Over a 200,000 mile design lifetime, a modern car is way more reliable and way less work to repair than your MG Midget (by virtue of not breaking as often in the first place). Yes, today’s cars aren’t designed to be collector items that will sit and rot in a barn not being driven and get easily restored by amateurs in 50 years, but why should they be?
But the point being made about repairability (and simplicity) seems good.
Modern cars are often more work to repair. They're not particularly modular, and to the extent that they are, they often bury one module under several layers of others. It requires you to disconnect and move working parts and assemblies to uncover the broken one.
Modern cars also use replaceable assemblies to speed up repairs, but it also means that even for small problems like a damaged wire in a harness, you often have to rip out the entire system it is "inside" of and replace it completely. The manufacturer has tons of ways of requiring you to "over replace" parts like this on a modern vehicle.
> but why should they be?
That's not an excuse to make them as disposable as they've become. You can't use "the climate" to blindly turn this into a black and white issue.
Not if you drive it very much/for very long. See this graph [1] (from this article [2]) for instance. Note that they're evenly diving 173,151 miles across the 13 "years" (and don't ask me why they decided to make the x-axis "years").
And that's with a modern fuel efficient car, not some ancient one.
[1] https://graphics.reuters.com/ELECTRