of my current modern car, enough to make some trade offs around the annoying computerization of it.
I suspect that there are more people around with my tastes than yours, and that's a driver of sales.
Declining service revenue has been a problem for car dealerships for a long time. EVs are only making it even harder as their maintenance needs are reduced further.
This is another topic where people look back on the past with rose colored glasses. At the risk of downvotes, this happens a lot on HN like in threads where people speak about their pre-SSD era computers as being faster and snappier than modern machines. I recently found my old laptop in storage and booted it up. I remember loving how fast it was at the time and being glad I spent extra for the fastest model at the time, but oh boy was it slow relative to anything I use today.
EVs are not more reliable in general, at least not according to the stats. And a lot of them haven't been on the road for long enough to know how their running costs will look like when they are a decade or two old.
There's just been an article here on HN, that BMW installed a crash safety fuse that triggered on a minor fender-bender and killed the battery. It was WELDED in, and even after getting to it with a torch and installing a new one, the ICU needed to be hacked to accept the new part.
They're also full of proprietary parts, basically you have entire car functions integrated to the same PCB, which are essentially unrepairable.
I hope I'm wrong, but I guess there'll be a major disillusionment with EVs once these cars get to 10-15 years and people find out in mass, that it's no longer economical to fix them.
I'm not an EV hater, I'm more of a pessimist - when it comes to manufacturers, I'm kinda 'pricing in' the worst behavior.
However they don't have as much routine maintenance overhead as ICE engines. No oil changes, regenerative braking reduces brake pad and rotor wear, etc
In practice however, most manufacturers mandate a yearly inspection when the car is in warranty, and after it's not, usually the state requires you to do one at least every other year.
During these the mechanic will do the routine maintenance. I'm a casual driver, I drove like 100k km in 6 years, and my first set of brake pads still haven't worn down.
> If your C15 breaks down in a field, you can fix it with a wrench.
I could. My wife couldn't.
Also, let's not forget the creature comforts of modern cars... rear seats, airbags, sound insulation, power steering, automatic transmissions, 4wd.
Living in the country, tool-vehicles are very useful. This is typically a beat up old 2wd pickup truck (lower is easier to load) with an 8-ft bed (so you can load full sheets of plywood) and a single cab (so you can get an 8-ft bed). My buddy down the street has one and I borrow it all the time. But you'd never take the family anywhere with this thing. It basically spends its entire life going back and forth to Lowes.
Because she doesn't drive a C15. Believe me, rural french women _will_ fix a C15. There's nothing to break down anyways, the engine is happy to run on distilled corn and melted rubber for oil, the suspension is what suspension, three tires ought to be enough for everyone.
> rear seats,
There's rear benches for you whole family and space for your kids to play around in the back while you're driving, what more do you want ?
Grab a phase 3, it has power steering. Or get stronger arms. Or stop trying to steer while you're not moving forward.
> automatic transmissions
You don't need automatic transmissions, you need to learn how to drive stick. The C15 has the added benefit that you don't really have a proper range to change gears, it'll just go in. Actually you don't even need to clutch, just jam the thing.
>4wd
Absolutely useless for 100% of the usages the average american makes of it. If it can drive through mud while carrying cows, it will handle anything you have to throw at it. 4WD sure is a nice thing to make you pay for more gas though.
>Living in the country, it's very useful to own a tool-vehicle. This is typically a beat up old 2wd pickup truck (lower is easier to load) with an 8-ft bed (so you can load full sheets of plywood) and a single cab (so you can get an 8-ft bed). My buddy down the street has one and I borrow it all the time. But you'd never take the family anywhere with this thing. It basically spends its entire life going back and forth to Lowes.
Alright, all kidding aside though: the US is literally the only country in the world that considers pickup trucks as a good utility vehicle: they are the most dogshit type of vehicle you could own for anything, and that includes your sheets of plywood. Pickup trucks are not used by anyone serious anywhere else in the world. Need to carry a bunch of crap ? Buy a busted Renault Master (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Master) and it has the added benefit of you being able to buy your plywood in crazy situations like the tiniest bits of rain.
The US's obsession for pickup trucks is the sign of a deeply unserious society.
The Toyota Hilux makes for a good vehicle to mount weapons in the back, but please see a lawyer about the legality of mounting an M60 at the back of your car if you're not living in Afghanistan
I did mention it at the end! That said, I believe most legal systems in the world frown on such behaviour, and more crucially, they're not used for carrying your groceries or 2x4's. clearly Americans lack the courage to mount up a DShK at the back of their F150, the cowards.
Oh snap, you are right! My bad, I prematurely got overly excited for comedic release and then forgot to read the rest.
But yeah, what's the point of an F150, if you don't even flex some heavy weaponry at Walmart? Timber and concrete fits the C15 just fine, it's artillery and air defense extensibility where it's lacking. Tho, fingers crossed, we may see F150 technicals by the end of the year.
My driving skills are probably below average. I really like that my car warns me of zebra crossings and can follow the car in front of me with a safe distance.
Many of the modern car features are just useless marketing fluff, but there is some really good progress too.
I’ve got two cars that I drive regularly, a modern day BMW with all the bells and whistles, and an almost 20 year old Honda
Acty Van. It’s 660cc, doesn’t have rear seat belts, or a radio, it does have power windows though.
I enjoy driving both for different purposes, but I have to agree with you. On long distance driving (>200km), the BMW is safer. Cruise control, lane keeping, auto distance. It really makes long, multi hour drives less tiring.
> The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool.
I don't think that's true, the car as mere tool is romantic anachronism. Back then, cars were central identitarian elements to the post-war, western promise of salvation. Whole cities were torn down and rebuild to fit the car. The car had ideological significance. I think, identitarian attachment to the car is actually less today, but due to the historic importance and focus, cars have become unconditional necessities in many places.
I think the reason, you frequently see "old cars as tools" in southern Europe still, is the fact most regions there only started industrialization after 1970 and were/are still greatly underdeveloped/relatively poor, compared to eg. early industrialized nations like Germany, which are super car-centric. They suffered less car adaptation at the time and as a consequence e.g. SUVs would be rather impractical in some places with extremely narrow streets. Additionally, (remaining) farmers in e.g. Germany are almost exclusively rather rich entrepreneurs managing industrialized food production on flat, boring lands, than "poor peasants" caring for traditional farms in remote villages living off tourism somewhere pretty.
Probably less due to zeitgeist/mentality, but rather geography, historic economic abilities and availability.
Can you give an example of a European city that was "torn down and rebuilt to fit the car?"
In my experience, even cities that suffered a lot of war time damage (Hamburg, Dresden) were rebuilt with every street in exactly the same place with the same narrow width.
It's a bit hyperbole, of course, and I was speaking to the sentiment of the time. In Germany Cologne would be an example of heavy car-centric development, coming to mind, but pretty much any city in West-Germany suffered this fate to some extent. I think there are far more drastic examples in America, but I am not knowledgeable about that.
> Das Konzept der autogerechten Stadt wurde in West-Deutschland beim Wiederaufbau der im Krieg zerstörten Städte umgesetzt, beispielsweise in Hannover (durch den damaligen Stadtbaurat Rudolf Hillebrecht), Dortmund, Köln und Kassel, aber auch in kleineren Städten wie Minden und Gießen. Dabei wurde in großem Umfang auch erhaltene Bausubstanz abgerissen. Vielfach wurden Stadtteile ohne Berücksichtigung sozioökonomischer und kultureller Faktoren zur Anlage von Durchgangsstraßen zerschnitten.
Because of the growth imperative. With essential things like ICE cars, phones and personal computing, we long satisfied need, those core business products are simply essentially finished/perfected. It's market, and therefore regulatory, failure to have gigantic corporations in positions enabling rent seeking and market shaping, instead of pushing true innovation. If Apple can't come up with something innovative, they need to be forced to downscale instead of creating artificial demand for essentially the same phone 5 years in a row. If VW repeatedly missed the chance to get off their obsolete engine platform, they need to fail.
I think, Cory Doctorow's idea for regaining digital resilience, by "simply" opening up artificial software restrictions through regulation, is widely applicable and would also push for adequate downscaling and actual innovation: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/
This article is comparing a C15 new in 1984 vs a secondhand one today. Really, the C15 represents a time when taxes were ~20% lower and there was a workable steel industry in Europe (which destroyed certain environments, especially around the Ruhrgebiet, whether the exact location was in France, Belgium or Germany). Oh and one major problem the C15 does have is that despite those stats, it is considered to NOT meet emission standards (due to age), and so you cannot enter many cities in one. You can enter with a Berlingo.
There is still a "C15" by the way. It's even less ugly. It's called the Berlingo [1]. Cheapest version is 24000euro + tax, or 35000 + tax for the hybrid version. Let's say in practice it'll run you 30000 euro.
In other words, after tax and counting inflation, let's summarize that since 1984, European cars have about doubled in price. Wages in the EU have gone up about 2x, after inflation.
You have to work 30000/2600 (avg wage per month, euros, in France) = just shy of an entire year of work if you invested 100% of your wage into the car. So let's say 2 years of work.
(due to the EU strongly opposing equal wages across the EU, there is a very large difference between average wage in France and, say, Greece. VERY large, more than 100%)
In 1977, you would have 4900FF average wage in France (in French Francs), and the C15 cost 62000FF. So, just about 12 months at 100% average wage, or let's say 2 years or work, saving up.
So, it even costs about the same.
And, sadly, one is forced to admit that when it comes to European cars, this is a pretty damn good result for that company. Most EU brands have done far worse.
> Oh and one major problem the C15 does have is that despite those stats, it is considered to NOT meet emission standards (due to age), and so you cannot enter many cities in one.
At least in Germany, due to it's age it would classify as a historic vehicle (number plate with an H) and be exempt from emission standards.
There are years-long threads dozens of pages long on priuschat.com with data files posted by wizards just to figure out the 12v charging pattern.
The vehicle itself will probably stop running before any of these wizards ever figure that out, or even understand the algorithm it uses to occasionally run the engine in EV mode.
And yet, I speculate the total runtime of any year of that vehicle will match what you see for the much simpler Citroen C15-- essentially, bounded only by however long the wizard wants to drive it.
Edit: preemptively-- the Prius driver can drive their Prius on roads appropriate for that type of vehicle for as long as they want. Citroen obviously can go more places-- my upshot is just that the glaring complexity of a Prius doesn't seem to have gotten in the way of its reliability as the author assumes it should have.
I think chances are vastly better now with EVs, you probably could reuse the crowdfunded opensource washing machine. Combustion engines are simply way, way too complex. Although I presume the real showstopper is control electronics and regulatory approval for ICEs and EVs alike.
You have cameras, sensors, gps, maps, that need to be updated... and all that would easily be solved by a few policemen with radar guns and writing fines.
What really makes me mad is how bumpers were made to protect the car and now they are these expressions of design that you have to protect at all costs from scratches even.
> What really makes me mad is how bumpers were made to protect the car and now they are these expressions of design that you have to protect
Bumpers today are made to protect the car's occupants, not the car.
They are the start of the crumple zone, whose purpose is to absorb and release most of the energy transfer of the crash by deforming, rather than transferring it to the passenger compartment.
>They have no ECU to brick, no adblue sensors to fail and put the car into limp mode
Which means they are some of the most polluting and wasteful cars available. ECUs are good. They make cars safer, more reliable and more efficient. Car manufacturers had to be dragged kicking and screaming to add adblue, because the Diesel engines are pretty toxic otherwise.
The apologia for old cars is just insane, they are not what you think they are.
>If your C15 breaks down in a field, you can fix it with a wrench.
> If your Range Rover breaks down in a field because a sensor in the air suspension noticed a voltage variance...you are stranded until a tow truck takes it to a dealer.
No, you just reset the ECU and get on with your day.
With all due respect, you are confusing a software race condition with a hard fault in a safety critical system.
Resetting the ECU only works if the error is a transient glitch in the code logic. If the failure is a physical sensor reading out of range?
Furthermore, modern automotive architectures store permanent diagnostic trouble codes in non volatile memory specifically to prevent people from "just resetting it" to bypass emissions or safety checks. You cannot clear those with a battery pull. You would need a proprietary manufacturer tool to force a relearn or adaptation.
But more importantly, your argument accepts a terrifying premise. That a 2.5 ton kinetic object moving at highway speeds should have the reliability profile of a consumer router. If I have to treat my vehicle like a frozen windows 98 desktop to get home, the automotive engineering has failed me. Physics doesn't need a reboot.
Yet despite the appliance-ification of cars, they are, on the whole, much safer and quite a bit more reliable than they were decades years ago, despite being forced to work a lot harder for emissions compliance.
It's true that you can't fix them with a spanner, paperclip and pair of tights any more, but it's so much more rare that you have to.
Resetting the ECU only works if the error is a transient glitch in the code logic. If the failure is a physical sensor reading out of range?
In many ECUs I've worked on, most faults are treated as transient until they're seen across multiple cycles. Resetting often does genuinely help. Sensors do see weird transients and physically impossible values for all sorts of reasons.
> If the failure is a physical sensor reading out of range?
Then you buy a new sensor and put it in, just like you would any other failed part.
> You would need a proprietary manufacturer tool to force a relearn or adaptation.
You can do almost anything you need to do with a non-proprietary Autel tool.
I mean, I get it, the manufacturers are absolutely doing their best these days to lock up repair and maintenance. But so many folks seem to throw their hands up and over-exaggerate the inability to fix modern cars. I've always worked on my own cars, from a 1960 Triumph TR3 to a 2025 Audi A3, and everything in between. Maybe once every four or five years have I hit something where I needed to take the car to the dealer, and that was true in the 1980s as well as today. Repair information for newer cars can be somewhat difficult to obtain (looking squarely at you, BMW) but with a bit of sailing the high seas, you can get all the shop manuals.
Until the sensor itself has a microcontroller and does a cryptographic handshake with the other side before it's allowed to work, for "security" reasons obviously.
The Scottish highlands have a population density comparable to the Mountain West. As someone who grew up in the mountain west, the highlands have a very similar feel.
From where I grew up, it's a four-hour drive to the nearest supermarket.
If you're in the US, you're probably not used to driving long distances on roads that aren't basically perfectly straight and four times the width of your car. You wouldn't enjoy driving here.
I spent some time on Google Maps, and the furthest spot I managed to find from a town was about 35km. Note that I didn't say anything about supermarkets - this is a thread about car reliability, so the context is how far you can be from a town where it's reasonable to expect that someone can help you with your car.
From experience if the air suspension ECU freaks out over a sensor reading out of range it's either water in one of the connectors, or the sensor is getting a bit worn and you've run it to the far end of its travel.
Getting the vehicle four-square (possibly jacking up the corner with the faulty sensor so it sits about the right height) and resetting the EAS ECU with a diagnostics tool will solve the problem in the short term.
The other thing of course is you can just get it to sit level or at least level-ish, then unplug the ECU, let it complain about some unspecified fault, and drive it without self-levelling until it can be repaired, probably when you're not knee-deep in mud.
We want friendly curious conversation, not questions designed to incriminate or insinuate. You're welcome, of course, to make your substantive points thoughtfully.
This. I think the entire argument and comparison is a fallacy because you can't just compare vehicles on utilitarian factors when many (most?) people are buying primarily based on fashion/aesthetics. Through my American eyes that C15 is dog shit ugly and I don't even care to read through how it measures up on utility because it's style is already a dealbreaker.
Personally-I know I don't need a big truck, and don't have farm/ranch/heavy duty requirements, but SUVs are quite useful for normal city life in most of the US. Several times a month I am fully loaded for some reason or another. May as well be fashionable and handle well too since this is also the vehicle I commute in and valet at a fancy restaurant occasionally.
I noticed that people often treat cars as they treat clothes. It's their largest and most expensive costumes.
This means that fashion and looks start to play a major role, utility be damned. This also means that relatively minor details, like the exact shape of headlights, become a major stylistic and thus market niche differentiator.
I don't think it's a new problem with cars. But it maybe relatively new in the utility / light truck space.
Not new at all in the US. Trucks are and have been some of the most frequent recipients of after market customization. It’s so common I can think of a dozen or so sub/niches. I’d say it’s only second to Jeep Wrangler.
But yes you’re absolutely right, in our car dominated cities people certainly see the car you drive as a fashion choice, a signal of your personality, and social status/net worth so it does get complicated. I like driving nice cars on occasion but am rather modest and practical with my daily driver.
I’m in a social circle with several dads who probably have similar net worths and generally have a lot in common. There’s a lot of chest pounding, bragging, and one upping going on. Not negatively, but in a sense of “you need to try this ridiculously priced thing” (whiskey and wine and travel are all common topics). I tend to be the contrarian of the group (I don’t drink alcohol at all, don’t watch sports, drive a clunker car). Anyway They’ve been all getting Rivian SUVs and geek out on them. Trying to talk me into getting one next. I just can’t see why I want to spend 6 figures on it when other very similar and decent looking alternatives exist for half the price. I don’t find anything it offers interesting enough. However, its overall utility of being a SUV of that size is very appealing to me so I’m not really questioning that part.
My first car I got in Germany was a C15. I used it to transport server racks, but also had a mattress in the back and had my first sex on it. On muddy festivals where others cars got stuck, I was able to get out easily. Repairs were dirt cheap. It also had a tow bar, and was able to pull a 1.5 metric ton trailer to get equipment to a computer party.
And I still was able to do 160 km/h (100 MPH) with it on the Autobahn. With or without server racks, with or without sex.
Best car I ever had.
It is really insane that these days cars on average weigh 25-40 times of their load. Human stupidity never ceases to amaze me.
At first I wanted to write a comment about how cars and sex are apparently very well linked. Upon thinking it over once more, it appears that the real link to sex is privacy, which is of course obvious. Thinking over it once more, we're brought back to the real selling point of cars: total privacy. Public transport is on paper really good, but it is totally devoid of privacy - which means that it is bad in reality. In other more provocative words, public transportation is bad because you can't have sex on the bus
Citroën were the first to make diesel filters standard. And my C15 had the HDi engine with diesel filters. And unlike others, they did not cheat and were not part of the Diesel scandal.
Also, I survived.
And when it comes to security features, more important than not having side airbags would have been not to combine smoking weed and fellatio while doing 160.
I am not saying that any of this would be a good idea if keeping your life is a priority.
But even with maniacs like myself on the road, Germany has deaths from fatal car crashes of 3-4 per 100,000, while the US has 12-13.
But again, I am not a lawyer, not a doctor, and this is not health advise, just a true story of what I did 25 years ago that may or may not entertain readers.
> The Ford Ranger (2020). One of the most popular pickups in the US. A key selling point is that the cabin is so high you can run over toddlers without even noticing.
The craziest thing about this criticism is that it is phrased as hyperbole but the reality is that this is seen as a small truck in the US.
The Ford Ranger actually is the best selling pickup truck in Europe for 10 straight years, but doesn’t sell as much in the US. The larger F series trucks sell more than an order of magnitude more in the US.
The best part about the F-150 is that it isn't even toddlers at that point. The most common F-150 variant I see in my area's hood goes up to my shoulder and I'm 2 meters tall.
You often see the very important people driving these working their way through crowded parking lots and places that are primarily foot traffic with a "Wtach out for ME!" driving style.
It's so funny that when people design vehicles that actually have a need to be big - big buses, commercial vans, fire trucks - one of their common features is that visibility is treated as something important, and often these types of vehicles have either a nearly flat, uniform front side, or they try to minimize the engine compartment hump as much as possible and make the windshield huge. But when we talk about cars that are made for the consumer, all sanity goes out the window, we get these near-caricatures that would be hilarious if they weren't real. The craziness can only be somewhat tamed by government restrictions, depending on where you live, but the peak of this design results in huge, elevated flat boxes for engine compartments, mounted as high as possible. It doesn't matter that the driver has a blind spot in every direction, what matters is showing off how HUGE your 18L V32 engine must surely be under that hood, how powerful it must be to draw air through that chrome grille that's half a person's height, and most importantly, how much of an imposing heroic warrior one must be to own that tank.
Not to mention the amount of stones they kick up. In AZ if your truck has a suspension lift, you're supposed to have mudflaps. But that law (and many other vehicle laws) is not enforced.
I see SO many illegally modified trucks and I've never seen or heard of someone getting in trouble or failing inspection for them. It boggles my mind every time I see a car with tires extending half a foot on either side of the cabin veering here and there, making their presence everyone else's problem.
Being from rural Canada, I prefer the truck and snowmobile sizes of the 90s (but not their emissions, it's hard to breath when they drive by). All the options are so big now.
I'm sure you know her better than me, but I'm not convinced it's not a Clark Kent-esque disguise. He takes his glasses off and he's obviously Superman, have you ever seen her in heavy Egyptian eyeliner? It might clear things up. Also, if she ever smites things by "shooting with her eyes", that's a pretty good tell.
As for that vehicle, it strikes awe and fear into me. Like it wants to eat me. A less threatening but equally whimsical vehicle is the Bombardier B12 from the 40s:
I'm probably one of the few people in this thread who are actually truck shopping right now
The ranger is a great option for most people but one of my capabilities for the truck is to bring my bike to motorcycle track days. Usually I'd only take a single motorcycle, however track days are more fun with friends. to fit two motorcycles in the back of the Ranger, you need to adjust the angle of the handlebars awkwardly to fit both on the bed.[0]
that leaves only the bigger 1500 class trucks as options for me, and why I'm going with an F150
> to fit two motorcycles in the back of the Ranger, you need to adjust the angle of the handlebars awkwardly to fit both on the bed.
can't you position one bike facing forward and one facing back, so the handlebars don't collide? Either way, going with an absurdly big and dangerous car to avoid _awkwardly positioning_ some cargo is pretty American thing to do
It's much easier to load motorcycles pointing forwards, just because you have to get them up a ramp into the bed. In the forward direction, you can use their engine to get up the hill.
It does checkout that people buy bro-dozers to avoid being slightly inconvenienced. Sucke for everyone else who unfortunately have to deal with their rearview mirrors perfectly line up with those headlight beams, unless they also buy a 'dozer.
I'm understating it, maybe. I don't think it would be practical to load a motorcycle backwards. If your requirement is "two bikes fit in the bed", they both need to be facing forward.
Clearly he made the comment to justify to strangers on the internet why he needs to buy a bigger truck. Truly the need to “adjust the angle of the handlebars awkwardly” is a great burden.
Isn't that generally the case, convenience? 20% to 50% extra in price to handle edge cases and unknown unknowns seems pretty cheap. That's like, $100/month to $200/month for a lot of extra flexibility in the US.
As someone unsympathetic to big vehicles in urban areas, and probably most suburban areas, the challenge as always is figuring out how to re-internalize externalized costs.
Or I guess reduce externalized costs. (Additional safety features? Increased road wear tax? Vehicle size class limitations on certain roads or lots?)
A lot of commenters saying you "need" a trailer (instead of an F150), but another option would be one bike in the bed and the second bike (if needed) on a hitch-mounted rack. A hitch rack takes less space to store when you're not using it than a full trailer. It would probably be more annoying to load and unload than just putting two bikes in the bed.
Anyway, if you want an F150, get it -- I don't really care.
Don't know why you are down voted. People just assume that you have a place to store a trailer (and truck and motorcycle).
As to your choice of the Ford,as a rural late model (2018) F-150 owner, I'd encourage you to consider something else. A used Tundra V8 or one of the GMC/Chevy's. My mechanic is thumbs down on the Rams longer term.
I've had nothing but stupidity with this F-150 and all I do is personal plowing and a few loads of gravel or dirt each year. Granted, my steep dirt road can be very rough in mud season. But I've now spent about 8K in non-maintenance repairs.
I say this as a past owner of multiple mustangs and rangers - I'm done with Ford.
I’ve done my research pretty thoroughly, I found a 2022 with the 3rd gen 3.5 eco boost, so the cam phasers are fixed. The only thing I have to look out for is the 10R80 10 speed. During the test drive the shifts were smooth and minimal gear hunting so hopefully it’s alright
You can probably fit a normal sized car and trailer in the space of an F150. Stupid argument. Or, you know, rent a trailer. It's utterly idiotic to carry around the weight and size of the F150 when you don't need the loading space. I hope American gas prices adjust to reality and people start considering efficiency, cause this mentality is not sustainable and hurts everyone on the planet.
This is dumb, I've lost count of how many times I've hauled multiple motorcycles somewhere and you know how I do it? A trailer. It's easier and safer to load and unload, which is why almost everyone else does that as well.
If you want an 'image' purchase just own up to it. Your post hoc justifications don't really hold water.
> The Ford Ranger actually sells better in Europe than it does in the US. And the larger F series trucks sell more than an order of magnitude more.
Do you have any sources for this? I looked online and found a couple of charts, none of them support this claim. The Ford Ranger sales in Europe vs US are similar (who buys more varies by year) but the F series seems to be mostly bought in US
The Tacoma is gussied up and not Spartan/repairable as the Hilux. I guess it’s more comparable to the current ranger than the hilux is, I wonder if ford makes a stripped down ranger for the developing world? Are there any Ranger Jeepneys? Maybe the T6? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Ranger_(T6)
Oddly enough, it says this was developed in Australia but might be the ranger selling in the USA/Europe now (the same one we are talking about). But the P703 is the model (a T6 variant) sold internationally now. It doesn’t surprise me that the current ranger was designed abroad. What I really don’t get is that ford doesn’t make cars in Australia anymore but they still design them there?
Thank you, that makes sense. But in that case it doesn't do much for the op's argument, which seems to be that Europe _prefers massive cars_. US still has much more of obscenely big cars, and Ford F having less % pickup market share shows that there's much bigger market for these cars, if anything
I have a Ford F-150 (14 gen) and the front is so huge I need to step on the front grill guard to reach anything inside the engine compartment. It is all around an unreasonably sized vehicle. My excuse is that (a) I do use it for home improvement stuff and for hauling stuff around and (b) I work from home so no commute. But for most people who do not work construction this is an insane daily driver.
> I do use it for home improvement stuff and for hauling stuff around
I don’t understand this argument, as they seem incredibly impractical for that. There is very little space for ‘stuff’, there is only the uncovered bed which is relatively small. The bed is also at an awkward height so very impractical to get stuff in or out. Since the bed is open, you always have to take all your ‘stuff’ out, you can’t leave tools in there or anything of value or it will get stolen. If you put a hard cover on. it leaves even less space. And since a large part of the vehicle has no roof you cannot have a roof rack.
You do not see these used by people in construction or other trades here in Europe. They use vans. An (extended) van has an ungodly amount of lockable storage space, easily accessible with side and back doors, with a floor at a reasonable height and if that isn’t enough you with a roof rack you can strap a lot to the roof as well.
I really don’t see how something like an F-150 is more practical for ‘hauling stuff’ than something like a Mercedes Sprinter.
I did look up some numbers (used the most capable configuration I could find for each of the vehicles):
Max bed length for an F-150: 247cm
Max cargo space length for a Sprinter: 481cm
Have you ever loaded drywall into a van? It is not fun. A truck bed is sized to load it perfectly. Strapping down lumber is also simpler. Lastly with nothing above the truck bed you can carry much taller things than in a van.
It isn’t the only way but yes a truck is very practical. That’s why they are used so much in the US. The difference between the US and the EU isn’t just arbitrary either. In the US gas (sorry, petrol) is a lot cheaper, roads are bigger, wider, longer, and sometimes you need to tow a large trailer. I tower a 3 ton excavator with my truck to build my home office.
I find it crazy that people would buy ton of stupid stuff from amazon, aliexpress or Shein but would not check the delivery option for stuff that is actually annoying to carry around yourself.
People who need a pickup bed for work usually buy those that come with the chassis of a commercial VAN which have a much bigger bed than you'd ever dream of on a Ford F series.
The rest are simply getting delivered or using trailers, either rented when used sporadically or bought. A trailer is usually at a more decent height and you don't have to carry the weight and have to manage a huge vehicle when you actually don't need all the space.
Loading drywall into my minivan is a lot easier than a truck. I can fit whole sheets and close the back gate so I don't need to strap them down and they are protected from the elements.
I think the F-150 is the most popular. I know many people don’t care about other’s subjective experiences, but it’s always such a mindfuck to my EU mind when I see trucks of this size.
Like my brain expects the car to finish, but there’s more car. Then it happens again and again in a quick succession. It confuses me, I shake it off. I look at the car again. The bed is empty, there’s one person in it.
Then I think „what’s the point”? And then I remember we grew up in different environments and have different expectations about how things should look like. And I still don’t fully get it.
Almost any large car will fit almost anywhere in the US, so you might as well get the car that serves even your most marginal use cases. Fuel costs are much lower than Europe, and Americans are relatively richer anyway.
From my experience, these trucks make much more sense on a road in the US. European roads are fairly small so these trucks look _even bigger_, whereas in the US everything is massive so the cars fit. Still, having to look _up_ to see the windshield is crazy and I hope it won't be normalized in the EU
Also, I would like to kindly remind you of the concept of "time". This was 25 year ago. The alternatives would have been worse. These days a C15 would be electric.
Obviously the OP is tounge-in-cheek, so keep it lightly.
But it does have merit: If you wish to measure your environmental footprint, you must look at the total lifetime of car, most importantly the manufacturing part. There is a difference between 900 KG of parts for a C15 vs 1,900 - 2400 KG for a Ford Ranger. These days most PM come from braking. Stopping 2000 KG will obviously cause more emissions from the brakes than stopping 1000 KG.
All in all, the point really is: The ratio between weight/size of the car itself and what is inside (people and/or server racks) has gotten completely out of hand. No, you do not need a 2,000 KG tank to move your 50-100 KG of flesh around. It's insanity, no matter if your care about the planet or not.
It's also unsafe. He's comparing it to a modern Ranger, not the Ranger of the same year as the C15 (which was much smaller and got better fuel economy), and he completely ignores the fact that the Citroen wasn't sold in North America.
He seems to imply there would be no appetite for one here but I disagree. In western Canada I see imported Kei trucks everywhere and these fill a similar niche!
And it weighs less than half of the other two (less than a ton), so less power is needed.
I agree though, the C15 is slower than the other two, but less than you’d perhaps think.
I own a Citroën 2CV. It has some of the same qualities: super robust, incredibly off-roady, simple mechanically, but I take my “regular car” (2017) for road trips > 100km…
I’ve done numerous long road trips in the 2CV though, before I got the other car. Some longer than 1000km.
I agree with the TFA, that many overestimate their needs, but older cars are also less luxurious - obviously!
The post is a hot take, slightly tongue-in-cheek, isn’t it? :)
That’s fair if you only account for usage emission. The compared tanks weight 2/3x as much (more ressources to extract, manufacture, transport…) and are made of intricate polymers, composites, wires & electronics… event the metal alloys are very technical (saving them to weight even more) and can’t be recycled into newer car. Old cars are mainly… steel.
I'm a big fan of the current range of French Renault electric cars.
The 5, 4, Megan and Scenic are just excellent.
I think the Scenic is probably the one I'd buy right now based on the range, 380 miles but the 5 and the 4 have so much character they're probably the first really iconic electric car designs IMHO.
Right now french people are obsessed with ecology and egalitarianism. Those who don't are not well seen in society, or left the country already.
So the best thing I'd see them excelling at in this century, if they can drive their ideology in the right direction, would be producing low-tech solutions solving 90% of problems with 20% of the costs, with open-source like tools / materials / methods everyone can replicate easily. A bit like this article about this old car.
> Right now french people are obsessed with ecology and egalitarianism.
Do you have anything to read up on that? This got me a little excited, but I also doubt it due to the rise of right wing populism everywhere else. Man, if France actually got the rare attitude to get shit done in these times, I may move there and help.
It's just my general sentiment when I see my french peers. It'd be interesting to try to turn this into data for sure, but "right wing" in France has a different meaning / reality than in others countries, not sure the raw stats would explain this difference.
If you like those kind of ideas you should def move in France and start building with others there little communist enclaves. Just be ready that in France we do think a lot before deciding to act, we don't have the same "get shit done" attitude like in the anglosphere world
Sysco does or used to sell a french fry that was indistinguishable from McDonald's when cooked similarly. They had a catalog that visualized lined up individual representative french fries.
The guillotine remark resonates in today reality because people feel this scam. Tone-policing the symptom while ignoring the cause is naive.
The C15 thread shows exactly why: It beats modern trucks in pure utility. Today we are paying more for less value.
It is exactly the wealth extraction Ray Dalio describes in Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order (Stage 5 of the debt cycle), resulting in internal conflict.
I'm not sure you have to be terribly right wing to say that a "societal movement" which includes something called "The Reign of Terror", in which tens of thousands of people were executed, was a bad thing. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution#Reign_of_Ter...)
You know modern France has the exact same problem of billionaire lobbying and media consolidation that the US has right?
Arnault (LVMH) [0], Trappier (Dassault) [1], Niel (Illiad) [2], Lagardère (Lagardère SA) [3], Bolloré (Bolloré Group) [4] and a couple others have an inordinate amount of control over French politics. It's also why whenever a country like China, the US, India, or others wants to hold the EU by the balls, they end up tariffing Congac, because Arnault's LVMH has a near monopoly on Congac production in France, so he almost always pressures Macron into acquiesing because otherwise he would threaten to back the RN.
Both France and the US are similarly ranked flawed democracies [5] with similar dysfunctions.
Also, immediately following the revolution, the guillotiners ended up doing it for the rich [6], as the French Revolution ended up leading to the re-establishment of authoritarian rule with le Directoire, Napoleon, Napoleon III, and others. The only thing you learn from the French Revolution is the same thing you learn from Tahrir Square - the house always wins, which in political science is modeled via Selectorate Theory [7] and Veto Players [8].
Sadly, it's the same reason why despite mass protest after mass protest, the Iranian regime hasn't fallen - the primary political and economic veto players in Iran (Army, IRGC, Basij, Police, Clergy, Business leadership, SoE leadership, Bonyad leadership) haven't defected because they have more to lose than gain if a revolution succeeded. The moment a handful of these interests think they can expand their presence under a new regime is when you would see Khamenei fall, but the leadership would end up being the same ba***rds anyhow, just like how the Islamic Republic ended up co-opting and rehabilitating army officers and business leadership from the Shah's regime during the Iran-Iraq War and after the cultural revolution.
The guillotine wasn't for the super rich, but for the privileged by birth. The equivalent would be to guillotine the nepo babies (and the Ivy League administrators who rubber stamp their admission).
Or fix inheritance. And by fix I mean tax as hell.
The statistics cited in the article you cite talks about the Nobility/Clergy/Other classification. There is no wealth-related statistic. It's entirely possible that a good fraction of the "Others" category were wealthy bourgeois.
Even in the height of the revolution, the nobility largely retained it's control [0]. And at the end of the day, le Directorate, the Napoleon regime, the Louis Phillips regime, and the Napoleon III regime continued to maintain the power of the bourgeois.
If the bourgeois had been completely purged in the French Revolution, then the crackdown of the 1848 Revolution (and the subsequent exodus of French republicans and socialists), 18 Bumaire, the Bourbon Restoration, and other successful power grabs by the bourgeois following the French Revolution wouldn't have happened.
Heck, much of the Council of 500 were themselves either mid-level aristocrats or the children of ancien regime enforcers as was seen with Talleyrand, Barras, Duke of Parma, Lebrun, and the Bonaparte family, along with members of the Directorate like Carnot, Barras, and Merlin.
There's a reason Marx termed the French Revolution as a "bourgeois revolution", why Max Scheler classes the French Revolution as a revolution driven by ressentiment (the Nietzchean concept that underlies elite overproduction), and how Bourdieu came to his thesis on "cultural capital" (which can also help explain the contemporary rise of left- and right-leaning populism).
In essence, who is more elite - an L6 at Google earning $600K TC who graduated from UC Irvine and whose parents were union employees, a Senior Editor at the NYT earning $130K TC who graduated from Yale and whose parents were lawyers, or a Congressional Chief of Staff who graduated from UChicago and whose parents immigrated from Taiwan on an H1B to work at Intel?
The answer is they are all members of the elite. It was the exact same with the leadership of the French Revolution, and the subsequent regimes.
It's the same reason why Mao's dad was a rural landlord, why Lenin's dad was a State Councillor, why Ho Chi Minh's father was a Confucian scholar, why Pol Pot's father was a rural landlord with ties to nobility, and Che Guevara's father an Argentine engineer who immigrated from Ireland.
You're being beside the point. All I'm saying is: don't conflate "nobility" and "bourgeois" in your statistics and analysis. In the context of the French revolution, they're not the same.
Of course the bourgeois weren't purged in the revolution. It's them who took power through that revolution.
> The answer is they are all members of the elite. It was the exact same with the leadership of the French Revolution, and the subsequent regimes.
no. Bourgeois, prior to the revolution, were not part of the elite. It's difficult to imagine, but there was a time where there wasn't such a direct correlation as today between wealth and power.
> don't conflate "nobility" and "bourgeois" in your statistics and analysis
Yet it was mid-level aristocrats that were overrepresented in the Directorate and the Council of 500.
> no. Bourgeois, prior to the revolution, were not part of the elite. It's difficult to imagine, but there was a time where there wasn't such a direct correlation as today between wealth and power
Yes. I know, but the initial conversation is based on correcting the a revisionist meme that the French Revolution was a quasi-communist revolution, when in reality it was just a form of inter-elite fratricide - especially between mid-level aristocrats and the church and a subset of royalists.
All the revolution did was cleave the bourgeois from the third estate, and merge them along with the second and first estates.
> meme that the French Revolution was a quasi-communist revolution
It's not a meme. There's clearly a collectivist movement within the revolution, it's just that this force failed to take power. The "révolution de Février", in 1848 was precisely this: Paris going full collectivist, abolishing property and all, then small land owner from the provinces freaking out and all come to Paris to whoop them.
> There's clearly a collectivist movement within the revolution, it's just that this force failed to take power
And there was a much more powerful core of leaders who were the children of the various types of elites within the ancien regime.
Almost the entire history of France the century after the revolution was authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian rule with the collaboration of intellectual, economic, and religious elites.
And this is why Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, and other flavors of Communists take a dim view of the French Revolution.
If a revolution between the cultural elite and the capital elite just led to the pre-eminence of the capital elite and their co-opting of the cultural elite, that means the revolution basically had no positive impact for the overwhelming majority of the French subaltern of the 19th century.
And don't get me or my extended family started about French colonialism.
It's weird, I feel like we're arguing over saying the same thing. Sure, I agree, but please don't say it's a meme.
Sure, it didn't take power, sure, the bourgeois were stronger, but they still managed to overthrow the forces of Louis-Phillipe. Internet wasn't invented yet, memes couldn't depose kings.
I know it's a joke, but if you clip a curb or even a slightly chunky branch at 15mph in one of these EVERYONE DIES (...only partially joking)
In a crash it'll fold up like the tin can it is, even against a car of a similar vintage and size (no comment on the cows). Up against even a modern supermini and you're literal mince meat, let alone a modern SUV. At least you won't suffer long.
So if you are off roading or on a snowy road, hopefully you won't slip into a tree or roll over. Modern cars - even "small" ones -are heavier partly because they are substantially safer. A crash that would have had to have you cut out of the wreckage by the fire brigade (potentially losing a limb or two in the process) is now the sort of thing you can walk away from. Yes even in "small" modern cars (you do not need a SUV for safety).
It's night and day really - just go look at the archive on EuroNCAP.. In the crash tests that left 90s and early 2000s cars as unrecognisable mounds of broken and twisted metal (e.g. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9a8PTeFDaYU which was a car that was probably 10 years more advanced than the c15 in terms of safety...) now barely even break the windscreen of modern super-mini cars (e.g. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NaWVepTJTGw&t=1s&pp=2AEBkAIB). Amazing.
The Citroen Saxo was notably terrible. It was remarked upon even at the time, especially due to the target market of its sportier versions: foolish young men. Here's another hatchback from 2000, faring noticeably better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBXNgKwWFs - not to say for a moment that you wouldn't still want a 2025 car.
I used to drive through France in the C15 days and you'd see a lot of crashes compared to England, a lot because of the road layouts. Straight in France so people went fast through villages and the like. In England everything's twisty.
I had a Renault Kangoo and was similarly militant about its supremacy. It was a cheap, reliable thing and people carrier. It could fit five people, or two people, two bicycles and plenty of camping gear. It was cheap and ugly enough to shrug about cosmetic damage, so I never worried about kicking the doors shut or sitting on the roof. It was also tiny and easy to drive and park. It was mechanically simple and reliable.
It broke down recently at 18 years of age and I can't justify maintaining a car in Berlin, but I loved that car to bits.
I remember in Belgium when the laws pushed for lower CO2, and you got an influx of all these diesel engines, as you couldn't get that low with gasoline engines (that had some power).
But a few years later people came to the realization that CO2 is the least bad of the global warming gasses, and those diesel engines emitted a lot of NOx.
Every year there was a distance that you'd have to drive before diesel made sense (as you get more miles out of a gallon, and it was cheaper per gallon).
That number kept on creeping up due to new diesel taxes, and the fact that diesel is no longer cheaper per unit than gas.
Most people who live in rural Britain today are still getting around in hatchbacks or estates (station wagons, to use the American term). The enormous SUVs are almost entirely driven by people who've used their money to buy into the countryside aesthetic.
There's the Citroen Nemo. It's a more compact version and I believe closer in size to the older panel vans. The new Berlingos are wider and taller than they used to be.
My favorite C15 story is with my childhood friend who got it as a hand-me-down first car, we used to put plastic lawn chairs in the back and head to the beach...
The gas meter was broken, so my friend had to guesstimate when he needed a refill.
At one point it was stolen, but then found a week later on the side of the highway,out of gas..
First off, I agree with the point made, though I think a more reasonable comparison would be something like a subaru. The people I know who have to deal with excessive snow or mud on country roads commonly opt for that. Of course there’s the “men” who compensate for their lack of buldge with 350s, dualies, etc. If you don’t work a farm, those whips are dummm.
That was a good perspective though- I grew up hearing Citroen makes garbage.
Side note- The vast majority of pollution is from industry. By a lot. That is where the finger needs to be pointing. Pointing the finger at SUV drivers distracts from the real issue and keeps us blaming each other.
Maybe that's why Subarus are stereotyped as a lesbian car in the US. Instead of grandstanding, they "get the job done" (as the Chappell Roan song goes).
Unless you’re in the Pacific Northwest, in which case, they are issued to every new resident (myself included). Traded in my Ford Explorer for a Subaru Outback and could not be happier.
AWD has regulatory advantage in Washington state (you're allowed to go over the mountain passes without snow chains in most conditions, even though a RWD or FWD vehicle with snow tires would be just fine in the same conditions), and Subarus are all AWD. I think that's part of it.
When I bought a new car last year, I made sure to get AWD -- not because I have any specific need for AWD performance, but because of this stupid special treatment in Washington law.
FWIW I bought a couple pairs of traction control cables for the Outback, just in case. I don’t know that I’ll ever need them, but better to have them and not need them than need them and not have them.
I’ve used them on 2WD vehicles in the past and they’re way easier to install than old-school chains, since they’re self-tensioning. Super Z cables, if anyone is interested.
> I think a more reasonable comparison would be something like a subaru
Yeah, I get this is tongue-in-cheek but if you're going to try to convince Americans of this idea, you need to use units we understand, and a car we've heard of.
I don't know if it is some much 'compensating' as it is a "look at my toy" showing off type of thing which isn't really directed at women. When I drive around metro areas it is pretty clear that the large majority of trucks are "house" trucks - they are never used for truck things. They are washed, waxed with nice shiny black tires.
Don't get me wrong - if you got the dough, by all means drive what you want. But most truck owners could get by with something else just as well.
Top gear driving to the magnetic north pole in Hiluxes was impressive. I figure those would compete. They were a bit non standard. (vid https://youtu.be/q0hoPNmY4oU)
Indeed, light and 4x4 is the best combo. I think the Citroen 2CV was pretty impressive as well and they did have that dual engine version (though it was never sold to the public).
Sorry for going counter to the narrative, but I had a friend who had an early 2000s Citroen which was made around the time when French cars had the worst reputation - and I tell you, by the stories he told, they deserved it.
There was no part on this which didn't get replaced during the scant few years he owned it, and it left him stranded like half a dozen times.
He contemplated setting it on fire rather than selling it, not wanting the next lucky owner to go through the same stuff he did.
> made around the time when French cars had the worst reputation
A reputation well earned IMO…
> There was no part on this which didn't get replaced during the scant few years he owned it, and it left him stranded like half a dozen times
French cars have a philosophy of more maintenance than German cars. On the other hand, Frenchy spare parts are often cheaper and easier to replace.
E.g. a timing belt replacement on PSA HDI takes just a few hours and costs €2-300. On a VAG TDI, the same procedure is almost a full day at a (competent) workshop and costs ~5-10x as much.
Designed in the era of Use-maxing vs Status-maxing. I think modern cars are taking a lot of car experience out and putting in the phone experience in. My Maruti Suzuki 800 was such a fun car to drive. Easy to repair. Decently efficient. Repair manual was understandable.
The new electrics are great. But they are less of a car and more of a transportation technology.
It’s incredibly grating to get into my mom’s car and see a FYP on her dashboard with podcast recs. It makes me feel like I woke up on the moon. It just makes no sense and it’s clearly harder (for her, and in general) to use than an old-school car radio.
It doesn’t help (but still besides the point) that they typically give the impression of being a stripped back Moto G4 a couple years out of updates.
That's hilarious. The German version (VW Caddy) is similar. Citroen at some point had a van version of the 2CV and the Diane, this is the continuation of that tradition.
Literally: the C15 was based on the Visa (clearly, when you look at it!), and was the first platform-shared vehicle between Citroen and Peugeot where it was basically a Peugeot warmed over with some additional eccentricity. Not bad, overall though.
I love small cars, in fact I owned a Fiat 500 for a number of years and a number of small VWs. With that said, it really grinds my gears (Pun intended) when Europeans want to lecture Americans about large cars.
Our roads are bigger, gas is dirt cheap, parking is plentiful and spacious outside dense metros, and the RAM 1500 I own is 100x more useful no mater how you want to try and spin the facts. I can tow a large trailer with my Jeep on it, a large RV, boats, etc. It is highly capable off roading on technical terrain here in Utah. It’s also insanely comfortable and luxurious on road trips and has enough room to lay on the rear bench seat as if it were a bed. I truly use all of the capabilities in a niche that almost no other vehicle besides a standard size truck occupies.
It's a global pandemic of oversized cars. People love SUVs because it makes them feel powerful and successful. Explanations why they need them are generally along the lines of "because we have kids" (but SUVs don't actually have that much space), or "because heavier means safer" (well yes, at the cost of others).
> But what if you're an environmentally conscious mother who needs to drive the 5 minute walk to your kids' school? Surely, a modern car must be less polluting?
> CO2 emissions/km:
No, you have already compared fuel consumption. This is equivalent.
You know all those dark patterns in software? What if we applied the same concepts to gigantic mechanical devices, taking advantage of human psychological faults, and generate a profit margin on those? Sure seems what seems to have happened with motor vehicles
My family hired https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izh_2715 in eastern Europe to move furniture few times. It was usually referred as "Pirojok", which can be translated as stuffed bun.
To be fair to the SUV they weren't really a thing in France before 2 decades after the C15. To be fair to the C15 the main buyers of SUV at the beginning were urban and suburban moms that wanted to show they had money and we're feeling better in big and tall cars
My dad got rid of his C15 after driving 1 million kilometers with it (rural France)
The engine was fine surprisingly, the body was rusted to the bone though
I’ve been a passenger in the front and the back of a C15 and they are pure utility vehicule. You get heating in winter and ventilation in summer. The windows are manual, front seat are okay, and I don’t know if they have updated models with aircon before stopping the production.
Can't imagine producing and selling this under the current regulations (and not just the crash-worthiness). I with they and C15 move towards each other...
Unrelated to the article: What I find frustrating about mastodon is how I click a link and then cannot favorite a post as there's no unified login between federated servers.
I have the Ford Ranger with the 2 litre biturbo diesel engine in Australia. It is so good it's hard to conceive that a better vehicle could be possible.
Well, it never breaks as in: it will always get you to where you need to go because the engine just keeps running. Broken driveshaft? Stick a vice grip on it and keep rolling... And they're easy to repair because there isn't a lot in them to begin with, so you have a lot of room to work. Running gear wears and needs fixing but the core is nigh on indestructible. Same with the VW diesels from that era, the 1.9 mechanical.
If you are person that doesn’t give a fuck about keeping up with Jones’s you just buy whatever does the job.
I could drive much better car but I don’t have to impress my neighbors.
Still with non-impressive car I get pushed around on the road by guys in big and impressive cars. But also I drive on defense anyway so I get them to go far away from me by letting them pass.
I am quite fit though not super big or anything and car I drive is attributable to old geezers or ladies. Once guy jumped out of the car to shout at me he took his tone two notches down quickly.
So technically you might be right but still there is whole human experience to deal with.
I think you've hit the nail on the head, but not in the same way as what I was thinking. It's not about impressiveness - as in, a show of wealth or status. It's all about size. This is a relatively small car, but as far as I can tell, back in the day all of them were considerably smaller, even the ones that were pricey and designed to look cool or expensive. Nowadays, the most obnoxious and dangerous car drivers have united with the most hands-off governments and manufacturers willing to pander to them exclusively to create an arms race of building the biggest megatank that can fit within a lane and only occupy six parking spots at once.
This is pretty tiresome, however the article is mostly correct. If I could get one of these and own it and drive it in the US, I would. I certainly don't want an over-expensive, over-weight, over-featured monstrosity, but that's all anyone sells in the US.
Off topic: That comma in the title really grates on me. It's supposed to be "dramatic pause" or something, but it can also be read as "pause while I check my notes to remember what the name of this thing actually is".
Hat tip to Joel Garreau, from whom I stole this reading of that kind of comma.
I always had BMWs, like I only ever bought reasonably high-end BMWs, but when we bought our place in Ireland, I needed a vehicle on Swiss plates and insurance (for legal reasons) to use there when car rental in Ireland was running crazy money. I had a look on the Swiss classifieds sites for anything "rechtslenker" (right-hand drive) and found two Rolls Royces, a clapped out MG, and about 15 yellow ex-Swiss Post Renault Kangoo 2-seat car-based cargo vans. (I guess they wanted their mailmen to be able to step out onto the curb, hence RHD in a LHD country?) I bought the van. Weird config: right hand drive, but configured for right-hand traffic, meaning I had to replace the headlights and fog light and get it re-aligned to fit in. Automatic transmission, 1.6L petrol engine, no airbag, no wheel lock, no AC, knobs and switches, glass all around like the MPV version, but a cargo floor. It's insanely simple, the parts are practically free from the perspective of a BMW fanatic, and it's actually a hoot to drive. When we moved, I imported it with our stuff, and it's our only car now. Hauls firewood like you wouldn't believe, and tows a large 2.5m x 1.25m x 1.2m single-axle box trailer without complaints, meaning I can (and have done) shift all the sheets of plywood and drywall I need without buying a pickup. We live way out in the countryside, where the roads have grass up the middle and potholes down both sides, but the Kangoo's ground clearance is enough (especially when empty) that it's never been an issue. I hardly miss the BMW. A little French van is all you need.
The Peugeot XUD engine that powers the Citroën C15 (and a whole bunch of other European cars of similar vintage) is what most of the small Ford diesels were based on, right until they got into the "wet belt" nonsense.
I have "repaired" one that was used to power a small fishing boat (it came out of a Xantia, and the hydraulic pump was used to operate the shooting gear). The boat sank and the engine compartment was flooded with sea water for about a week. It started up and ran quite happily after draining what was approximately a 50/50 mix of sea water and sludgy engine oil and putting fresh in, then removing the injectors and cranking it to blow the water out of the cylinders.
It never quite ran right after that and was hard to start, and five or six years later the boat's owner replaced it with another Xantia engine, this time the turbocharged version.
> Would you like to live neighbours with this person, or share communal facilities with him?
Sure why not? Because they made that comment? It’s not that they buy trucks because they are much taller than a short person but they still are. I’d rather not live next to the person with the dangerous truck.
If you can read people, you know a person like this is going to be constantly invading your privacy, inventing conflicts and complaining. Probably trying to make you join in his vendetta against some neighbour, and if you decline he will make a vendetta behind your back against you.
These kind of people are so easy to spot once you have some experience.
Are you saying that the author engaging in online activism and presenting very common criticisms of SUVs in a sarcastic way somehow implies they're bad neighbors?
Their cynicism is cope. They are witnessing their own decline every single day.
It's honestly so sad. On the other side of the globe there is Tesla [1]. Even if you don't like the idea of cars, this is the pinnacle of a utilitarian product. Also one of the most popular vehicles (globally) as opposed to the (incorrect) example used in the thread.
Modern cars are great for the most parts. More comfortable, more safe, more autonomous, bigger, better and faster. Of course not all cars are created equal.
Cars are a resilient mode of transport. Even if road maintenance stops for 30 years due to some kind of crisis, a society with cars will be way more functional than one that was solely reliant on a centralized transportation system. And this is not an unrealistic scenario, people are just used to the last 80 years of peace due to rapid economic growth and globalization.
the neighbour with a big-ass truck will help you shovel your drive-way, and invite you to a barbecue. This guy will leave an angry note on your door because you forgot your porch light on, or infringed on his laundry time.
Just to be clear: I was a kid at that time and although the Citroen 2CV was a cool looking car the C15 was just as fugly back then as it is today. A fucking fuglier than fugly piece of ugly shit that was, already back then, making the world uglier for everybody.
I don't dispute that it was useful and reliable: I remember the milkman and plumbers and electricians having these. Note that some had a 2CV and would just cut off the roof (don't tell me it wasn't a thing: I've got pictures of me as a kid in a 2CV whose roof was cut).
Only the french have the "taste" to create such uglyness as the C15. It's hard to understand how a country can both produce the Concorde and the C15.
Even the russian and their Lada brand never managed to create something as fugly as the 4L or the C15.
Now you'll excuse me but I've got to take a look at what nature produces:
Because that C15 brings back memories from a traumatizing time where uglyness was ruling the world.
P.S: I owned a Citroen VISA: it's hard to tell if it was only the 2nd ugliest Citroen ever after the C15 (indisputably the fugliest of them all) because Citroen produced soooo many turds.
When we lived in a more rural area, and I drove my kids to school each morning (in a normal-sized sedan), I taught them to notice the contents of the SUVs they saw. The common pattern, like 90% of the time in the morning, was a lady driver in a spotless SUV with a kid in the very back row of seats.
And the demographics made sense: you’d expect to see more moms dropping off kids, at least in redder parts of the country, and the back row is supposed safest (as long as you only plan on getting into head-on collisions). Still, the common theme of a ridiculous vehicle with exactly 2 occupants sitting in the farthest possible positions from each other came to be funny to us.
Those ludicrous pavement princess pieces of junk are status symbols of conspicuous consumption, and that’s it.
Now, a pickup with tool racks or lumber in the back, or covered with drywall dust, or bearing a ranch sticker? Fine. Those make perfect sense. Anything short of that is just bragging about how much you love donating to Exxon, like an NRA sticker but dumber.
I do get heat for my truck.
I call it the truckasourus, it does take up a lot of room, I pulled out the rear seat and installed a three level shelf that fills the whole back of the cab, tools, grocieries, more tools, laundry, more food, and room on the top shelf to sleep if nessesary, then a 8 foot box, that will get replaced with a 9' flat deck, and front, middle and rear racks so I can move 24'steel, 4x8 sheets, welding gas, and whatever else, when I am not moving round bales or fire wood, other large heavy clumsy stuff.
funny thing is that I have a car just for more civilised things, that costs me almost as much to sit there, as my truck costs to drive.
I flashed the eprom in the truck so it gets significantly better fuel milage, and has forgotten how to go into limp mode, though the messages in the dash are dire.
I could build a smaller rig, but it would fail in 1/3 of the tasks required, so it is impossible to come out ahead with running two, or hireing moving services.
So the article, while funny, is narrow and snippy.
Sometimes I consider a bumper sticker that would say, "Thanks for driving a Prius, I need the fuel!"
the milquetoast attempts at casting poorly-targeted stones at the beginning of this article really bring it down. Plenty of rural brits share exactly the same mentality, this just stinks of lack of cultural experience.
it's a great vehicle, and I applaud the french approach to cars.
Truly rural Brits - Northumbria, the Devon uplands, Yorkshire Moors, the remoter parts of Scotland & Wales, sure.
Thing with England is that, being a small, flat and largely well-connected country, there's lots of places that identify strongly as rural but are, economically and culturally, more like outer-suburbia in a US context. That's where you'll find the Defender and F-150 crowd.
He forgets the part where because of emissions requirements the C15 can't be driven in that scourge the people the author defends call "low emissions zones".
Stick a petrol version of the engine in (Peugeot XU instead of XUD) and convert it to run on propane. There you go, now the exhaust is just water and carbon dioxide, and you don't die from breathing it in. No CO, no HC, and not really any more NOx that was in the air it sucked in.
This is why forklifts run on gas, instead of petrol or diesel.
We could have had incredibly clean air in our cities 25 years ago, if the government hadn't decided that pushing "scrappage schemes" to get people to buy "cleaner greener diesels" was cheaper.
If you want to live in polluted areas there are plenty of places available on Earth for that, I believe most people would rather not. Low emissions zones are mostly in very densely populated areas where the impact of pollution is higher, not sure why you consider that a scourge.
People who don't live in France may not know why low emission zones are so stupid: it's not about how much pollution your car emits, but how old it is.
So you're not allowed to bring a 20 years old car even if it's small, light and as a result doesn't pollute that much (because of its low fuel consumption). However you're allowed to bring in your brand new SUV even if its emissions are much higher. In fact it doesn't matter how much your SUV pollutes, it's recent so it's "fine".
Do you know you usually drive 20+ cars? Poor people. Do you know who loves restrictions on old cars? Car manufacturers.
Perhaps I'm a plumber going to work on a house in a LEZ? Perhaps I need to deliver something? Perhaps deliver to the airport (!) inside the LEZ.
There are all kinds of reasons why someone might need to take a van into an LEZ, if you think for more than about quarter a second.
This is primarily a reason why you shouldn't drive a vehicle from the 1970s, as the article suggests, and why LEZs need practicality not to drive service inflation inside the area.
Every emission zone regulation I'm familiar with distinguishes between private and commercial vehicles for exactly this reason. The French zones for example divide vehicles into categories. Private vehicles are set a base category/range, and commercial restrictions are usually the next category looser.
CO2 is a bit of an outlier in the groups of pollutants emitted by a car. Modern cars will emit way less of the other pollutants that are directly unhealthy for humans to breathe (NOx, CO, particulate matter, etc.).
I know the thread is mostly for fun, but only considering CO2 is a bit misleading when accessing how environmentally (un)friendly a car is.
Which will get you into London's Low Emission Zone (LEZ). Not the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), though.
Besides, I think the point is really that we should be making and buying vehicles more like this (in the positive aspects) rather than that we should all drive 40 year old Citroens.
If the EU cared about this so much they wouldn't have allowed all car makers to buy one another until all cars cost €25k for the base model. Maybe, maybe that's the issue that prevents people from updating their cars which emit a lot of stuff they don't like.
You seem to have an axe to grind about something completely unrelated to the article here. Since you brought it up, though, if you're going to be one of the thousands of people driving up the road outside my house every day then, as a member of a family with multiple generations of life-threatening asthma, the fact that you're required to do it in a car with strictly regulated emissions is an unalloyed positive as far as I'm concerned.
This thing will be so old that the owner just needs to apply for a "historical" car license and then those eco-zones are irrelevant.
But yeah, the author's wrong on so many things. Starting with putting his stuff on mastodon in the first place. Or not withstanding that the same people he cheers on, are outlawing diesel engines.
Tbh though, a lot of the latter was fueled from US-industrial anti-diesel propaganda.
Can you fit an 8'x4' sheet of plywood in it? My pickup truck wants to know. But it doesn't have to worry, because my other main use for it is as a large gas powered wheel barrow for carrying yard waste, and the little enclosed C15 can't compete.
In fact it looks like the love child my Ford F350 and a Citroen C2. But it can't be because I had the Ford fixed.
If you keep the rear doors open, the cargo platform is 1644 by 1540 (mm), 8x4 would be 2438 by 1219.
Most likely you'd just put sheet goods on the roof (and yes roof racks for panel vans were common, still are).
> my other main use for it is as a large gas powered wheel barrow for carrying yard waste, and the little enclosed C15 can't compete.
You can certainly put yard waste in a C15, though people usually use a trailer for that (unless there's little enough of it it fits in a large builder / garden bag).
Someone pointed out that a lot of US builders will drive pickups truck, and that it's kinda doesn't make sense, why don't they drive a van? Depending on the trade and location builders and contractors here will drive something like a VW Transporter, Mercedes Sprinter, Toyota HiAce or a Peugeot Partner. The Sprinter will fit e.g. your plywood, others will have mounts on the side or roof to transport material.
They won't act as a large wheelbarrow though, not well at least.
When my kids were small, we bought a minivan and it was pretty awesome. I really hadn’t thought much about it until…
A couple of years ago, I rented one to help my kids move into college. It was a Chrysler of some kind and now I’m kind of tempted to buy one. The seats disappear into the floor and then you can carry full sheets of plywood. It’s front wheel drive and drives like a car. Super comfortable, super configurable, good visibility, lots of cup holders, climate controls, power outlets, and reasonably fuel efficient (for what it is). But it’s just sooooo dorky.
The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days.
I still see these running in rural Spain and France, usually held together with wire and hope, clocking like what 400k+ km? The XUD diesel engines are practically unkillable. They have no ECU to brick, no adblue sensors to fail and put the car into limp mode and thankfully none of those DRM locked headlights.
The argument for the countryside need of a modern SUV usually cites reliability and safety, and in 2026, modern complexity is the enemy of reliability. If your C15 breaks down in a field, you can fix it with a wrench. If your Range Rover breaks down in a field because a sensor in the air suspension noticed a voltage variance...you are stranded until a tow truck takes it to a dealer.
> The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days.
I wonder how differently cars would be built, if instead of maximizing for value extraction and crap nobody needs, they instead were optimized for utility and maintenance (and sure, fuel economy, aerodynamics and some sane environmental stuff). Like take the C15 and add 2-4 decades of manufacturing and safety improvements, while keeping it simple and utilitarian.
That would be the absolute dream engineering brief. If I actually sit down and design that vehicle, it would have something like this. List, off the top of my head.
1. You keep the modern metallurgy and the crumple zones. You keep ABS and basic traction control because they are solved problems that save lives without needing cloud connectivity.
2. Instead of a 2000 USD proprietary touchscreen that will be obsolete in 3 years, the dashboard could be just a double DIN slot and a heavy-duty, universal tablet mount with a 100W USB-C PD port. The car provides the power and the speakers and my phone provides the maps and music. When the tech improves, you upgrade your phone, not your dashboard.
3. Nobs and buttons instead of touchscreens like VW has done recently, if my memory serves me right.
The tragedy is that regulations in the EU and North America make this incredibly difficult to sell. The sane environmental stuff you mentioned has morphed into a requirement for deeply integrated electronic oversight. But I genuinely believe there is a massive, silent majority of drivers waiting for a car that promises nothing other than to start every morning and never ask for a software update.
> The sane environmental stuff you mentioned has morphed into a requirement for deeply integrated electronic oversight
Decent catalytic converters require an array of sensors, ECU, and ability to fine control the engine inputs to work - without them most large cities would become smog ridden hells.
There's no reason technology has to be user-hostile. You can still have an ECU and screens and everything. When it breaks the screen can be used to tell you exactly which sensor input is out of range. There's no reason parts need to be serialized and learning a new part can only be done once.
You can build a modern vehicle that's still repairable.
Modules need to be programmed for your vehicle specs and country because there are different laws and functions.
For example rear taillights are different in Europe vs the US.
Another is that higher trims of my car have a rear climate zone which has a different fan and actuators for air flow that the module needs to know exist.
> Modules need to be programmed for your vehicle specs and country because there are different laws and functions.
So are different intervalls of oil change between Australia and Europe - and yet, even in the 90s, people were able to keep that in mind.
We got taught to be helpless by the industry, so they can help us out. If that mindset would have existed in the 60s, 70s, then there would not be a "true to OEM" aftermarket available for car parts. We need to get back to that.
We got taught to be helpless by the industry, so they can help us out.
industry is pretty damn good at figuring out what customers actually want, instead of just what customer say they want and then don't actually buy.
cars are the way they are because that's what the overwhelming majority of car buyers actually want. The average driver doesn't want their car spitting out error codes, they want a check engine light to tell them to take it to a mechanic, and any information beyond that is confusing.
Sure, but the reasons programming requires proprietary software accessible only to the dealer via some kind of online access are depressing: laziness, greed, and crime.
Making software that's usable by independent shops and consumers costs money, eliminates business lock-in to dealers, and boosts the gray/black market for broken or stolen parts, so the only reason manufacturers do it at all is when they are required to by regulation.
That’s just a bunch of “if”s. And they are already programmed. But instead of coming directly built in on the vehicle you need to purchase a very expensive tool that hooks on the port and then tells you what the vehicle should tell you in the first place.
The solution to city air pollution is a different vehicle with a different drive train: an EV. The C15 is a workhorse for farmers and craftsmen not for shopping trips and driving the family to visit granny on the other side of town.
> The solution to city air pollution is a different vehicle with a different drive train: an EV.
Priority list should basically be:
0. Bicycles 1. Metro 2. Buses 3. EVs
(not counting emergency and service vehicles)
> 0. Bicycles 1. Metro 2. Buses 3. EVs
-1. Feet
EVs are still heavier than ICE vehicles and will for the next 10-20 years unless one is OK with a tiny battery. And heavy weight means more pollution from wheels that produce particles that ends up in lungs. Note brakes also pollutes with asbestos but EVs typically have regenerative braking so I think brakes pollutes roughly the same in a heavier EV as in ICE car.
I compared the weights of EVs versus ICE, and they were surprisingly close. Most of time, the differences were in the 15% range, and then you find exceptions like the Hummer, which is 30% heavier. I'm sure it comes as no surprise That the heavier the vehicle, the bigger the difference in ICE versus EV weight.
While I think lighter weight vehicles of all types would be a big win, I fear that ship has sailed. I think we have an opportunity to reset vehicle size both from a desire for cheaper and simpler vehicles. Look at cost and weight of the BYD EVs and the new pickup trucks from Slate and Telos.
Overall, I find the slightly increased weight for an EV to be an acceptable trade-off. Brakes last longer, tires, depending on make, are about 10% shorter life at most and overall maintenance is much less. Since I keep my cars until the body goes toes up, I have a much lower carbon footprint. than the 3yr lease route
If you give the difference in weight as a percentage, it is sort of surprising that the percentage is higher for heavier vehicles, right? Or at least I don’t get it. I’d expect the EV to be a constant factor heavier, a total weight of combustion_vehicle*1.1 or something.
I wonder if it's sorta like the rocket equation. A heavier vehicle requires larger batteries to move the extra weight with a comparable range as a smaller vehicle, but the batteries are heavy too, so you need even more battery to move the heavier batteries.
It's exactly that. Battery = heavy, heavy vehicle = short range. I wonder if ICE vehicle weight is calculated with a full fuel tank? Gas / Diesel is also pretty heavy and large vehicles have large empty spaces to be filled with fuel.
I had a 2010s Civic and moved to a Model 3. The curb weight difference was only ~3-400 lbs (about 10%), but the larger battery capacity, large SUV offerings are significantly heavier than ICE options (the F150 Lightning is about 2,000 pounds heavier than an ICE F150, for example, 5,000 -> 7,000 lbs.).
The tire pollution is true, but the brakes hardly get used on an EV. They are almost for emergency use only. Mine has a special mode to disable regeneration for a while so you can use the brake pads to clean the rotors.
Modern car brakes don't have asbestos.
The difference in tyre wear is so marginal it's probably unmeasurable - less than the difference between running at the correct pressure and forgetting to check your tyre pressure.
ICE vehicles also have exhaust pipes which pollute some too...
My EV is lighter than your ICE. Volkswagen eUP. 1183kg. 250km range in summer conditions.
I love the idea of these tiny EVs. Apparently the EU's making some legislation for them so that they can go without much of the expensive 'safety' equipment such as driver tracking.
Parking cars in cities not designed for them is a nightmare, but getting around with a car is so much faster than public transport, even if your city's is fairly decent.
Hybrids are even better, super tiny batteries with an ICE on standby.
If you scale size as well (like a motorcycle but e.g. as a tricycle for safety), you can realize some major efficiency improvements (doubling or tripling energy efficiency).
Which is why, bicycles should be the focus of transportation improvement.
tangential: people also underestimate the convenience of public transport being a one-way trip, meaning you can go from A>B>C>D>A and never have to go back to a previous spot to pick up a part of your luggage that you left behind.
Personally, when not being a tourist, almost all my trips are home to some place and back again.
Public transport is great, but if you're going to a less good part of the city, or even just a place that's unfamiliar, and less frequented, it might be a bit more difficult to get around.
And public transport travel distances can be patchy based on where the stops are, especially if you're going to the outskirts of your city.
Also when having to be present in the office, that extra 15-25 mins (x2) it takes to get to and from the office adds up quickly.
Engine control alone can be self-contained. The Ford EEC IV of the 1980s had its program permanently etched into the Intel 8061 CPU, and was designed to last 30 years. It did. I finally sold off my 40 year old Ford Bronco, which was still running on the original engine and CPU.
For gasoline engines, electronic fuel injection is far better than a carburetor, it isn't just the emissions systems.
Sure, it's harder to work on. The trade off there is that you don't have to work on it.
If you have an electric vehicle you need none of that
And if people would make one that wasn't an iPad on wheels I'd be in line to buy.
This is my exact same sentiment. I’m cautiously excited about the upcoming Slate Pickup[1] - I can see it being my go-to if I leave NYC, but it still won’t hit like the XJ Cherokee I drove before I gave up cars for the city.
1: https://www.slate.auto/
Looks interesting, I wonder to what extent they really want to make cars DIY-able again (as they state). On the one hand, they mention servicing is "easy" — just turn to their partner repair shop chain! On the other hand, there's Slate University and mention of repairability. I haven't followed development of this at all, so I'm genuinely curious. Hope it's not just "you can swap in and out our proprietary modules".
I really want to like the slate but their speakers and tablet holder concept actually are awful. Just a super basic off the shelf din rail hole and aux in and slap the most basic touch screen with physical control stereo you can find in there that does air play and car play works for me.
also stereo speakers in the glove box is...what
Who cares. Literally every discussion of vehicles someone has to bring up infotainment systems. You know that getting your dopamine drip is not what a vehicle is for, right?
I like the idea of a slate but the truck bed just makes no sense at that size. I don’t understand why it’s not defaulted to another row of seats or hatchback, with the option to convert to truck. 5 ft bed without extension is kind of pointless as a bed, but huge as a trunk.
That's effectively what it is, but reverse. You buy it as a truck, and can buy seats & cap and turn it into an SUV. I see it as the closest thing you can get to a kei truck in the US without importing. Relatively cheap, good payload capacity, (better than a lot of trucks out there) effectively unable to tow, 5-foot bed, which is the same or larger than most mid-size trucks, and a tiny form factor.
It's certainly a niche vehicle, but it looks exciting if it can fill you niche.
I worry about the Slate truck being DOA with expiration of incentives for EVs. Someone please tell me I'm wrong, because if they do deliver as promised, I'll be excited to buy one.
For me, I'm hoping it fills the mid-90s Isuzu Pup sized hole in my heart.
For the price of that C15 (adjusted for inflation it seems) you may be able to buy a battery for an EV. Maybe.
What do the sensors do? There's not much you can change in the catalytic converter so I assume it's just reading temperature? So I assume it's changing the fuel/air combustion ratio according to the cat's temperature?
Not a motorhead but IIRC a combustion with too little oxygen produces soot (pollution) and one with too much oxygen produces NOx pollution, with a sweet spot in the middle. The exhaust oxygen sensor allows the ECU to adjust the air/fuel mix to hit the minimum pollution spot, instead of estimating it.
There might also be a catalyst temperature sensor or something.
It's not a "whole bunch" of sensors, it's a few sensors and it's not some inscrutable magic, it's somethijg someone could replicate in open-source if they had equipment and time. We really need to get away from the mindset that proprietary stuff contains inscrutable magic. It's often worse quality than the open thing. However, it does have the right connections to be allowed to be put in a car that drives on the road.
This is why late 90s cars are objectively the greatest ever built. You had ECUs, cats, ABS, disc brakes, airbags, power steering, and conventional automatic transmissions. Everything that makes a modern car safe and reliable, but none of the high tech digital BS that has infused things nowadays.
ESC (electronic stability control) didn't become common until about 2010 to 2015. It makes a really big difference for safety -- EU estimates are that it's saved more than 15,000 lives. Let's backport that one too. :)
My 2004 RX-8 had decently solid ESC, but it was a “high-end” vehicle at the time. It’s definitely something we want to keep in our idealized vehicle (but let’s also keep the “disable ESC so I can have fun” button)
I was going to make this exact comment. The RX-8 had excellent stability control. Saved my ass at least once going too fast around a 90 degree corner. It also behaved really well on icy roads. It was pretty incredible for a rear wheel drive sports car, especially impressive at the time compared to every other car on the road back then.
I bought my first real wheel drive car in 2014. Still have it. It's not a race car. About 170hp. It struggles at the smallest curves. Good thing it has traction control and esp. Except all the front wheel cars I had before, one even slightly more powerful and smaller, never needed any of that. Never ever buying a rwd again. (Enthusiast forums of the brand tell me I don't know how to drive RWD. Skill issue. :D)
Rwd is definitely sketchier in certain circumstances, especially going uphill in low traction. Also pretty bad in the snow generally. but I’ve only had issues going around corners when it was very wet and I was driving faster that the speed limit. If you are running into traction issues driving normally (ie not flooring it) I would recommend having your tires and alignment checked, even with RWD that should not be happening in my experience.
You should look into different tires perhaps.
I will grant that there might be a match issue but I don't think Michelin Pilot Sports are bad tires.
It was available already on late 90s vehicles. That was the fix to solve Mercedes Class A failing Elk test: put ESP on all trims
In reality many 90s cars are phenomenal rust buckets due to issues in the adoption of water-based paints, cars which actually still have tangible amounts of steel in their panels are basically golden samples.
>the dashboard could be just a double DIN slot and a heavy-duty, universal tablet mount with a 100W USB-C PD port. The car provides the power and the speakers and my phone provides the maps and music.
Legally mandated backup cameras make your idea DOA.
In fact, nearly everything terrible about cars in the last decade can be traced to regulations in some way.
Wondering why transmissions are insanely complicated and unreliable now? Manufacturers were forced to eek out an extra couple MPG due to continually tightening environmental regulations. Something has to give.
> In fact, nearly everything terrible about cars in the last decade can be traced to regulations in some way.
I think the reason we even need backup cameras now is that visibility is so poor on modern vehicles. I think that in turn is due to increasing the height of the bottom of the windows for better airbags. I’m sure it’s great in a crash, but visibility is also a safety concern.
Not all of it is regulations though, but lot of common complaints.
> Instead of a 2000 USD proprietary touchscreen that will be obsolete in 3 years, the dashboard could be just a double DIN slot and a heavy-duty, universal tablet mount with a 100W USB-C PD port. The car provides the power and the speakers and my phone provides the maps and music. When the tech improves, you upgrade your phone, not your dashboard.
Dacia does that. The base sandero comes with speakers and Bluetooth. The rest is up to you, there is no screen no radio.
I am happy with Car Play as a decent middle ground. It’s nice to have a large screen, and everything is still done on the phone and not on a shite computer whose components were cost-cut to an inch of their lives.
We already had basically the solution you suggested with airplay/car play - USB charger with audio out that just is a display. when a phone isn't plugged in it shows super basic radio features like station and song name for AM and FM.
Had it and now most manufacturers are abandoning that for some proprietary crap that's much worse and requires a subscription for navigation and music streaming.
You should look into the slate truck! This is exactly what they are trying to do
https://www.slate.auto
Maybe Framework could get into the car business.
I have a theory that these environmental regulations at least to some degree defeat themselves. They make engines more complicated, so more fragile and harder for an amateur (edit: or any professional who isn't their own brand repair shops) to service. They encourage smaller-block engines with turbos and compressors which makes the engine more short-lived. They produce stuff like throttle-hang and gear selection recommendations optimized for driving economy, not engine longevity (or driving experience, for that matter).
On the whole, they seem to be contributing to this movement of taking power away from the end consumer and making your product more and more like a subscription (this goes further than the car industry, of course). I do realize that it's important to cut down on pollution! And maybe this kind of stuff has been studied... although I imagine it would be very hard to do accurately.
Imagine if a car manufacturer would provide service guides, easily-accessible part diagrams and competitively priced spare parts. Imagine if they optimized for longevity and if the handbook that came with the car had more technical details than it had warnings about how doing any kind of maintenance yourself will result in a) your death and b) a voided warranty. That would be pretty nice.
Did I hear right that some new vehicles are claiming 20,000km service intervals?
I know I’ve seen 15,000 service intervals.
This is the minimum to maintain the warranty for the first 3 / 5 / 7 seven years whatever.
If you change the oil at every 5000k and never turn off a cold engine - all petrol engines have fuel wash down at ignition cut, but much worse when the engine is come - you should expect 500,000+ plus kilometres out of an engine barring any metallurgical problems or manufacturing defects.
Petrol makes a poor lubricant for engines, and fucks engine oil. The less of it in engine oil the better.
Modern engines and fully synthetic oils are way better than the their counterparts from my youth, but 15,000+ kilometres service intervals are less about what engines need and more about what the folks over in marketing need.
Edit: I did see a second hand commercial diesel van recently that had met all service requirements for the warranty period, x number of years or 90,000 kilometres.
This meant it had logged exactly two oil changes since new, and the third had just been done at 90,000.
90,000k on two oil changes. Wild.
Incidentally, you're describing my 2020 Subaru Impreza. Under $20k for my dealer demo.
I do wish it supported a later version of Android Auto so that I could run that via Bluetooth. (It does have regular Bluetooth but that's just audio.)
Wireless Android Auto or Carplay generally use BT to setup but WiFi to send the bulk of the graphical data over.
That said, there are adapters to make an existing Android Auto Wireless if you want it. I think some are sold on Amazon too so you could probably try and maybe return. I don't have any experience with them since I'm very happy with my car's built in wired Android Auto and the reliability of cabling but it is something you can try.
Thanks for the tip. I'll look into it.
Were they sold with an option to have have no OEM infotainment? Just speakers and a phone mount?
I don't think it has any OEM infotainment. I think there is some kind of software in there but I've never looked at it. It's not intrusive.
Looking at image search for "2020 impreza dash" there's a screen above climate controls in all images. I was asking if there was an option to have no sceen.
Backup cameras are required by regulation since the late 2010s. You can’t sell a car with no screen.
In some countries.
Oh, I see. I don't know. I doubt it. That wasn't something I was interested in; I use navigation very often. But it's my navigation tool, not theirs.
How about an option just to have one of those old Ford radios with the huge buttons you can push with gloves on? And maybe an aux-in?
So long as it also plays cassettes.
My first car had the mechanical radio buttons and cassette player, I think you even had to turn the cassette over when one side ended.
I can unlock my doors with my phone and monitor the cars location with my phone with cloud connectivity.
This isn't required and was offered as a 5 year free plan with optional paid extensions after
How is this bad?
Now the car company has a live feed of your location and the ability to unlock your car at will. That's probably fine unless they get hacked, at which point it abruptly becomes less fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35919133
> I wonder how differently cars would be built, if instead of maximizing for value extraction and crap nobody needs, they instead were optimized for utility and maintenance (and sure, fuel economy, aerodynamics and some sane environmental stuff).
Auto manufacturers already have stripped-down base models of their entry-level vehicles. Many have commercial versions of their vehicles, especially trucks and vans, that are stripped down.
The stripped down base models don't sell well.
Remember how the internet was clamoring for an iPhone Mini? Whenever there were complaints about modern cell phones, you could find what looked like unanimous agreement that a smaller iPhone would be the golden ticket. Then Apple made an iPhone Mini, and it did not sell well.
The same happens with vehicles. Whenever you find threads complaining about modern vehicles it seems unanimous that modern vehicles have too many things consumers don't want and we'd be better off with simple base models. Yet simple base models do exist already and they don't sell well. Real consumers look at their $20,000 Nissan Versa and realize that spending an extra $1-2K on amenities isn't going to change their monthly payment much.
There is a lot of precedent for this. The Tata Nano was an Indian micro car that was small, low-power, and had bare minimum amenities. It was under $5K USD in inflation-adjusted dollars.
It was discontinued due to low demand because sales declined steadily year over year. Nobody wanted it.
I wonder how much of that is due to dealers, who want to upsell. Do they even keep the base model in stock, or does it have to be special ordered (or today, we can give you a "discount" on the fancy model that still has a higher profit margin for us).
I'm just speculating; the same reasoning wouldn't apply to the iPhone mini. But car dealers have a lot of incentive to skew the results. It takes a fair bit of willpower to say "I am buying this specific car I want and will go elsewhere if I can't have it."
Just as an anecdote - When I was buying my last car I went in and asked for just the base model with nothing added onto it, ie not even the "eXtra Special" designations, and the dealership said they probably won't have any for a long time and if I'd like to pay 50% more for one with some features added on.
I declined and kept looking at the inventory of the 4-5 dealerships nearest to me. For six months they never had a single base model.
I started looking at another maker and they seemed to have base models that just wouldn't sell, stuck on lots for that same time period.
> and the dealership said they probably won't have any for a long time
In my case, I told the dealerships I was okay with waiting up to two years to get the exact trim I wanted. I told them whichever dealership could get me an allocation first got the sale. Then I literally stood up to leave.
And like magic, they went to the computer and found the exact trim I wanted and got my allocation a month out. I was extremely picky on color and options, though. If I had been flexible on color it would have been sooner.
The sales people at dealerships will pressure you into upsells. They’re not going to turn down an easy sale if you demonstrate that you know what you’re doing. They were trying to upsell you.
That seems unlikely as I literally left and did not buy a car with more options and stayed in contact afterwards but I have seen that technique before where they suddenly "find" one in inventory after they realize you aren't going to take the option that gives them more comission.
>> When I was buying my last car I went in and asked
> In my case, I told
Exactly.
When you’re paying, you don’t ask, you tell.
This is what I want, and this is what I’ll pay.
Don’t get me started on fucking real estate agents either. Parasites. Real estate sells itself. Conveyancers / Solicitors do all the real work, and typically charge a set fee. Real estate agents typically charge a percentage and they literally don’t do anything.
The sales folk at a car dealership aren’t there to help you.
There is literally no situation bad enough that a car sales agent or real estate agent can’t make worse. Incapacitated pilot? Fucking useless. Need a dental cavity filled? Fucking useless. Got a problem with your Goggomobil? fucking useless.
Packing peanuts are more effective at their claimed benefits than car sales agents and real estate agents are at theirs.
Sometimes real estate agents do a lot. Anecdote of course, but my real estate agent spent a few hours basically every weekend with us for like 2-3 months as we toured 25 houses, went over ~10 inspection reports, and made 3-4 offers. And he and his team got roughly 20k. In a better housing market I think they do a lot less, but I know ours did a lot of work.
Anecdotally: I helped someone look for a cheap car recently and the base models are everywhere on my local lots. YMMV and I'm sure someone will respond that their area doesn't have any, but in my recent experience it wasn't hard to find a base model at all.
It's driven by consumer demand: If you can pay $30/month on your 5-year loan and get heated seats and a nicer navigation system, that's $1/day for 5 years and then you own it. It's easy to talk yourself into stepping up to something nicer that you're going to use every day.
I suspect you are right that this is linked to how much time people spend in their cars.
I am quite happy with a cheap car because I do not use it everyday, and even when I do the majority of my journeys are short ones (15 to 20 min).
I really wish there were an even cheaper car for that use case. Perhaps billed as a second car for families, where one is used just for commuting and errands, and the other is the general purpose one with a longer range. Say, with an 80 mile battery, two seats, and under $10k.
I gather that they exist in China and might be allowed into the US. I'd buy one.
I was hoping secondhand Nisan Leaf’s would fit those criteria by now.
The Nissan Leaf’s biggest problem is it’s the only vehicle in its class worth considering, or available at all, so secondhand ones are sold at whatever the market will bear.
There’s the Prius, but whoever is responsible for its styling will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Agreed - check out for example a Toyota rav4 le. This is the base model with effectively zero modern “subscription-esque” fancy features. It’s got a touchscreen and power windows, but otherwise it’s all the reliability/etc of Toyota and that’s it. About half the price of what most rav4s are listed at and $20k+ cheaper than a 4Runner.
It has a Data Communication Module - it spies on you. If you try to remove that, you lose audio in the front right speaker.
In the United States (USD, MSRP):
* 2026 Toyota RAV4 LE (base trim) - $31,900
* 2026 Toyota RAV4 Limited (top trim) - $43,300
* 2026 Toyota 4Runner SR5 (base trim) - $41,570
Oh no, across the line Toyota still tries to sell you a subscription service that's required for things like remote start.
So? Why would people buying the cheapest possible model care?
Remote start is a luxury feature. Just ignore the subscription offer like a luxury trim option.
It depends. What else is included in that subscription? Mirror and seat heating by any chance?
Can you buy a Toyota that isn't always online? Because having remote start available, subscription or not, sounds like you can't.
My point was you can buy a car that is primarily safety+capability and not luxury+subscription. My rav4 has a touchscreen and power windows but that’s literally it as far as convenience/luxury. ~28k a couple years ago, no subscription.
Anything heated, remote, touch to start, etc is in the luxury category what gp was asking about avoiding.
Depending on the weather, heated mirrors may be a safety feature. I'd very much like that for rain/foggy days for example.
This comment section went from “I don’t understand why car makers don’t sell a cheap stripped down car without luxuries” to “Heated mirrors and seats are very important” very quickly.
HN comments discovering in real time why the stripped-down base model vehicles don’t actually sell. People like those luxury features and they choose to pay extra for them.
But which ones are luxury? I don’t want a fucking infotainment system that has the fucking a/c controls on the fucking touch screen for example.
And I’m not willing to pay 30% extra for electric and then wonder if it’s safe to rent a cabin in the woods for the new year’s.
Same procedure as every year, James.
> It depends. What else is included in that subscription? Mirror and seat heating by any chance?
Are you saying it is? Or is this a rhetorical question?
Either way, those are again luxury features. If someone is in the market for those features they’re not really looking for the base model any more.
> Are you saying it is? Or is this a rhetorical question?
i don't know. I'm not in the market for a new car atm. And considering how enthittified new cars are, I shouldn't be at all.
Econo shitboxes also have very stiff competition from used low-end cars. The economics of them are often rather dubious.
And yet I personally know more people who own iPhone minis (myself included) now in 2026 than that own pixel phones of any model. I think the data is distorted by the fact that most people who want things like that also don’t typically buy new (especially with cars). I did buy my iPhone 13 mini from Apple directly, but I bought it after the 14 line had already been released.
HN commenters and their friends are an extremely biased sample set.
The sales numbers don’t lie about the global demand though.
I loved the iPhone 4 format factor, but prefer more recent and larger editions for battery life and battery longevity.
My only gripe with the 6.7 inch form factor would be solved if someone would just sell me a bigger hand. I can’t hold it one handed and reach the far corner of the screen without some obnoxious accessory like a Popsocket bolted to the back thereby making it impossible to use on a flat surface or fit in a pocket.
Come to think of it, Zaphod might have been on to something with that third arm.
I am aware. My point was basically that the people who wanted them weren’t lying, they really love them, and are willing to keep them for years even though they are getting slightly old now. I’m imagining this doesn’t show up in first year sales numbers in a similar way to how the things people say they want in cars typically drive used market buying not new market purchases.
I’ve tried to validate this hypothesis, but run into problems finding the data. Do you know where to find currently active numbers by model? I’m think something like browser market share charts. I’ve only been able to find numbers from the year they were released, and even that was as a percentage of total sales, not raw numbers.
My hypothesis is that minis (13 mini and 12 mini) are over represented in active phones compared to other models of that generation.
Not easy I would say.
Safety improvement means larger crumple zones, reinforcement, etc... Which mean a bigger and heavier vehicle if you want to keep the same capacity. That in turn means a more powerful engine, brakes, wheels and tyres, etc... further increasing the size and weight of the vehicle. This is an exponential factor.
Fuel economy and environmental stuff (which are linked) come with tighter engine control for better combustion and cleaner exhaust. It means tighter tolerances so simple tools may be less appropriate, and electronics.
And there are comfort elements that are hard to pass nowadays: A/C, power steering, door lock and windows. Mandatory safety equipment like airbags and ABS. Even simple cars like what Dacia makes are still bigger, heavier and more complex than older cars like the C15, they don't really have a choice.
It’s the ford transit connect. Car makers can’t make money on them because a) for personal use they are uncomfortable and b) commercial buyers drive them a million miles before replacing them.
The margin in cars is in the luxury. And for most personal buyers they’ll get as much luxury as they can afford because they are contemplating their monthly cost over total price and leather seats cost $80 more per month on a $600 monthly, they’ll splurge.
Modularity would be great too. Standardized connectors and outer dimensions for engines even between brands. Medium, large, small. You don't need 100 different types. Meanwhile, all this has been overtaken by the need to get away from fossil fuels as soon as we practically can. Oil should not be valued based on the cost of pumping it out of the ground but based on the cost of creating a liter of it from raw materials (CO2, lots of energy).
> Standardized connectors and outer dimensions for engines even between brands. Medium, large, small. You don't need 100 different types.
There aren't 100 different types of engines. At any given time each auto manufacturer only has a couple different engines in production. Different models can get different variations for performance or use targets, but auto manufacturers are very good at standardizing within their company.
Look at the list of Honda engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Honda_engines
Notice how they're grouped by series? All of the engines in each series share a common platform with minor changes from year to year. In many cases you can swap parts between engines within the same series. An engine series lasts 10-15 years. Some times the parts even carry over to the next series.
Swapping between brands is a pipe dream, though. Forcing everyone to fit their engineering into a bounding box that has to be agreed upon by all auto manufacturers around the world would only lead to either unnecessarily large vehicles with wasted space (to leave room for future engineering needs) or unnecessarily complicated engineering to fit everything into the pre-defined allowable engine envelope. All to accommodate engine swaps between manufacturers which is never necessary for consumer cars.
We can do just that in lots of other industries.
Why don’t we start with computers and software first? Let’s eliminate all these different laptop options and force every manufacturer to use 3 government-mandated chassis sizes: Small, medium, and large. Make parts interchangeable with standard connectors and power budgets. Nobody is allowed to innovate or customize because we must be standardized.
Where do you think we’d be now? Typing on our highly optimized MacBook Pros, or working on a clunky box with the fans whirring like a hair dryer because everyone had to fit a standard lowest common denominator design and changing it required years of regulatory work?
Or how about software and operating systems? We allow two OS types: Server and Desktop and they all have to work together within standardized interfaces. Nobody is allowed to innovate unless it’s within the regulated specs.
Doesn’t sound so good when it’s applied to topics we’re most familiar with.
In any industry with high performance machines like CNC machines, pick and place, or precision equipment you will find that the parts are not modular or interchangeable across manufacturers either.
You do this by standardizing interconnection at both the physical and protocol levels, and leave everything else alone. Then you allow both to evolve at a reasonable rate (maybe 10 years for the physical interconnects, maybe less for protocol since back compat is much easier there).
This leaves people free to tweak form factors, energy efficiency, system capacities etc. etc.
We don't need to care about the final results ("small medium large"), we need to care that you can connect things together (which also means "replace one component with another"). Same for automobiles and most other consumer technology products.
> Then you allow both to evolve at a reasonable rate (maybe 10 years
Automakers already get 10-15 years or more out of their platforms. The same series of engines will be used across the their lineup for a very long time. Transmissions are shared across car makers, and so on.
That’s not a problem. The request above was for all auto manufacturers to have to fit into a standardized format.
It would be like telling Intel, AMD and Apple that they all had to use the same CPU socket for 5 years and they all had to be interchangeable.
Do you think we’d have MacBook Pros with all day battery life that also have 500MB/s of memory bandwidth if the company was forced to use a standard CPU socket that all manufacturers agreed on? Definitely would not. Some other country without such requirements would be enjoying them, though.
It’s a demand that makes less sense the closer you are to the subject matter.
Despite 36+ years as a programmer at more or less every level of computing, I don't know that much about CPU sockets. However, my impression is that we'd not be particularly limited by a requirement that a given physical CPU socket design (size, pinouts, power supply) was used for 10 years. As a self-builder, and thus periodic (re)purchaser of motherboards and cpus, my sense is that the majority of the changes to CPU socket specs are gratuitous and unnecessary.
I could be wrong.
You are purposefully obtuse and I'm not sure what joy you derive from it but just to take your silly strawmen:
Laptops for the most part are put together from standardized parts and you can exchange the major ones (CPU, RAM, storage and often even the displays) from one brand to another and it will work. And if you go to desktop computers the range of parts that can be swapped out between manufacturers increases even further (power supplies, graphics cards, etc).
The 'highly optimized MacBook Pro' is as closed as apple can make it because they are trying to emulate car manufacturers, including 'model years'.
As for OS types, we have a basic common denominator, the boot environment and some abstractions which allow us to run a wide variety of operating systems on the same hardware.
And on that hardware you can run applications, which either talk to the OS directly using a standardized interface and there usually are a number of emulation options and VMs that allow you to run other operating systems and/or their applications, usually with some penalty but for the most part it works.
CNC machines use a lot of standardized tooling (I had a machine shop at some point, founded a CNC machine company, and I think I'm still in touch enough with this domain to be able to do it again if I want to today). Sure, you can't pull a board from one machine and stick it in another, but the G-code they use is for the most part backwards compatible to 1966 or so and it isn't rare at all to see a machine upgraded to the latest controllers and motors but keeping the frame, tooling and such.
Cars are over optimized to the point that the cost to society (in terms of landfill and recycling) is immense, there is most likely a point where a better balance between up front profits and cost to society can be found.
I'm sorry, but I'm not being obtuse nor making strawman arguments. I'm trying to explain an industry I'm familiar with. If you're going to start with personal attacks or calling my input "silly" I don't know why I bother, but here goes:
> Laptops for the most part are put together from standardized parts and you can exchange the major ones (CPU, RAM, storage and often even the displays) from one brand to another and it will work. And if you go to desktop computers the range of parts that can be swapped out between manufacturers increases even further (power supplies, graphics cards, etc).
You cannot swap CPUs between laptops, obviously, unless you get the exact same generation CPU with the same footprint. This fact helps basically nobody. It is true that some laptops are built around the same CPUs from a common vendor, but the same thing happens in cars too!
Major parts like transmissions are shared across many vehicles and vendors. The popular ZF 8HP transmission can be found in cars from Dodge, Audi, Jaguar, BMW, Porsche, Land Rover, Jeep, Volkswagen, and others for example.
This patterns repeats across many major components like Bosch ECUs. Automakers aren’t dumb. They’re not custom making every part for no good reason.
Many of the sensors and small pieces used in cars are generic and interchangeable. They're also available across a range of generic vendors.
Common parts like wheels and tires are standardized with small variations, much like the different RAM speeds in computers. Windshield wipers are generic. Cars take generic fuel and oil.
The point is: There are a lot of shared and common parts in the automative world already. Like your CNC example, there are some common parts where it makes sense, but you can't take the motor controller board out of a Haas and drop it into Mazak. You're familiar with this industry so I think you can see why demanding that all CNC vendors standardize their motor controllers and everything else would be a silly proposition. Likewise, I'm familiar with the automotive world and I'm trying to explain that cars do share a lot of parts already, but demanding that everyone conform to a single set of standards is a silly proposition.
You say that 'there are not 100's of different engines' -> but there are 100's of different engines, even within the same manufacturer and in spite of the core being the same it is often extremely hard to swap an engine of the same basic geometry because of the different sensors, bolt patterns and so on. It would be trivial to require those bolt patterns to be standardized and for ECUs to be standardized to the point that they could be swapped between vehicles. It is the - in my opinion ridiculous - differentiation that leads to vendor lock-in resulting in the fact that even though the underlying component is supplied by Bosch and it is absolutely identical you still can't move it from one vehicle to another because they spliced a different plug onto it and other lock-in increasing tricks.
The automotive world is full of such bullshit and given that there is no need for it (wouldn't it be nice to be able to swap an engine from any brand into any other based on a generic form factor and standardized interface) it is clearly all about protecting the profits.
When you go to a VAG garage with an Audi the exact same part from Bosch will be 1.5 times as expensive (as will the mechanic that puts it in) as when you go there with a VW. And if you go there with a Porsche the difference will be even larger. And of course there will be tricks to make sure that the cheap parts don't fit the more expensive model. And that's within what is essentially one company, once you go outside of that your ability to swap parts without access to a machine shop drastically diminishes.
That transmission you mention is a great example: you could swap it out in theory, but in practice the manufacturers have made it impossible to do so, parts have their own identity, talk to the ECU using custom protocols and so on.
> Modularity would be great too.
Unfortunately, that wouldn't pad the car companies' margins. What's best for th consumer is generally worse for the company.
Cars are highly modular. Parts are shared across as many models as possible. Engine series are designed to last 10-15 years.
The car makers increase their margins by keeping their cars modular.
Such a thing exists. It's called a Dacia Duster. Well, certainly for utility and to a lesser extent economy.
Fiat Panda 4x4 too.
I had a Panda from the early 2010s and that was my exact thought reading this thread: sounds like a fiat panda. Surprised to see this downvoted. Did they change so much?
Downvoted because they’re non-existent for north americans
And C15 does exist for them?
Aren't the Fiat 500 and Panda the same car but with only a neo retro design on the former?
Nope
This is the original 500 https://www.autocar.co.uk/sites/autocar.co.uk/files/images/c...
This is the new 500 https://www.actualidadmotor.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/F...
I'll ignore the 500X and 500L because, to me, they are completely different cars.
This is the original Panda from the 80s https://www.hagerty.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/The-ori...
This is the Panda from the early 2000s (the one I used to practice for my driving license) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/2004_Fia...
This is the more recent model https://www.motornet.it/img/modelli/auto/FIA/PANDA%202021_1....
The Panda is a completely different design.
ok I am referring to the early 2000's design, I believe Fiat was using the same platform and engine and I doubt they would do differently now.
Oh, ok, now I see what you mean.
Companies would make less money because consumers just buy a product and keep it for generations if the product quality is THAT good.
When companies make less money, there's less jobs. When there's less jobs people have less money to spend on things like Rent.
Citroen Berlingo is basically that.
Well, it requires a different way of thinking but that's exactly how cars will be built if you'd use them via a subscription (fuel included).
You would get the toyota hilux champ which is not purchasable in rich countries.
By now, we would have reached a quality standard of vehicles that are regularly passed down across several generations before they stop being useful.
You can quickly see what a mortal sin this would be against our Lord and Savior, Capitalism.
But whatever you want Toyota has a 10k truck and a jimmy is 15k, if you need a car a vitz can be had for 12k
This comment shines a spotlight on my issues with the US auto market. None of these vehicles are sold in the US, for a variety of reasons - both economic and regulatory. I hate knowing that the vehicles I want to buy both exist and are affordable, but I just can’t have them. Meanwhile, the cars sold in my market are all egregiously enormous, have giant screens inside, etc.
This is the very definition of a “first world problem,” but it sure is frustrating.
One of the many reasons I choose not to live in “the west”.
Yeah, but how do poor VCs make money then?
Definitely not with a car sold for relatively cheap that has a engine who refuses to die...
You think VCs fund the world's largest auto makers?
Modern cars break down less than older cars -- they are more reliable, not less. They generate more power, with better emissions. They have a wealth of creature comforts and features beyond what 1980s cars had.
The reliability of a vehicle isn't just the frequency of breakdowns.
It's the frequency of breakdowns times how fucked you are when it does break down.
So the actual math also depends on your means and where you live.
Yes, and they're still much better.
yeah, Risk = Probability * Impact
They’re also vastly safer
* For the driver.
Large cars/SUVs are vastly more dangerous for everyone else. Visibility in modern cars is also much worse, regardless of size.
Driver and passengers. Some of the modern sensor stuff benefits everyone else, too.
ABS, traction control, lane assist, crumple zones and many more things benefit everyone on the road.
Of course the emissions from that old diesel are a major health hazard. I’d rather not have that drive past my yard where my toddler is playing.
Sorry to go against the C15 French circle jerk, but a good modern SUV is safer for everyone despite being heavier, and a SUV.
First, a good SUV is an electric SUV. Whoever had the experience to be behind a C15 without HEPA filters, something you can find in a good SUV, knows that the C15 will kill you with its air pollution.
It’s worse if you are doing sport on a bike or running. And trail running may not save you from those C15, as they are pretty capable off road vehicles and are used by hunters and farmers.
Also, the C15 has no ABS and ESP. Pierre is a lot less likely to crash into you with a modern SUV than a C15.
Finally, the C15 has no active security. It will drive full speed into toddlers playing on the road while a good modern SUV will stop automatically. Same for cyclists and other vehicles.
Visibility is indeed worse because the industry decided that a solid A pilar was more important.
I'm not sure how useful it is to argue based on comparisons of that ancient car and new ones. Yes yes I know that's how it started, but I think it is obvious that a useful discussion is about looking at the principles behind that old car, and then to apply "what if" to modern ones.
I'm making this assumption based on how utterly useless it is to try to have a serious discussion that's really about that old car vs. a new one. I mean, would anyone even think about producing those same old cars with their old technology? Obviously not.
I think, in my discussions, not just this one, it would help us all A LOT if we didn't try to win an argument and limit ourselves to interpret the other people's comments in the most restricting way. Let's assume we are here to learn something other than finding ways to be "technically correct".
Sorry, the statement that a shitty C15 is safer than a modern SUV is too hard to ignore. Overall, my statement isn't to take very seriously though.
Not quite. The statement was that the C15 is safer for people outside of the car than the modern SUV.
If I had to get hit by a car, I'd much rather it be the C15 than the modern SUV. I'm much less likely to survive the SUV hitting me.
Now you can make the argument that other modern safety features make it less likely that the modern SUV would even hit you in the first place (given automatic emergency braking, etc.), and I suspect you might even be right, but I think that requires some data to back it up.
When I wrote everyone, I meant people inside and outside.
The statement wasn’t specific to collisions but you are free to prefer being hit by a C15. As for myself as a pedestrian, I am not sure. The modern SUV is bigger but modern cars have improve safety for pedestrians. Mostly much softer and taller bumpers. It’s not perfect but from the ncap YouTube videos, I may prefer the modern SUV.
If we go with empirical data, I suggest test crashing all those C15.
Modern engines are generally more reliable, yes. And galvanised steel and aluminium has helped chassis' and bodies last longer too. I think the 'sweet spot' has passed for most car categories though, the last being city cars when they got mandatory infotainment systems towards the end of the 2010s.
> They have a wealth of creature comforts and features beyond what 1980s cars had.
I don't want these, I don't want to pay for them. They raise the cost and they're unavoidable. This is a NEGATIVE, not a positive.
For you. Everyone's tastes are different. I remember riding around in cars in the 80s, and I much prefer the comfort of my current modern car, enough to make some trade offs around the annoying computerization of it.
I suspect that there are more people around with my tastes than yours, and that's a driver of sales.
Declining service revenue has been a problem for car dealerships for a long time. EVs are only making it even harder as their maintenance needs are reduced further.
This is another topic where people look back on the past with rose colored glasses. At the risk of downvotes, this happens a lot on HN like in threads where people speak about their pre-SSD era computers as being faster and snappier than modern machines. I recently found my old laptop in storage and booted it up. I remember loving how fast it was at the time and being glad I spent extra for the fastest model at the time, but oh boy was it slow relative to anything I use today.
EVs are not more reliable in general, at least not according to the stats. And a lot of them haven't been on the road for long enough to know how their running costs will look like when they are a decade or two old.
There's just been an article here on HN, that BMW installed a crash safety fuse that triggered on a minor fender-bender and killed the battery. It was WELDED in, and even after getting to it with a torch and installing a new one, the ICU needed to be hacked to accept the new part.
They're also full of proprietary parts, basically you have entire car functions integrated to the same PCB, which are essentially unrepairable.
I hope I'm wrong, but I guess there'll be a major disillusionment with EVs once these cars get to 10-15 years and people find out in mass, that it's no longer economical to fix them.
I'm not an EV hater, I'm more of a pessimist - when it comes to manufacturers, I'm kinda 'pricing in' the worst behavior.
EVs aren't immune to design problem or recalls.
However they don't have as much routine maintenance overhead as ICE engines. No oil changes, regenerative braking reduces brake pad and rotor wear, etc
In practice however, most manufacturers mandate a yearly inspection when the car is in warranty, and after it's not, usually the state requires you to do one at least every other year.
During these the mechanic will do the routine maintenance. I'm a casual driver, I drove like 100k km in 6 years, and my first set of brake pads still haven't worn down.
I didn't claim they were maintenance-free. They still have moving parts and some fluids.
They do not have the same level of moving parts, wear items, and fluids as an ICE engine though.
Both are true. New vehicles are more reliable and safer. New vehicles are vastly harder to maintain by a home auto mechanic.
I don't know enough to say whether realizability requires lower DIYability.
> If your C15 breaks down in a field, you can fix it with a wrench.
I could. My wife couldn't.
Also, let's not forget the creature comforts of modern cars... rear seats, airbags, sound insulation, power steering, automatic transmissions, 4wd.
Living in the country, tool-vehicles are very useful. This is typically a beat up old 2wd pickup truck (lower is easier to load) with an 8-ft bed (so you can load full sheets of plywood) and a single cab (so you can get an 8-ft bed). My buddy down the street has one and I borrow it all the time. But you'd never take the family anywhere with this thing. It basically spends its entire life going back and forth to Lowes.
>I could. My wife couldn't.
Because she doesn't drive a C15. Believe me, rural french women _will_ fix a C15. There's nothing to break down anyways, the engine is happy to run on distilled corn and melted rubber for oil, the suspension is what suspension, three tires ought to be enough for everyone.
> rear seats,
There's rear benches for you whole family and space for your kids to play around in the back while you're driving, what more do you want ?
>airbags
Useless if you don't crash.
>sound insulation
What do you need to hear except the beautiful sound of the X-Type engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSA-Renault_X-Type_engine) ?
>power steering
Grab a phase 3, it has power steering. Or get stronger arms. Or stop trying to steer while you're not moving forward.
> automatic transmissions
You don't need automatic transmissions, you need to learn how to drive stick. The C15 has the added benefit that you don't really have a proper range to change gears, it'll just go in. Actually you don't even need to clutch, just jam the thing.
>4wd
Absolutely useless for 100% of the usages the average american makes of it. If it can drive through mud while carrying cows, it will handle anything you have to throw at it. 4WD sure is a nice thing to make you pay for more gas though.
>Living in the country, it's very useful to own a tool-vehicle. This is typically a beat up old 2wd pickup truck (lower is easier to load) with an 8-ft bed (so you can load full sheets of plywood) and a single cab (so you can get an 8-ft bed). My buddy down the street has one and I borrow it all the time. But you'd never take the family anywhere with this thing. It basically spends its entire life going back and forth to Lowes.
Alright, all kidding aside though: the US is literally the only country in the world that considers pickup trucks as a good utility vehicle: they are the most dogshit type of vehicle you could own for anything, and that includes your sheets of plywood. Pickup trucks are not used by anyone serious anywhere else in the world. Need to carry a bunch of crap ? Buy a busted Renault Master (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Master) and it has the added benefit of you being able to buy your plywood in crazy situations like the tiniest bits of rain.
The US's obsession for pickup trucks is the sign of a deeply unserious society.
The Toyota Hilux makes for a good vehicle to mount weapons in the back, but please see a lawyer about the legality of mounting an M60 at the back of your car if you're not living in Afghanistan
> Pickup trucks are not used by anyone serious anywhere else in the world.
Excuse me?! Pickup trucks are the sole foundation of motorized defense in some regions! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_(vehicle)
I did mention it at the end! That said, I believe most legal systems in the world frown on such behaviour, and more crucially, they're not used for carrying your groceries or 2x4's. clearly Americans lack the courage to mount up a DShK at the back of their F150, the cowards.
Oh snap, you are right! My bad, I prematurely got overly excited for comedic release and then forgot to read the rest.
But yeah, what's the point of an F150, if you don't even flex some heavy weaponry at Walmart? Timber and concrete fits the C15 just fine, it's artillery and air defense extensibility where it's lacking. Tho, fingers crossed, we may see F150 technicals by the end of the year.
My driving skills are probably below average. I really like that my car warns me of zebra crossings and can follow the car in front of me with a safe distance.
Many of the modern car features are just useless marketing fluff, but there is some really good progress too.
I’ve got two cars that I drive regularly, a modern day BMW with all the bells and whistles, and an almost 20 year old Honda Acty Van. It’s 660cc, doesn’t have rear seat belts, or a radio, it does have power windows though.
I enjoy driving both for different purposes, but I have to agree with you. On long distance driving (>200km), the BMW is safer. Cruise control, lane keeping, auto distance. It really makes long, multi hour drives less tiring.
I wouldn’t drive my Acty to the next town.
> The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool.
I don't think that's true, the car as mere tool is romantic anachronism. Back then, cars were central identitarian elements to the post-war, western promise of salvation. Whole cities were torn down and rebuild to fit the car. The car had ideological significance. I think, identitarian attachment to the car is actually less today, but due to the historic importance and focus, cars have become unconditional necessities in many places.
I think the reason, you frequently see "old cars as tools" in southern Europe still, is the fact most regions there only started industrialization after 1970 and were/are still greatly underdeveloped/relatively poor, compared to eg. early industrialized nations like Germany, which are super car-centric. They suffered less car adaptation at the time and as a consequence e.g. SUVs would be rather impractical in some places with extremely narrow streets. Additionally, (remaining) farmers in e.g. Germany are almost exclusively rather rich entrepreneurs managing industrialized food production on flat, boring lands, than "poor peasants" caring for traditional farms in remote villages living off tourism somewhere pretty.
Probably less due to zeitgeist/mentality, but rather geography, historic economic abilities and availability.
Can you give an example of a European city that was "torn down and rebuilt to fit the car?"
In my experience, even cities that suffered a lot of war time damage (Hamburg, Dresden) were rebuilt with every street in exactly the same place with the same narrow width.
It's a bit hyperbole, of course, and I was speaking to the sentiment of the time. In Germany Cologne would be an example of heavy car-centric development, coming to mind, but pretty much any city in West-Germany suffered this fate to some extent. I think there are far more drastic examples in America, but I am not knowledgeable about that.
> Das Konzept der autogerechten Stadt wurde in West-Deutschland beim Wiederaufbau der im Krieg zerstörten Städte umgesetzt, beispielsweise in Hannover (durch den damaligen Stadtbaurat Rudolf Hillebrecht), Dortmund, Köln und Kassel, aber auch in kleineren Städten wie Minden und Gießen. Dabei wurde in großem Umfang auch erhaltene Bausubstanz abgerissen. Vielfach wurden Stadtteile ohne Berücksichtigung sozioökonomischer und kultureller Faktoren zur Anlage von Durchgangsstraßen zerschnitten.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogerechte_Stadt
A 1984 Ford Ranger with a bed cap would compare favorably to the C15.
> The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days.
The same cancer that turned technology from a tool to an ad delivery machine is affecting vehicles.
Because of the growth imperative. With essential things like ICE cars, phones and personal computing, we long satisfied need, those core business products are simply essentially finished/perfected. It's market, and therefore regulatory, failure to have gigantic corporations in positions enabling rent seeking and market shaping, instead of pushing true innovation. If Apple can't come up with something innovative, they need to be forced to downscale instead of creating artificial demand for essentially the same phone 5 years in a row. If VW repeatedly missed the chance to get off their obsolete engine platform, they need to fail.
I think, Cory Doctorow's idea for regaining digital resilience, by "simply" opening up artificial software restrictions through regulation, is widely applicable and would also push for adequate downscaling and actual innovation: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/
I wonder what it would take to convert a modern diesel (e.g. an EA288 TDI) to mechanical injection.
You'd have to fit a mechanical injection pump, which has a different sized pulley, for a start. And injectors and lines adapted to fit.
Pretty much infeasible, I suppose.
This article is comparing a C15 new in 1984 vs a secondhand one today. Really, the C15 represents a time when taxes were ~20% lower and there was a workable steel industry in Europe (which destroyed certain environments, especially around the Ruhrgebiet, whether the exact location was in France, Belgium or Germany). Oh and one major problem the C15 does have is that despite those stats, it is considered to NOT meet emission standards (due to age), and so you cannot enter many cities in one. You can enter with a Berlingo.
There is still a "C15" by the way. It's even less ugly. It's called the Berlingo [1]. Cheapest version is 24000euro + tax, or 35000 + tax for the hybrid version. Let's say in practice it'll run you 30000 euro.
In other words, after tax and counting inflation, let's summarize that since 1984, European cars have about doubled in price. Wages in the EU have gone up about 2x, after inflation.
You have to work 30000/2600 (avg wage per month, euros, in France) = just shy of an entire year of work if you invested 100% of your wage into the car. So let's say 2 years of work.
(due to the EU strongly opposing equal wages across the EU, there is a very large difference between average wage in France and, say, Greece. VERY large, more than 100%)
In 1977, you would have 4900FF average wage in France (in French Francs), and the C15 cost 62000FF. So, just about 12 months at 100% average wage, or let's say 2 years or work, saving up.
So, it even costs about the same.
And, sadly, one is forced to admit that when it comes to European cars, this is a pretty damn good result for that company. Most EU brands have done far worse.
[1] https://www.citroen.fr/vehicules/utility/Berlingo-Van.html
> Oh and one major problem the C15 does have is that despite those stats, it is considered to NOT meet emission standards (due to age), and so you cannot enter many cities in one.
At least in Germany, due to it's age it would classify as a historic vehicle (number plate with an H) and be exempt from emission standards.
> modern complexity is the enemy of reliability
There are years-long threads dozens of pages long on priuschat.com with data files posted by wizards just to figure out the 12v charging pattern.
The vehicle itself will probably stop running before any of these wizards ever figure that out, or even understand the algorithm it uses to occasionally run the engine in EV mode.
And yet, I speculate the total runtime of any year of that vehicle will match what you see for the much simpler Citroen C15-- essentially, bounded only by however long the wizard wants to drive it.
Edit: preemptively-- the Prius driver can drive their Prius on roads appropriate for that type of vehicle for as long as they want. Citroen obviously can go more places-- my upshot is just that the glaring complexity of a Prius doesn't seem to have gotten in the way of its reliability as the author assumes it should have.
> If your Range Rover breaks down in a field
Do they go there?
I mostly see those in parking lots occupying two spaces (a white one 4, once) or cruising slowly in narrow high streets.
Century of the Self. Products aren't life-improving tools anymore they're a way to express yourself.
It's not just vehicles. It's everything, as it's caused by changes that happened to the highest-level command structures of our economy.
C2V ?
I can't believe we're still waiting for an open source car!
The open source washing machine and printer still aren't here either... :(
I think chances are vastly better now with EVs, you probably could reuse the crowdfunded opensource washing machine. Combustion engines are simply way, way too complex. Although I presume the real showstopper is control electronics and regulatory approval for ICEs and EVs alike.
Many of the things are also there because of regulation.
eg: https://www.forbes.com/sites/edgarsten/2024/07/01/mandated-a...
You have cameras, sensors, gps, maps, that need to be updated... and all that would easily be solved by a few policemen with radar guns and writing fines.
What really makes me mad is how bumpers were made to protect the car and now they are these expressions of design that you have to protect at all costs from scratches even.
You don't HAVE to. In a no fault case you can just take the insurance payout and live with the damage.
> What really makes me mad is how bumpers were made to protect the car and now they are these expressions of design that you have to protect
Bumpers today are made to protect the car's occupants, not the car.
They are the start of the crumple zone, whose purpose is to absorb and release most of the energy transfer of the crash by deforming, rather than transferring it to the passenger compartment.
>They have no ECU to brick, no adblue sensors to fail and put the car into limp mode
Which means they are some of the most polluting and wasteful cars available. ECUs are good. They make cars safer, more reliable and more efficient. Car manufacturers had to be dragged kicking and screaming to add adblue, because the Diesel engines are pretty toxic otherwise.
The apologia for old cars is just insane, they are not what you think they are.
>If your C15 breaks down in a field, you can fix it with a wrench.
This is just delusional.
> If your Range Rover breaks down in a field because a sensor in the air suspension noticed a voltage variance...you are stranded until a tow truck takes it to a dealer.
No, you just reset the ECU and get on with your day.
With all due respect, you are confusing a software race condition with a hard fault in a safety critical system.
Resetting the ECU only works if the error is a transient glitch in the code logic. If the failure is a physical sensor reading out of range?
Furthermore, modern automotive architectures store permanent diagnostic trouble codes in non volatile memory specifically to prevent people from "just resetting it" to bypass emissions or safety checks. You cannot clear those with a battery pull. You would need a proprietary manufacturer tool to force a relearn or adaptation.
But more importantly, your argument accepts a terrifying premise. That a 2.5 ton kinetic object moving at highway speeds should have the reliability profile of a consumer router. If I have to treat my vehicle like a frozen windows 98 desktop to get home, the automotive engineering has failed me. Physics doesn't need a reboot.
Yet despite the appliance-ification of cars, they are, on the whole, much safer and quite a bit more reliable than they were decades years ago, despite being forced to work a lot harder for emissions compliance.
It's true that you can't fix them with a spanner, paperclip and pair of tights any more, but it's so much more rare that you have to.
> If the failure is a physical sensor reading out of range?
Then you buy a new sensor and put it in, just like you would any other failed part.
> You would need a proprietary manufacturer tool to force a relearn or adaptation.
You can do almost anything you need to do with a non-proprietary Autel tool.
I mean, I get it, the manufacturers are absolutely doing their best these days to lock up repair and maintenance. But so many folks seem to throw their hands up and over-exaggerate the inability to fix modern cars. I've always worked on my own cars, from a 1960 Triumph TR3 to a 2025 Audi A3, and everything in between. Maybe once every four or five years have I hit something where I needed to take the car to the dealer, and that was true in the 1980s as well as today. Repair information for newer cars can be somewhat difficult to obtain (looking squarely at you, BMW) but with a bit of sailing the high seas, you can get all the shop manuals.
> Then you buy a new sensor and put it in, just like you would any other failed part.
In the middle of nowhere?
Until the sensor itself has a microcontroller and does a cryptographic handshake with the other side before it's allowed to work, for "security" reasons obviously.
If you're driving to the middle of nowhere you carry spares and tools.
Source: live in Scotland, frequently drive to the middle of nowhere in a Range Rover.
Haha, how far is the middle of nowhere from the nearest town in Scotland? A few dozen kilometres?
The Scottish highlands have a population density comparable to the Mountain West. As someone who grew up in the mountain west, the highlands have a very similar feel.
Several hundred miles, depending where you go.
From where I grew up, it's a four-hour drive to the nearest supermarket.
If you're in the US, you're probably not used to driving long distances on roads that aren't basically perfectly straight and four times the width of your car. You wouldn't enjoy driving here.
I'm not in the US.
I spent some time on Google Maps, and the furthest spot I managed to find from a town was about 35km. Note that I didn't say anything about supermarkets - this is a thread about car reliability, so the context is how far you can be from a town where it's reasonable to expect that someone can help you with your car.
From experience if the air suspension ECU freaks out over a sensor reading out of range it's either water in one of the connectors, or the sensor is getting a bit worn and you've run it to the far end of its travel.
Getting the vehicle four-square (possibly jacking up the corner with the faulty sensor so it sits about the right height) and resetting the EAS ECU with a diagnostics tool will solve the problem in the short term.
The other thing of course is you can just get it to sit level or at least level-ish, then unplug the ECU, let it complain about some unspecified fault, and drive it without self-levelling until it can be repaired, probably when you're not knee-deep in mud.
[flagged]
Can you please not cross-examine in HN comments? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
We want friendly curious conversation, not questions designed to incriminate or insinuate. You're welcome, of course, to make your substantive points thoughtfully.
This. I think the entire argument and comparison is a fallacy because you can't just compare vehicles on utilitarian factors when many (most?) people are buying primarily based on fashion/aesthetics. Through my American eyes that C15 is dog shit ugly and I don't even care to read through how it measures up on utility because it's style is already a dealbreaker.
Personally-I know I don't need a big truck, and don't have farm/ranch/heavy duty requirements, but SUVs are quite useful for normal city life in most of the US. Several times a month I am fully loaded for some reason or another. May as well be fashionable and handle well too since this is also the vehicle I commute in and valet at a fancy restaurant occasionally.
I noticed that people often treat cars as they treat clothes. It's their largest and most expensive costumes.
This means that fashion and looks start to play a major role, utility be damned. This also means that relatively minor details, like the exact shape of headlights, become a major stylistic and thus market niche differentiator.
I don't think it's a new problem with cars. But it maybe relatively new in the utility / light truck space.
Not new at all in the US. Trucks are and have been some of the most frequent recipients of after market customization. It’s so common I can think of a dozen or so sub/niches. I’d say it’s only second to Jeep Wrangler.
But yes you’re absolutely right, in our car dominated cities people certainly see the car you drive as a fashion choice, a signal of your personality, and social status/net worth so it does get complicated. I like driving nice cars on occasion but am rather modest and practical with my daily driver.
I’m in a social circle with several dads who probably have similar net worths and generally have a lot in common. There’s a lot of chest pounding, bragging, and one upping going on. Not negatively, but in a sense of “you need to try this ridiculously priced thing” (whiskey and wine and travel are all common topics). I tend to be the contrarian of the group (I don’t drink alcohol at all, don’t watch sports, drive a clunker car). Anyway They’ve been all getting Rivian SUVs and geek out on them. Trying to talk me into getting one next. I just can’t see why I want to spend 6 figures on it when other very similar and decent looking alternatives exist for half the price. I don’t find anything it offers interesting enough. However, its overall utility of being a SUV of that size is very appealing to me so I’m not really questioning that part.
I can confirm all of the findings.
My first car I got in Germany was a C15. I used it to transport server racks, but also had a mattress in the back and had my first sex on it. On muddy festivals where others cars got stuck, I was able to get out easily. Repairs were dirt cheap. It also had a tow bar, and was able to pull a 1.5 metric ton trailer to get equipment to a computer party.
And I still was able to do 160 km/h (100 MPH) with it on the Autobahn. With or without server racks, with or without sex.
Best car I ever had.
It is really insane that these days cars on average weigh 25-40 times of their load. Human stupidity never ceases to amaze me.
My first car was a rusty 20 year old Renault 5, in which I barely fit myself, so no sex in the car for me.
(But my grandma had a flat that she did not live in during the summer months... hmm... sweet memories... excuse me, what were we talking about again?)
At first I wanted to write a comment about how cars and sex are apparently very well linked. Upon thinking it over once more, it appears that the real link to sex is privacy, which is of course obvious. Thinking over it once more, we're brought back to the real selling point of cars: total privacy. Public transport is on paper really good, but it is totally devoid of privacy - which means that it is bad in reality. In other more provocative words, public transportation is bad because you can't have sex on the bus
Public transport porn is actually a big thing in the Czech Republic, at least according to my bookmark collection.
> what were we talking about again?
I think, you were just about to tell us about your first time with your grandma.
Reminds me of the 1973 Toyota RV-2 concept car, with the back of the car being a giant sexy shag carpet. Look at this amazing (nude) ad in Penthouse:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180408023557/https://members.i...
>Best car I ever had.
You were doing 160 in a death trap with minimal safety features, which was literally making the air unbreathable.
Citroën were the first to make diesel filters standard. And my C15 had the HDi engine with diesel filters. And unlike others, they did not cheat and were not part of the Diesel scandal.
Also, I survived.
And when it comes to security features, more important than not having side airbags would have been not to combine smoking weed and fellatio while doing 160.
I am not saying that any of this would be a good idea if keeping your life is a priority.
But even with maniacs like myself on the road, Germany has deaths from fatal car crashes of 3-4 per 100,000, while the US has 12-13.
But again, I am not a lawyer, not a doctor, and this is not health advise, just a true story of what I did 25 years ago that may or may not entertain readers.
>Citroën were the first to make diesel filters standard. And my C15 had the HDi engine with diesel filters.
Modern Diesel Engines have gotten so much better in every single area.
>And unlike others, they did not cheat and were not part of the Diesel scandal.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/dutch-court-says-dies...
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py37TT6PxW4 to see just how common cheating was. Also have a look at the graph at 17:47 .
"From 2009."
The concept of "software in motors" did not exist in the age of the C15.
This is just a lie you just made up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_control_unit
Please: Chill. All good. This is just light entertainment.
Still: Under the definitions I work with, an ECU is Hardware. Rule of thumb: If it does not run Doom, it's probably hardware :)
>Still: Under the definitions I work with, an ECU is Hardware.
What a silly definition.
> The Ford Ranger (2020). One of the most popular pickups in the US. A key selling point is that the cabin is so high you can run over toddlers without even noticing.
The craziest thing about this criticism is that it is phrased as hyperbole but the reality is that this is seen as a small truck in the US.
The Ford Ranger actually is the best selling pickup truck in Europe for 10 straight years, but doesn’t sell as much in the US. The larger F series trucks sell more than an order of magnitude more in the US.
The best part about the F-150 is that it isn't even toddlers at that point. The most common F-150 variant I see in my area's hood goes up to my shoulder and I'm 2 meters tall.
You often see the very important people driving these working their way through crowded parking lots and places that are primarily foot traffic with a "Wtach out for ME!" driving style.
It's so funny that when people design vehicles that actually have a need to be big - big buses, commercial vans, fire trucks - one of their common features is that visibility is treated as something important, and often these types of vehicles have either a nearly flat, uniform front side, or they try to minimize the engine compartment hump as much as possible and make the windshield huge. But when we talk about cars that are made for the consumer, all sanity goes out the window, we get these near-caricatures that would be hilarious if they weren't real. The craziness can only be somewhat tamed by government restrictions, depending on where you live, but the peak of this design results in huge, elevated flat boxes for engine compartments, mounted as high as possible. It doesn't matter that the driver has a blind spot in every direction, what matters is showing off how HUGE your 18L V32 engine must surely be under that hood, how powerful it must be to draw air through that chrome grille that's half a person's height, and most importantly, how much of an imposing heroic warrior one must be to own that tank.
Yep, the hoods are higher than my wife's head.
My wife: 5'5": https://imgur.com/a/CVFDb0D
Not to mention the amount of stones they kick up. In AZ if your truck has a suspension lift, you're supposed to have mudflaps. But that law (and many other vehicle laws) is not enforced.
I see SO many illegally modified trucks and I've never seen or heard of someone getting in trouble or failing inspection for them. It boggles my mind every time I see a car with tires extending half a foot on either side of the cabin veering here and there, making their presence everyone else's problem.
Being from rural Canada, I prefer the truck and snowmobile sizes of the 90s (but not their emissions, it's hard to breath when they drive by). All the options are so big now.
Also, you may be married to Medjed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medjed#/media/File:Medjed.svg
I am not married to an Egyptian deity! But never the less, she's amazing.
Since you're from Canada, what do you think about this one:
https://imgur.com/a/0pxeXVF
Same wife (maybe even same shoes?) / Egyptian deity.
> I am not married to an Egyptian deity!
I'm sure you know her better than me, but I'm not convinced it's not a Clark Kent-esque disguise. He takes his glasses off and he's obviously Superman, have you ever seen her in heavy Egyptian eyeliner? It might clear things up. Also, if she ever smites things by "shooting with her eyes", that's a pretty good tell.
As for that vehicle, it strikes awe and fear into me. Like it wants to eat me. A less threatening but equally whimsical vehicle is the Bombardier B12 from the 40s:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/1949-Bom...
I'm probably one of the few people in this thread who are actually truck shopping right now
The ranger is a great option for most people but one of my capabilities for the truck is to bring my bike to motorcycle track days. Usually I'd only take a single motorcycle, however track days are more fun with friends. to fit two motorcycles in the back of the Ranger, you need to adjust the angle of the handlebars awkwardly to fit both on the bed.[0]
that leaves only the bigger 1500 class trucks as options for me, and why I'm going with an F150
[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmegARwXN7Q
> to fit two motorcycles in the back of the Ranger, you need to adjust the angle of the handlebars awkwardly to fit both on the bed.
can't you position one bike facing forward and one facing back, so the handlebars don't collide? Either way, going with an absurdly big and dangerous car to avoid _awkwardly positioning_ some cargo is pretty American thing to do
Or, hear me out, just get a trailer which is what I do to tow my motorcycle with a sedan.
It's much easier to load motorcycles pointing forwards, just because you have to get them up a ramp into the bed. In the forward direction, you can use their engine to get up the hill.
It does checkout that people buy bro-dozers to avoid being slightly inconvenienced. Sucke for everyone else who unfortunately have to deal with their rearview mirrors perfectly line up with those headlight beams, unless they also buy a 'dozer.
I'm understating it, maybe. I don't think it would be practical to load a motorcycle backwards. If your requirement is "two bikes fit in the bed", they both need to be facing forward.
Look, my other car is a 1993 Mazda Miata. I know how much it sucks to be the small car in the sea of brodozers
I’m buying a used work truck. It’s a pretty far cry from the “brodozer” you imagine
Trailers do exist and there is no good reason to drive a commercial vehicle every day for simple trips. It is also less expensive to use a trailer.
Yes, I’m sure that guy made the comment so he could get advice from HN’s top minds about how he doesn’t actually know what his requirements are.
Clearly he made the comment to justify to strangers on the internet why he needs to buy a bigger truck. Truly the need to “adjust the angle of the handlebars awkwardly” is a great burden.
It is fine if one of your key requirements is to compensate for something ;)
Fellow motorbike trailer owner here.
This is a great solution. I have a small utility trailer I use to move my dirtbike (and lots of other stuff!) I tow it with a CR-V.
Since I don't need the hauling capacity every day, or even every week, it's great to leave the trailer at home and park in more places.
So, the normal size truck actually carries the things you want to transport, if you move their handlebars.
You’d pay an extra $7000 because… you don’t like to pack?
Isn't that generally the case, convenience? 20% to 50% extra in price to handle edge cases and unknown unknowns seems pretty cheap. That's like, $100/month to $200/month for a lot of extra flexibility in the US.
As someone unsympathetic to big vehicles in urban areas, and probably most suburban areas, the challenge as always is figuring out how to re-internalize externalized costs.
Or I guess reduce externalized costs. (Additional safety features? Increased road wear tax? Vehicle size class limitations on certain roads or lots?)
Buying secondhand, the F150 is actually cheaper. I neglected to mention this but there’s a lot more used F150s than Rangers on the market
Ah, I could see that point.
A lot of commenters saying you "need" a trailer (instead of an F150), but another option would be one bike in the bed and the second bike (if needed) on a hitch-mounted rack. A hitch rack takes less space to store when you're not using it than a full trailer. It would probably be more annoying to load and unload than just putting two bikes in the bed.
Anyway, if you want an F150, get it -- I don't really care.
Get a trailer. Way more flexibility that way and easier loading/unloading.
Don't know why you are down voted. People just assume that you have a place to store a trailer (and truck and motorcycle).
As to your choice of the Ford,as a rural late model (2018) F-150 owner, I'd encourage you to consider something else. A used Tundra V8 or one of the GMC/Chevy's. My mechanic is thumbs down on the Rams longer term.
I've had nothing but stupidity with this F-150 and all I do is personal plowing and a few loads of gravel or dirt each year. Granted, my steep dirt road can be very rough in mud season. But I've now spent about 8K in non-maintenance repairs.
I say this as a past owner of multiple mustangs and rangers - I'm done with Ford.
You usually don't buy a vehicle that doesn't fit on a regular parking space when you don't have place to store a trailer.
Funny how some people go stupid justification after stupid justification for what is just an impractical for anything vanity product.
I’ve done my research pretty thoroughly, I found a 2022 with the 3rd gen 3.5 eco boost, so the cam phasers are fixed. The only thing I have to look out for is the 10R80 10 speed. During the test drive the shifts were smooth and minimal gear hunting so hopefully it’s alright
I prefer small trailers for this but if you don't have the space for a trailer, F150 it is.
You can probably fit a normal sized car and trailer in the space of an F150. Stupid argument. Or, you know, rent a trailer. It's utterly idiotic to carry around the weight and size of the F150 when you don't need the loading space. I hope American gas prices adjust to reality and people start considering efficiency, cause this mentality is not sustainable and hurts everyone on the planet.
This is dumb, I've lost count of how many times I've hauled multiple motorcycles somewhere and you know how I do it? A trailer. It's easier and safer to load and unload, which is why almost everyone else does that as well.
If you want an 'image' purchase just own up to it. Your post hoc justifications don't really hold water.
> The Ford Ranger actually sells better in Europe than it does in the US. And the larger F series trucks sell more than an order of magnitude more.
Do you have any sources for this? I looked online and found a couple of charts, none of them support this claim. The Ford Ranger sales in Europe vs US are similar (who buys more varies by year) but the F series seems to be mostly bought in US
I think they meant it has much larger % share of pickup market in Europe vs US, not necessarily higher absolute number of sales (https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/feu/en/news/2025/02...)
Surely the hilux would be more popular than the ranger, but maybe Toyota just sends those to the developing world and Australia?
I'd love to buy a Hilux in the US but they aren't available. Drove them in South America for years and they're great vehicles.
The Hilux is the second best selling truck in Europe, as far as I can tell.
The similar (but not identical) US model is the Tacoma.
> The similar (but not identical) US model is the Tacoma.
This is a very common misconception.
At no point have the hilux and Tacoma shared any parts. Not engines, transmissions, frames, breaks, axles, wiring or anything interior.
The hilux is a small efficient turbo diesel with plenty of torque. The Tacoma is an anemic gas V6 that gets horrible mileages.
The Tacoma is significantly larger, and has a lower payload.
The hilux is an actual utility work vehicle, the Tacoma cosplays as one.
I’ve lived in Australia and Canada for 20 years each, driven many models of each many tens of thousands of kilometres.
The Tacoma is gussied up and not Spartan/repairable as the Hilux. I guess it’s more comparable to the current ranger than the hilux is, I wonder if ford makes a stripped down ranger for the developing world? Are there any Ranger Jeepneys? Maybe the T6? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Ranger_(T6)
Oddly enough, it says this was developed in Australia but might be the ranger selling in the USA/Europe now (the same one we are talking about). But the P703 is the model (a T6 variant) sold internationally now. It doesn’t surprise me that the current ranger was designed abroad. What I really don’t get is that ford doesn’t make cars in Australia anymore but they still design them there?
Thank you, that makes sense. But in that case it doesn't do much for the op's argument, which seems to be that Europe _prefers massive cars_. US still has much more of obscenely big cars, and Ford F having less % pickup market share shows that there's much bigger market for these cars, if anything
For the most recent year numbers were published it also had better raw numbers.
Where in Europe is that? Because in southern Europe pickups are very rare, but maybe they're more common in the north.
I have a Ford F-150 (14 gen) and the front is so huge I need to step on the front grill guard to reach anything inside the engine compartment. It is all around an unreasonably sized vehicle. My excuse is that (a) I do use it for home improvement stuff and for hauling stuff around and (b) I work from home so no commute. But for most people who do not work construction this is an insane daily driver.
> I do use it for home improvement stuff and for hauling stuff around
I don’t understand this argument, as they seem incredibly impractical for that. There is very little space for ‘stuff’, there is only the uncovered bed which is relatively small. The bed is also at an awkward height so very impractical to get stuff in or out. Since the bed is open, you always have to take all your ‘stuff’ out, you can’t leave tools in there or anything of value or it will get stolen. If you put a hard cover on. it leaves even less space. And since a large part of the vehicle has no roof you cannot have a roof rack.
You do not see these used by people in construction or other trades here in Europe. They use vans. An (extended) van has an ungodly amount of lockable storage space, easily accessible with side and back doors, with a floor at a reasonable height and if that isn’t enough you with a roof rack you can strap a lot to the roof as well.
I really don’t see how something like an F-150 is more practical for ‘hauling stuff’ than something like a Mercedes Sprinter.
I did look up some numbers (used the most capable configuration I could find for each of the vehicles):
Max bed length for an F-150: 247cm Max cargo space length for a Sprinter: 481cm
Bed/cargo width: F-150: 126cm, Sprinter 178cm Bed/cargo height: F-150: 54cm, Sprinter: 200cm
Max. payload capacity: F-150 : 1106kg, Sprinter 1477kg for the extra-long version, 2447kg for the long version.
Have you ever loaded drywall into a van? It is not fun. A truck bed is sized to load it perfectly. Strapping down lumber is also simpler. Lastly with nothing above the truck bed you can carry much taller things than in a van.
It isn’t the only way but yes a truck is very practical. That’s why they are used so much in the US. The difference between the US and the EU isn’t just arbitrary either. In the US gas (sorry, petrol) is a lot cheaper, roads are bigger, wider, longer, and sometimes you need to tow a large trailer. I tower a 3 ton excavator with my truck to build my home office.
I find it crazy that people would buy ton of stupid stuff from amazon, aliexpress or Shein but would not check the delivery option for stuff that is actually annoying to carry around yourself.
People who need a pickup bed for work usually buy those that come with the chassis of a commercial VAN which have a much bigger bed than you'd ever dream of on a Ford F series.
The rest are simply getting delivered or using trailers, either rented when used sporadically or bought. A trailer is usually at a more decent height and you don't have to carry the weight and have to manage a huge vehicle when you actually don't need all the space.
Loading drywall into my minivan is a lot easier than a truck. I can fit whole sheets and close the back gate so I don't need to strap them down and they are protected from the elements.
You can fit a full size dresser in the rear sat compartment in the crew cab models (the most popular model)
My wife walked past an F350 the other day with our toddler, and the hood was above her head.
My wife, that is. She’s 5’10”.
The even smaller Ford Maverick sells twice as many as the Ranger
I think the F-150 is the most popular. I know many people don’t care about other’s subjective experiences, but it’s always such a mindfuck to my EU mind when I see trucks of this size.
Like my brain expects the car to finish, but there’s more car. Then it happens again and again in a quick succession. It confuses me, I shake it off. I look at the car again. The bed is empty, there’s one person in it.
Then I think „what’s the point”? And then I remember we grew up in different environments and have different expectations about how things should look like. And I still don’t fully get it.
Almost any large car will fit almost anywhere in the US, so you might as well get the car that serves even your most marginal use cases. Fuel costs are much lower than Europe, and Americans are relatively richer anyway.
From my experience, these trucks make much more sense on a road in the US. European roads are fairly small so these trucks look _even bigger_, whereas in the US everything is massive so the cars fit. Still, having to look _up_ to see the windshield is crazy and I hope it won't be normalized in the EU
They make little sense on any road though.
The f-150 is a bit smaller than its big brothers the f-250 and f-350 dually!
When I see a Ford car in Geoguessr I always know I'm in USA. Just Americans but these terrible cars.
How casually people here are ignoring NOx and especially PM2.5. It has no DPF (Diesel Particulate Filter). You are emitting more than 200 times the amount of pm2.5 than a modern diesel. source:https://www.nanoparticles.ch/archive/2011_May_PR.pdf https://aaqr.org/articles/aaqr-20-02-oa-0081
Also this car has only has 60hp.
Mine had the HDi engine with DPF and 70hp.
Citroën were the first to make DPF standard.
Also, I would like to kindly remind you of the concept of "time". This was 25 year ago. The alternatives would have been worse. These days a C15 would be electric.
Obviously the OP is tounge-in-cheek, so keep it lightly.
But it does have merit: If you wish to measure your environmental footprint, you must look at the total lifetime of car, most importantly the manufacturing part. There is a difference between 900 KG of parts for a C15 vs 1,900 - 2400 KG for a Ford Ranger. These days most PM come from braking. Stopping 2000 KG will obviously cause more emissions from the brakes than stopping 1000 KG.
All in all, the point really is: The ratio between weight/size of the car itself and what is inside (people and/or server racks) has gotten completely out of hand. No, you do not need a 2,000 KG tank to move your 50-100 KG of flesh around. It's insanity, no matter if your care about the planet or not.
It's also unsafe. He's comparing it to a modern Ranger, not the Ranger of the same year as the C15 (which was much smaller and got better fuel economy), and he completely ignores the fact that the Citroen wasn't sold in North America.
He seems to imply there would be no appetite for one here but I disagree. In western Canada I see imported Kei trucks everywhere and these fill a similar niche!
Safety is relative.
Ranger crashes into C15: Ranger wins, C15 passengers dead. Ranger crashes into human: Ranger wins, human dead.
C15 crashes into C15: Tossup. C15 crashes into human: C15 wins, but human is less dead.
The whole concept of car upsizing all the time is about that: If you crash into another moving object, you want to be the winner.
Understood. Buy a tank.
> Also this car has only has 60hp.
And it weighs less than half of the other two (less than a ton), so less power is needed.
I agree though, the C15 is slower than the other two, but less than you’d perhaps think.
I own a Citroën 2CV. It has some of the same qualities: super robust, incredibly off-roady, simple mechanically, but I take my “regular car” (2017) for road trips > 100km…
I’ve done numerous long road trips in the 2CV though, before I got the other car. Some longer than 1000km.
I agree with the TFA, that many overestimate their needs, but older cars are also less luxurious - obviously!
The post is a hot take, slightly tongue-in-cheek, isn’t it? :)
That’s fair if you only account for usage emission. The compared tanks weight 2/3x as much (more ressources to extract, manufacture, transport…) and are made of intricate polymers, composites, wires & electronics… event the metal alloys are very technical (saving them to weight even more) and can’t be recycled into newer car. Old cars are mainly… steel.
The French seem to be very thoughtful people who solved multiple pesky problems permanently:
1) Guillotine for the super rich
2) Nuclear to power >70%
3) C15 for people, cows, craftsmen, mini house
4) TGV
5) french fries for the fastest carbohydrate delivery, handily beating rice
I wish they bring back the first 3 and do some shorts, market them to the world. Fries are doing fine.
I'm a big fan of the current range of French Renault electric cars.
The 5, 4, Megan and Scenic are just excellent.
I think the Scenic is probably the one I'd buy right now based on the range, 380 miles but the 5 and the 4 have so much character they're probably the first really iconic electric car designs IMHO.
This! Especially 5!
Right now french people are obsessed with ecology and egalitarianism. Those who don't are not well seen in society, or left the country already.
So the best thing I'd see them excelling at in this century, if they can drive their ideology in the right direction, would be producing low-tech solutions solving 90% of problems with 20% of the costs, with open-source like tools / materials / methods everyone can replicate easily. A bit like this article about this old car.
> Right now french people are obsessed with ecology and egalitarianism.
Do you have anything to read up on that? This got me a little excited, but I also doubt it due to the rise of right wing populism everywhere else. Man, if France actually got the rare attitude to get shit done in these times, I may move there and help.
It's just my general sentiment when I see my french peers. It'd be interesting to try to turn this into data for sure, but "right wing" in France has a different meaning / reality than in others countries, not sure the raw stats would explain this difference.
If you like those kind of ideas you should def move in France and start building with others there little communist enclaves. Just be ready that in France we do think a lot before deciding to act, we don't have the same "get shit done" attitude like in the anglosphere world
French fries is not a french invention AFAIK but belgian!
That’s not true.
https://www.rtbf.be/article/cuisine-la-frite-vient-elle-de-f...
https://www.news.uliege.be/cms/c_10630394/fr/les-grands-myth...
Also the French have the great Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, early and famous potato proponent. Do they even want credit for such a basic dish?
There is considerable argument over it.
Yup, French fries are Belgian. Also - it's important to cook them twice, otherwise it's just McDonalds and not real French fries.
Tbf McDonalds is also double fried, just the first time happens before they are flash frozen and sent to the restaurant.
Okay, I didn't want to elaborate the entire recipe :)... was just a way of making a small joke by making it sound like the Champagne wine region.
Sysco does or used to sell a french fry that was indistinguishable from McDonald's when cooked similarly. They had a catalog that visualized lined up individual representative french fries.
Met ossenwit.
That's how my grandfather made them using peanut oil. Blanch and then fry, with a thermometer in the oil.
> Guillotine for the super rich
Can we not glorify mass executions on HN please? Bluesky is available if that's your thing.
The guillotine remark resonates in today reality because people feel this scam. Tone-policing the symptom while ignoring the cause is naive.
The C15 thread shows exactly why: It beats modern trucks in pure utility. Today we are paying more for less value.
It is exactly the wealth extraction Ray Dalio describes in Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order (Stage 5 of the debt cycle), resulting in internal conflict.
When did hacker news become so right wing that saying the French revolution was a good societal movement is seen as "glorifying mass executions"? lmao
You… might want to read more about what happened during the French Revolution, after they killed all the royalty.
Liberty Leading the People would probably be flagged as highly NSFW too.
I'm not sure you have to be terribly right wing to say that a "societal movement" which includes something called "The Reign of Terror", in which tens of thousands of people were executed, was a bad thing. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution#Reign_of_Ter...)
No. 5) is Belgian.
I believe both nation would be offended about the confusion of origins.
Americans simply thought they are in France in WWII when they ate it.
; )
Here are some Belgian articles about the French origin :
https://www.rtbf.be/article/cuisine-la-frite-vient-elle-de-f...
https://www.news.uliege.be/cms/c_10630394/fr/les-grands-myth...
> Guillotine for the super rich
You know modern France has the exact same problem of billionaire lobbying and media consolidation that the US has right?
Arnault (LVMH) [0], Trappier (Dassault) [1], Niel (Illiad) [2], Lagardère (Lagardère SA) [3], Bolloré (Bolloré Group) [4] and a couple others have an inordinate amount of control over French politics. It's also why whenever a country like China, the US, India, or others wants to hold the EU by the balls, they end up tariffing Congac, because Arnault's LVMH has a near monopoly on Congac production in France, so he almost always pressures Macron into acquiesing because otherwise he would threaten to back the RN.
Both France and the US are similarly ranked flawed democracies [5] with similar dysfunctions.
Also, immediately following the revolution, the guillotiners ended up doing it for the rich [6], as the French Revolution ended up leading to the re-establishment of authoritarian rule with le Directoire, Napoleon, Napoleon III, and others. The only thing you learn from the French Revolution is the same thing you learn from Tahrir Square - the house always wins, which in political science is modeled via Selectorate Theory [7] and Veto Players [8].
Sadly, it's the same reason why despite mass protest after mass protest, the Iranian regime hasn't fallen - the primary political and economic veto players in Iran (Army, IRGC, Basij, Police, Clergy, Business leadership, SoE leadership, Bonyad leadership) haven't defected because they have more to lose than gain if a revolution succeeded. The moment a handful of these interests think they can expand their presence under a new regime is when you would see Khamenei fall, but the leadership would end up being the same ba***rds anyhow, just like how the Islamic Republic ended up co-opting and rehabilitating army officers and business leadership from the Shah's regime during the Iran-Iraq War and after the cultural revolution.
[0] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2023/08/07/how-be...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/frances-d...
[2] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2022/07/10/u...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/article/world/macron-and-the-moguls-...
[4] - https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/culture-et-idees/dossier/la...
[5] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu
[6] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/650023
[7] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/4092374
[8] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rvv7
The guillotine wasn't for the super rich, but for the privileged by birth. The equivalent would be to guillotine the nepo babies (and the Ivy League administrators who rubber stamp their admission).
Or fix inheritance. And by fix I mean tax as hell.
Most guillotined were commoners [0] - not the wealthy nor the intelligentsia.
> Or fix inheritance. And by fix I mean tax as hell
If France can't fix it [1] after politically powerful billionaires stymied it [2], neither can the US
[0] - https://theconversation.com/the-french-revolution-executed-r...
[1] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/10/31/french-l...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/world/frances-richest-man-lvmhs-arna...
The statistics cited in the article you cite talks about the Nobility/Clergy/Other classification. There is no wealth-related statistic. It's entirely possible that a good fraction of the "Others" category were wealthy bourgeois.
Even in the height of the revolution, the nobility largely retained it's control [0]. And at the end of the day, le Directorate, the Napoleon regime, the Louis Phillips regime, and the Napoleon III regime continued to maintain the power of the bourgeois.
If the bourgeois had been completely purged in the French Revolution, then the crackdown of the 1848 Revolution (and the subsequent exodus of French republicans and socialists), 18 Bumaire, the Bourbon Restoration, and other successful power grabs by the bourgeois following the French Revolution wouldn't have happened.
Heck, much of the Council of 500 were themselves either mid-level aristocrats or the children of ancien regime enforcers as was seen with Talleyrand, Barras, Duke of Parma, Lebrun, and the Bonaparte family, along with members of the Directorate like Carnot, Barras, and Merlin.
There's a reason Marx termed the French Revolution as a "bourgeois revolution", why Max Scheler classes the French Revolution as a revolution driven by ressentiment (the Nietzchean concept that underlies elite overproduction), and how Bourdieu came to his thesis on "cultural capital" (which can also help explain the contemporary rise of left- and right-leaning populism).
In essence, who is more elite - an L6 at Google earning $600K TC who graduated from UC Irvine and whose parents were union employees, a Senior Editor at the NYT earning $130K TC who graduated from Yale and whose parents were lawyers, or a Congressional Chief of Staff who graduated from UChicago and whose parents immigrated from Taiwan on an H1B to work at Intel?
The answer is they are all members of the elite. It was the exact same with the leadership of the French Revolution, and the subsequent regimes.
It's the same reason why Mao's dad was a rural landlord, why Lenin's dad was a State Councillor, why Ho Chi Minh's father was a Confucian scholar, why Pol Pot's father was a rural landlord with ties to nobility, and Che Guevara's father an Argentine engineer who immigrated from Ireland.
[0] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/650023
You're being beside the point. All I'm saying is: don't conflate "nobility" and "bourgeois" in your statistics and analysis. In the context of the French revolution, they're not the same.
Of course the bourgeois weren't purged in the revolution. It's them who took power through that revolution.
> The answer is they are all members of the elite. It was the exact same with the leadership of the French Revolution, and the subsequent regimes.
no. Bourgeois, prior to the revolution, were not part of the elite. It's difficult to imagine, but there was a time where there wasn't such a direct correlation as today between wealth and power.
> don't conflate "nobility" and "bourgeois" in your statistics and analysis
Yet it was mid-level aristocrats that were overrepresented in the Directorate and the Council of 500.
> no. Bourgeois, prior to the revolution, were not part of the elite. It's difficult to imagine, but there was a time where there wasn't such a direct correlation as today between wealth and power
Yes. I know, but the initial conversation is based on correcting the a revisionist meme that the French Revolution was a quasi-communist revolution, when in reality it was just a form of inter-elite fratricide - especially between mid-level aristocrats and the church and a subset of royalists.
All the revolution did was cleave the bourgeois from the third estate, and merge them along with the second and first estates.
> meme that the French Revolution was a quasi-communist revolution
It's not a meme. There's clearly a collectivist movement within the revolution, it's just that this force failed to take power. The "révolution de Février", in 1848 was precisely this: Paris going full collectivist, abolishing property and all, then small land owner from the provinces freaking out and all come to Paris to whoop them.
> There's clearly a collectivist movement within the revolution, it's just that this force failed to take power
And there was a much more powerful core of leaders who were the children of the various types of elites within the ancien regime.
Almost the entire history of France the century after the revolution was authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian rule with the collaboration of intellectual, economic, and religious elites.
And this is why Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, and other flavors of Communists take a dim view of the French Revolution.
If a revolution between the cultural elite and the capital elite just led to the pre-eminence of the capital elite and their co-opting of the cultural elite, that means the revolution basically had no positive impact for the overwhelming majority of the French subaltern of the 19th century.
And don't get me or my extended family started about French colonialism.
It's weird, I feel like we're arguing over saying the same thing. Sure, I agree, but please don't say it's a meme.
Sure, it didn't take power, sure, the bourgeois were stronger, but they still managed to overthrow the forces of Louis-Phillipe. Internet wasn't invented yet, memes couldn't depose kings.
> It's weird, I feel like we're arguing over saying the same thing
Yea, I think from the looks of it there's a bit of mutual confusion over terminology being used, but we are largely aligned
> Internet wasn't invented yet, memes couldn't depose kings
I'm using the Rene Girard definition of a "meme" before it got co-opted into internet speak.
I know it's a joke, but if you clip a curb or even a slightly chunky branch at 15mph in one of these EVERYONE DIES (...only partially joking)
In a crash it'll fold up like the tin can it is, even against a car of a similar vintage and size (no comment on the cows). Up against even a modern supermini and you're literal mince meat, let alone a modern SUV. At least you won't suffer long.
So if you are off roading or on a snowy road, hopefully you won't slip into a tree or roll over. Modern cars - even "small" ones -are heavier partly because they are substantially safer. A crash that would have had to have you cut out of the wreckage by the fire brigade (potentially losing a limb or two in the process) is now the sort of thing you can walk away from. Yes even in "small" modern cars (you do not need a SUV for safety).
It's night and day really - just go look at the archive on EuroNCAP.. In the crash tests that left 90s and early 2000s cars as unrecognisable mounds of broken and twisted metal (e.g. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9a8PTeFDaYU which was a car that was probably 10 years more advanced than the c15 in terms of safety...) now barely even break the windscreen of modern super-mini cars (e.g. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NaWVepTJTGw&t=1s&pp=2AEBkAIB). Amazing.
The Citroen Saxo was notably terrible. It was remarked upon even at the time, especially due to the target market of its sportier versions: foolish young men. Here's another hatchback from 2000, faring noticeably better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBXNgKwWFs - not to say for a moment that you wouldn't still want a 2025 car.
I used to drive through France in the C15 days and you'd see a lot of crashes compared to England, a lot because of the road layouts. Straight in France so people went fast through villages and the like. In England everything's twisty.
I had a Renault Kangoo and was similarly militant about its supremacy. It was a cheap, reliable thing and people carrier. It could fit five people, or two people, two bicycles and plenty of camping gear. It was cheap and ugly enough to shrug about cosmetic damage, so I never worried about kicking the doors shut or sitting on the roof. It was also tiny and easy to drive and park. It was mechanically simple and reliable.
It broke down recently at 18 years of age and I can't justify maintaining a car in Berlin, but I loved that car to bits.
Genuine question: what about the NOx?
I remember in Belgium when the laws pushed for lower CO2, and you got an influx of all these diesel engines, as you couldn't get that low with gasoline engines (that had some power).
But a few years later people came to the realization that CO2 is the least bad of the global warming gasses, and those diesel engines emitted a lot of NOx.
Every year there was a distance that you'd have to drive before diesel made sense (as you get more miles out of a gallon, and it was cheaper per gallon).
That number kept on creeping up due to new diesel taxes, and the fact that diesel is no longer cheaper per unit than gas.
Don't forget pm2.5 ! Especially since this doesn't have an DPF(diesel particulate filter).
Most people who live in rural Britain today are still getting around in hatchbacks or estates (station wagons, to use the American term). The enormous SUVs are almost entirely driven by people who've used their money to buy into the countryside aesthetic.
That’s why those big SUV are nicknamed “Chelsea tractors”
He's mixing US/UK vs France and 1985 vs 2025.
Today, Citroen's equivalent offering is the Berlingo. Starts at 26k, not as much of a tank as the other cars but still way more massive than the C15.
There's the Citroen Nemo. It's a more compact version and I believe closer in size to the older panel vans. The new Berlingos are wider and taller than they used to be.
Today's C15 is called... the Dacia... Dokker?
Dacia takes "obsolete" Renault technologies and sells them for dirt cheap.
Good news everyone, the Dacia Sandero might have been a laugh 20 years ago, but today Dacia are doing really well.
The berlingo, especially up to 2014, are tankier, ther're known with the name B9 (vin starts with that) diesel 1.6 hdi has proven resilience)
The C15 was produced up until 2006.
Good luck fitting a full palette in a berlingo though
https://images.caradisiac.com/images/0/9/8/4/190984/S0-route...
My favorite C15 story is with my childhood friend who got it as a hand-me-down first car, we used to put plastic lawn chairs in the back and head to the beach...
The gas meter was broken, so my friend had to guesstimate when he needed a refill.
At one point it was stolen, but then found a week later on the side of the highway,out of gas..
missed a chance to use "gastimate"
First off, I agree with the point made, though I think a more reasonable comparison would be something like a subaru. The people I know who have to deal with excessive snow or mud on country roads commonly opt for that. Of course there’s the “men” who compensate for their lack of buldge with 350s, dualies, etc. If you don’t work a farm, those whips are dummm.
That was a good perspective though- I grew up hearing Citroen makes garbage.
Side note- The vast majority of pollution is from industry. By a lot. That is where the finger needs to be pointing. Pointing the finger at SUV drivers distracts from the real issue and keeps us blaming each other.
Maybe that's why Subarus are stereotyped as a lesbian car in the US. Instead of grandstanding, they "get the job done" (as the Chappell Roan song goes).
Unless you’re in the Pacific Northwest, in which case, they are issued to every new resident (myself included). Traded in my Ford Explorer for a Subaru Outback and could not be happier.
AWD has regulatory advantage in Washington state (you're allowed to go over the mountain passes without snow chains in most conditions, even though a RWD or FWD vehicle with snow tires would be just fine in the same conditions), and Subarus are all AWD. I think that's part of it.
When I bought a new car last year, I made sure to get AWD -- not because I have any specific need for AWD performance, but because of this stupid special treatment in Washington law.
FWIW I bought a couple pairs of traction control cables for the Outback, just in case. I don’t know that I’ll ever need them, but better to have them and not need them than need them and not have them.
I’ve used them on 2WD vehicles in the past and they’re way easier to install than old-school chains, since they’re self-tensioning. Super Z cables, if anyone is interested.
I have the same style of chain :-). Plan A is 3PMSF-rated tires, though.
> I think a more reasonable comparison would be something like a subaru
Yeah, I get this is tongue-in-cheek but if you're going to try to convince Americans of this idea, you need to use units we understand, and a car we've heard of.
>prove that men who buy SUVs and Pick-Ups are, with very few exceptions, compensating for something ;)
What does that mean? The thread just repeating this compensating thing but not sure what does it try to say really.
Also most women I know drive SUVs or family vans not compact cars. Are they compensating for something?
I don't know if it is some much 'compensating' as it is a "look at my toy" showing off type of thing which isn't really directed at women. When I drive around metro areas it is pretty clear that the large majority of trucks are "house" trucks - they are never used for truck things. They are washed, waxed with nice shiny black tires.
Don't get me wrong - if you got the dough, by all means drive what you want. But most truck owners could get by with something else just as well.
I think he writes 'compensate' (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/compensate, meaning no. 3) as a translation of 'compenser' (https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/compenser). There's a not-so-funny cliché: men with a small you-know-what supposedly tend to choose larger cars to make up for the difference in size.
> Also most women I know drive SUVs or family vans not compact cars. Are they compensating for something?
Freud: Duh?!
In Italy we had similar memes for the (old) Fiat Panda 4x4
the Amazon's Grand Tour episode which compared the Jeep Wrangler, a Chevrolet Silverado, and Panda 4x4 as jungle cars was highly satisfying.
Best car on snow ever. Like next one does not come even close.
Top gear driving to the magnetic north pole in Hiluxes was impressive. I figure those would compete. They were a bit non standard. (vid https://youtu.be/q0hoPNmY4oU)
Indeed, light and 4x4 is the best combo. I think the Citroen 2CV was pretty impressive as well and they did have that dual engine version (though it was never sold to the public).
There's practically a whole meme genre for the first-gen Renault Twingo.
Brits are no strangers to the Citroen C15 as the article seems to imply. We liked them.
It was the basis of a successful line of British built micro-campers from Romahome.
https://www.practicalmotorhome.com/advice/used-romahome-on-c...
I remember looking at one as a surf-van back in the day.
Sorry for going counter to the narrative, but I had a friend who had an early 2000s Citroen which was made around the time when French cars had the worst reputation - and I tell you, by the stories he told, they deserved it.
There was no part on this which didn't get replaced during the scant few years he owned it, and it left him stranded like half a dozen times.
He contemplated setting it on fire rather than selling it, not wanting the next lucky owner to go through the same stuff he did.
> made around the time when French cars had the worst reputation
A reputation well earned IMO…
> There was no part on this which didn't get replaced during the scant few years he owned it, and it left him stranded like half a dozen times
French cars have a philosophy of more maintenance than German cars. On the other hand, Frenchy spare parts are often cheaper and easier to replace.
E.g. a timing belt replacement on PSA HDI takes just a few hours and costs €2-300. On a VAG TDI, the same procedure is almost a full day at a (competent) workshop and costs ~5-10x as much.
Horses for courses I think.
My daily driver is a 10yo VAG, for the record.
Designed in the era of Use-maxing vs Status-maxing. I think modern cars are taking a lot of car experience out and putting in the phone experience in. My Maruti Suzuki 800 was such a fun car to drive. Easy to repair. Decently efficient. Repair manual was understandable.
The new electrics are great. But they are less of a car and more of a transportation technology.
It’s incredibly grating to get into my mom’s car and see a FYP on her dashboard with podcast recs. It makes me feel like I woke up on the moon. It just makes no sense and it’s clearly harder (for her, and in general) to use than an old-school car radio.
It doesn’t help (but still besides the point) that they typically give the impression of being a stripped back Moto G4 a couple years out of updates.
fourgonnette! Thanks to this post now i know where the spanish version of the word comes from! Furgoneta!
A 1980s Toyota Hilux would give it a run for its money
https://youtu.be/Yl1FNX08HFc
It doesn’t look like it would fit three cows.
Toyota Hilux are in their own category. They are literally combat proven.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/93/42/42/93424282cbcafce0ad81...
That's hilarious. The German version (VW Caddy) is similar. Citroen at some point had a van version of the 2CV and the Diane, this is the continuation of that tradition.
Literally: the C15 was based on the Visa (clearly, when you look at it!), and was the first platform-shared vehicle between Citroen and Peugeot where it was basically a Peugeot warmed over with some additional eccentricity. Not bad, overall though.
Exactly. And the Visa was an interesting little car all by itself.
I love small cars, in fact I owned a Fiat 500 for a number of years and a number of small VWs. With that said, it really grinds my gears (Pun intended) when Europeans want to lecture Americans about large cars.
Our roads are bigger, gas is dirt cheap, parking is plentiful and spacious outside dense metros, and the RAM 1500 I own is 100x more useful no mater how you want to try and spin the facts. I can tow a large trailer with my Jeep on it, a large RV, boats, etc. It is highly capable off roading on technical terrain here in Utah. It’s also insanely comfortable and luxurious on road trips and has enough room to lay on the rear bench seat as if it were a bed. I truly use all of the capabilities in a niche that almost no other vehicle besides a standard size truck occupies.
It's a global pandemic of oversized cars. People love SUVs because it makes them feel powerful and successful. Explanations why they need them are generally along the lines of "because we have kids" (but SUVs don't actually have that much space), or "because heavier means safer" (well yes, at the cost of others).
> But what if you're an environmentally conscious mother who needs to drive the 5 minute walk to your kids' school? Surely, a modern car must be less polluting?
> CO2 emissions/km:
No, you have already compared fuel consumption. This is equivalent.
You know all those dark patterns in software? What if we applied the same concepts to gigantic mechanical devices, taking advantage of human psychological faults, and generate a profit margin on those? Sure seems what seems to have happened with motor vehicles
This thread is so sad. A population in decline.
The ranger has a tow rating of 7500 lb.
The gross vehicle weight (ie the max vehicle weight with the heifers, obviously stuffies) of the C15 is 1500 kg (hence the name) or 3300 lb.
Uhaul rents a car tow trailer rated for 5000 lb that weighs 2200 lb [1].
The Ranger, then, can tow the C-15 + the heifers = 5500 lb and have 2000 lb left over to put two real heifers, and do this legally at 70mph.
Citroen makes great vehicles though. Amazing off roaders.
[1] https://www.uhaul.com/Trailers/Auto-Transport-Rental/AT/
My family hired https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izh_2715 in eastern Europe to move furniture few times. It was usually referred as "Pirojok", which can be translated as stuffed bun.
Absolutely true. It's even the subject of many memes! search for "c15 memes".
I love the Chad: "I love you!" c15: (oil and engine lights on) "Please let me die"
These made my day and I barely understand Spanish
In Poland it was Polonez Caro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Polonez
To be fair to the SUV they weren't really a thing in France before 2 decades after the C15. To be fair to the C15 the main buyers of SUV at the beginning were urban and suburban moms that wanted to show they had money and we're feeling better in big and tall cars
My government did everything to not allow people use old cars. Great monuments like Citroen C15 are not allowed in the whole city of Krakow.
My dad got rid of his C15 after driving 1 million kilometers with it (rural France) The engine was fine surprisingly, the body was rusted to the bone though
That's fairly typical. I had a diesel from that era and it ended up in a boat when it already had 750K on it... it is still going as far as I know.
I’ve been a passenger in the front and the back of a C15 and they are pure utility vehicule. You get heating in winter and ventilation in summer. The windows are manual, front seat are okay, and I don’t know if they have updated models with aircon before stopping the production.
Can't imagine producing and selling this under the current regulations (and not just the crash-worthiness). I with they and C15 move towards each other...
Asking seriously, what is holding us from creating these masterpieces again?
> I often hear Americans & rich brits justify buying oversized, polluting vehicles by claiming they need them because they live in the "countryside".
> I call bullshit, Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15
But they aren’t even for sale in the US!
The Ranger is now a midsize truck. A better comparison is the hybrid Maverick.
Unrelated to the article: What I find frustrating about mastodon is how I click a link and then cannot favorite a post as there's no unified login between federated servers.
I have the Ford Ranger with the 2 litre biturbo diesel engine in Australia. It is so good it's hard to conceive that a better vehicle could be possible.
If that's the one with the wet timing belt, then I can think of one way to make it better!
It's funny (and depressing) because it's actually true despite the hyperbole.
Best car ever! I have seen then running in Spain forever and still work as the first day. Easiest car to repair ever and never breaks!
Easiest car to repair ever and never breaks!
If it never breaks how do people know it's easy to repair?
Well, it never breaks as in: it will always get you to where you need to go because the engine just keeps running. Broken driveshaft? Stick a vice grip on it and keep rolling... And they're easy to repair because there isn't a lot in them to begin with, so you have a lot of room to work. Running gear wears and needs fixing but the core is nigh on indestructible. Same with the VW diesels from that era, the 1.9 mechanical.
This is basically the equivalent to the FIAT Panda 4x4 in small villages in Italy
what's a modern equivalent? (and maybe a 4 seater)
Lovely. Of only they could make some in todays's world of new cars....
Typical technically correct content.
If you are person that doesn’t give a fuck about keeping up with Jones’s you just buy whatever does the job.
I could drive much better car but I don’t have to impress my neighbors.
Still with non-impressive car I get pushed around on the road by guys in big and impressive cars. But also I drive on defense anyway so I get them to go far away from me by letting them pass.
I am quite fit though not super big or anything and car I drive is attributable to old geezers or ladies. Once guy jumped out of the car to shout at me he took his tone two notches down quickly.
So technically you might be right but still there is whole human experience to deal with.
I think you've hit the nail on the head, but not in the same way as what I was thinking. It's not about impressiveness - as in, a show of wealth or status. It's all about size. This is a relatively small car, but as far as I can tell, back in the day all of them were considerably smaller, even the ones that were pricey and designed to look cool or expensive. Nowadays, the most obnoxious and dangerous car drivers have united with the most hands-off governments and manufacturers willing to pander to them exclusively to create an arms race of building the biggest megatank that can fit within a lane and only occupy six parking spots at once.
I'm sold. Where can I buy one!
This is pretty tiresome, however the article is mostly correct. If I could get one of these and own it and drive it in the US, I would. I certainly don't want an over-expensive, over-weight, over-featured monstrosity, but that's all anyone sells in the US.
Off topic: That comma in the title really grates on me. It's supposed to be "dramatic pause" or something, but it can also be read as "pause while I check my notes to remember what the name of this thing actually is".
Hat tip to Joel Garreau, from whom I stole this reading of that kind of comma.
It is wrong - it should be a colon “:” instead of a comma.
I always had BMWs, like I only ever bought reasonably high-end BMWs, but when we bought our place in Ireland, I needed a vehicle on Swiss plates and insurance (for legal reasons) to use there when car rental in Ireland was running crazy money. I had a look on the Swiss classifieds sites for anything "rechtslenker" (right-hand drive) and found two Rolls Royces, a clapped out MG, and about 15 yellow ex-Swiss Post Renault Kangoo 2-seat car-based cargo vans. (I guess they wanted their mailmen to be able to step out onto the curb, hence RHD in a LHD country?) I bought the van. Weird config: right hand drive, but configured for right-hand traffic, meaning I had to replace the headlights and fog light and get it re-aligned to fit in. Automatic transmission, 1.6L petrol engine, no airbag, no wheel lock, no AC, knobs and switches, glass all around like the MPV version, but a cargo floor. It's insanely simple, the parts are practically free from the perspective of a BMW fanatic, and it's actually a hoot to drive. When we moved, I imported it with our stuff, and it's our only car now. Hauls firewood like you wouldn't believe, and tows a large 2.5m x 1.25m x 1.2m single-axle box trailer without complaints, meaning I can (and have done) shift all the sheets of plywood and drywall I need without buying a pickup. We live way out in the countryside, where the roads have grass up the middle and potholes down both sides, but the Kangoo's ground clearance is enough (especially when empty) that it's never been an issue. I hardly miss the BMW. A little French van is all you need.
My parents had 3 kids and a 2CV as our single family car for a while. We managed just fine, something that is supposedly "impossible" these days.
The Peugeot XUD engine that powers the Citroën C15 (and a whole bunch of other European cars of similar vintage) is what most of the small Ford diesels were based on, right until they got into the "wet belt" nonsense.
I have "repaired" one that was used to power a small fishing boat (it came out of a Xantia, and the hydraulic pump was used to operate the shooting gear). The boat sank and the engine compartment was flooded with sea water for about a week. It started up and ran quite happily after draining what was approximately a 50/50 mix of sea water and sludgy engine oil and putting fresh in, then removing the injectors and cranking it to blow the water out of the cylinders.
It never quite ran right after that and was hard to start, and five or six years later the boat's owner replaced it with another Xantia engine, this time the turbocharged version.
I get the same feelings when i see a suv driven by a single person, and i think of the good old fiat panda…
> CAPACITY: C15: 2.6m³ Ranger: 1.8m³ Discovery: 0.8m³
I mean this is excluding beds. C15 doesn't have one.
Modern cars have crumple zones.
That's the entire difference.
This person is a living caricature. If Ford wanted to sell more F350s, their best advertisers could do no better than this (man's?) mastodon.
Similar to Nissan / Datsun 620, 720, and D21 trucks in the US. They ran forever, especially for folks who were mechanics and kept a stash of parts.
This song is not about C15, but is quite appropriate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzDg-1lEaD8
Notice that one of the pictures isn't actually a C15, but a Renault Express, which is equally indestructible though slightly smaller inside.
Now I want one….
"This Mastodon server is a friendly and respectful discussion space for people working in areas related to EU policy."
"The Ford Ranger (2020). One of the most popular pickups in the US.
A key selling point is that the cabin is so high you can run over toddlers without even noticing."
Lovely people as always. Would you like to live neighbours with this person, or share communal facilities with him?
> Would you like to live neighbours with this person, or share communal facilities with him?
Sure why not? Because they made that comment? It’s not that they buy trucks because they are much taller than a short person but they still are. I’d rather not live next to the person with the dangerous truck.
If you can read people, you know a person like this is going to be constantly invading your privacy, inventing conflicts and complaining. Probably trying to make you join in his vendetta against some neighbour, and if you decline he will make a vendetta behind your back against you.
These kind of people are so easy to spot once you have some experience.
Are you saying that the author engaging in online activism and presenting very common criticisms of SUVs in a sarcastic way somehow implies they're bad neighbors?
> Would you like to live neighbours with this person
Sure, because he has a sense of humor.
Their cynicism is cope. They are witnessing their own decline every single day. It's honestly so sad. On the other side of the globe there is Tesla [1]. Even if you don't like the idea of cars, this is the pinnacle of a utilitarian product. Also one of the most popular vehicles (globally) as opposed to the (incorrect) example used in the thread.
Modern cars are great for the most parts. More comfortable, more safe, more autonomous, bigger, better and faster. Of course not all cars are created equal.
Cars are a resilient mode of transport. Even if road maintenance stops for 30 years due to some kind of crisis, a society with cars will be way more functional than one that was solely reliant on a centralized transportation system. And this is not an unrealistic scenario, people are just used to the last 80 years of peace due to rapid economic growth and globalization.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1ve_ttBEPw
I'd rather live next to that guy than a guy with a big-ass truck, since I walk around my neighbourhood quite a lot.
the neighbour with a big-ass truck will help you shovel your drive-way, and invite you to a barbecue. This guy will leave an angry note on your door because you forgot your porch light on, or infringed on his laundry time.
Just to be clear: I was a kid at that time and although the Citroen 2CV was a cool looking car the C15 was just as fugly back then as it is today. A fucking fuglier than fugly piece of ugly shit that was, already back then, making the world uglier for everybody.
I don't dispute that it was useful and reliable: I remember the milkman and plumbers and electricians having these. Note that some had a 2CV and would just cut off the roof (don't tell me it wasn't a thing: I've got pictures of me as a kid in a 2CV whose roof was cut).
Only the french have the "taste" to create such uglyness as the C15. It's hard to understand how a country can both produce the Concorde and the C15.
Even the russian and their Lada brand never managed to create something as fugly as the 4L or the C15.
Now you'll excuse me but I've got to take a look at what nature produces:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird-of-paradise
Because that C15 brings back memories from a traumatizing time where uglyness was ruling the world.
P.S: I owned a Citroen VISA: it's hard to tell if it was only the 2nd ugliest Citroen ever after the C15 (indisputably the fugliest of them all) because Citroen produced soooo many turds.
>"I call bullshit ..."
Does anyone give a fuck? People can and do have plenty of reasons not to stick to a single model of car
When we lived in a more rural area, and I drove my kids to school each morning (in a normal-sized sedan), I taught them to notice the contents of the SUVs they saw. The common pattern, like 90% of the time in the morning, was a lady driver in a spotless SUV with a kid in the very back row of seats.
And the demographics made sense: you’d expect to see more moms dropping off kids, at least in redder parts of the country, and the back row is supposed safest (as long as you only plan on getting into head-on collisions). Still, the common theme of a ridiculous vehicle with exactly 2 occupants sitting in the farthest possible positions from each other came to be funny to us.
Those ludicrous pavement princess pieces of junk are status symbols of conspicuous consumption, and that’s it.
Now, a pickup with tool racks or lumber in the back, or covered with drywall dust, or bearing a ranch sticker? Fine. Those make perfect sense. Anything short of that is just bragging about how much you love donating to Exxon, like an NRA sticker but dumber.
Won't impress friends/chicks as an F150 or a Land Rover Discovery /s
On a more serious note real (which is a minority) owners of bigger trucks need some serious torque for hauling.
I must have missed a memo, because every situation in which I've ever wanted to "impress a chick" has taken place indoors, or at least far from roads.
And yet lots of guys seem to spend an extra $30k or more on their vehicle for no additional utility beyond that. Literally who is impressed?
Then again, these are probably dudes who get their dating advice from the Tate brothers. /shrug
Closeted gays trying to impress other dudes, idk?
It’s like those huge bodybuilders: you’re picturing being surrounded by chicks, while realistically it’s other buff dudes miring your physique.
Everyone is always hauling. Lol.
All non-Americans know Americans sleep 8 hrs a day, work 8 hrs a day, and haul 8 hrs a day.
[flagged]
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. It's the last thing we need here. (Well, tied for last.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: your account has unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines quite a bit and repeatedly crossing into personal attack:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46526454
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46493104
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46422571
Can you please stop doing that? It destroys what HN is for so we end up banning such accounts.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Where did you see angriness in this thread?
[flagged]
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how provocative another comment is or you feel it is. It only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[deleted]
Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I do get heat for my truck. I call it the truckasourus, it does take up a lot of room, I pulled out the rear seat and installed a three level shelf that fills the whole back of the cab, tools, grocieries, more tools, laundry, more food, and room on the top shelf to sleep if nessesary, then a 8 foot box, that will get replaced with a 9' flat deck, and front, middle and rear racks so I can move 24'steel, 4x8 sheets, welding gas, and whatever else, when I am not moving round bales or fire wood, other large heavy clumsy stuff. funny thing is that I have a car just for more civilised things, that costs me almost as much to sit there, as my truck costs to drive. I flashed the eprom in the truck so it gets significantly better fuel milage, and has forgotten how to go into limp mode, though the messages in the dash are dire. I could build a smaller rig, but it would fail in 1/3 of the tasks required, so it is impossible to come out ahead with running two, or hireing moving services. So the article, while funny, is narrow and snippy. Sometimes I consider a bumper sticker that would say, "Thanks for driving a Prius, I need the fuel!"
What a hideous hunk of sheet metal
the milquetoast attempts at casting poorly-targeted stones at the beginning of this article really bring it down. Plenty of rural brits share exactly the same mentality, this just stinks of lack of cultural experience.
it's a great vehicle, and I applaud the french approach to cars.
Truly rural Brits - Northumbria, the Devon uplands, Yorkshire Moors, the remoter parts of Scotland & Wales, sure.
Thing with England is that, being a small, flat and largely well-connected country, there's lots of places that identify strongly as rural but are, economically and culturally, more like outer-suburbia in a US context. That's where you'll find the Defender and F-150 crowd.
Brits are usually pretty good at taking the piss…
He forgets the part where because of emissions requirements the C15 can't be driven in that scourge the people the author defends call "low emissions zones".
Good so the car won't be killing people due to high noxious emissions.
Stick a petrol version of the engine in (Peugeot XU instead of XUD) and convert it to run on propane. There you go, now the exhaust is just water and carbon dioxide, and you don't die from breathing it in. No CO, no HC, and not really any more NOx that was in the air it sucked in.
This is why forklifts run on gas, instead of petrol or diesel.
We could have had incredibly clean air in our cities 25 years ago, if the government hadn't decided that pushing "scrappage schemes" to get people to buy "cleaner greener diesels" was cheaper.
If you want to live in polluted areas there are plenty of places available on Earth for that, I believe most people would rather not. Low emissions zones are mostly in very densely populated areas where the impact of pollution is higher, not sure why you consider that a scourge.
Could you expand on why?
People who don't live in France may not know why low emission zones are so stupid: it's not about how much pollution your car emits, but how old it is.
So you're not allowed to bring a 20 years old car even if it's small, light and as a result doesn't pollute that much (because of its low fuel consumption). However you're allowed to bring in your brand new SUV even if its emissions are much higher. In fact it doesn't matter how much your SUV pollutes, it's recent so it's "fine".
Do you know you usually drive 20+ cars? Poor people. Do you know who loves restrictions on old cars? Car manufacturers.
> Could you expand on why?
Perhaps I'm a plumber going to work on a house in a LEZ? Perhaps I need to deliver something? Perhaps deliver to the airport (!) inside the LEZ.
There are all kinds of reasons why someone might need to take a van into an LEZ, if you think for more than about quarter a second.
This is primarily a reason why you shouldn't drive a vehicle from the 1970s, as the article suggests, and why LEZs need practicality not to drive service inflation inside the area.
Every emission zone regulation I'm familiar with distinguishes between private and commercial vehicles for exactly this reason. The French zones for example divide vehicles into categories. Private vehicles are set a base category/range, and commercial restrictions are usually the next category looser.
I'm just poking a gigantic hole on the hypocrisy of the author. I am not interested in that discussion.
> I am not interested in that discussion.
Rather uncurious of you then, not sure why make a comment if you aren't willing to explore it further. Shouting into the void?
https://eupolicy.social/@jmaris/115860595509967609
CO2 is a bit of an outlier in the groups of pollutants emitted by a car. Modern cars will emit way less of the other pollutants that are directly unhealthy for humans to breathe (NOx, CO, particulate matter, etc.).
I know the thread is mostly for fun, but only considering CO2 is a bit misleading when accessing how environmentally (un)friendly a car is.
That does not matter. It only complies with Euro 3 emissions requirements.
Which will get you into London's Low Emission Zone (LEZ). Not the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), though.
Besides, I think the point is really that we should be making and buying vehicles more like this (in the positive aspects) rather than that we should all drive 40 year old Citroens.
If the EU cared about this so much they wouldn't have allowed all car makers to buy one another until all cars cost €25k for the base model. Maybe, maybe that's the issue that prevents people from updating their cars which emit a lot of stuff they don't like.
You seem to have an axe to grind about something completely unrelated to the article here. Since you brought it up, though, if you're going to be one of the thousands of people driving up the road outside my house every day then, as a member of a family with multiple generations of life-threatening asthma, the fact that you're required to do it in a car with strictly regulated emissions is an unalloyed positive as far as I'm concerned.
20 day old account and constantly hates against the EU. Probably a bot.
Not worth engaging
This thing will be so old that the owner just needs to apply for a "historical" car license and then those eco-zones are irrelevant.
But yeah, the author's wrong on so many things. Starting with putting his stuff on mastodon in the first place. Or not withstanding that the same people he cheers on, are outlawing diesel engines.
Tbh though, a lot of the latter was fueled from US-industrial anti-diesel propaganda.
Can you fit an 8'x4' sheet of plywood in it? My pickup truck wants to know. But it doesn't have to worry, because my other main use for it is as a large gas powered wheel barrow for carrying yard waste, and the little enclosed C15 can't compete.
In fact it looks like the love child my Ford F350 and a Citroen C2. But it can't be because I had the Ford fixed.
> Can you fit an 8'x4' sheet of plywood in it?
If you keep the rear doors open, the cargo platform is 1644 by 1540 (mm), 8x4 would be 2438 by 1219.
Most likely you'd just put sheet goods on the roof (and yes roof racks for panel vans were common, still are).
> my other main use for it is as a large gas powered wheel barrow for carrying yard waste, and the little enclosed C15 can't compete.
You can certainly put yard waste in a C15, though people usually use a trailer for that (unless there's little enough of it it fits in a large builder / garden bag).
Someone pointed out that a lot of US builders will drive pickups truck, and that it's kinda doesn't make sense, why don't they drive a van? Depending on the trade and location builders and contractors here will drive something like a VW Transporter, Mercedes Sprinter, Toyota HiAce or a Peugeot Partner. The Sprinter will fit e.g. your plywood, others will have mounts on the side or roof to transport material.
They won't act as a large wheelbarrow though, not well at least.
Tradespeople in the US often have both vans and trucks, depending on how they want to use them. Both are very common.
None will tow my 30' fifth wheel very far.
There's not enough room in a van. You need a F350 super duty to properly haul stuff.
When my kids were small, we bought a minivan and it was pretty awesome. I really hadn’t thought much about it until…
A couple of years ago, I rented one to help my kids move into college. It was a Chrysler of some kind and now I’m kind of tempted to buy one. The seats disappear into the floor and then you can carry full sheets of plywood. It’s front wheel drive and drives like a car. Super comfortable, super configurable, good visibility, lots of cup holders, climate controls, power outlets, and reasonably fuel efficient (for what it is). But it’s just sooooo dorky.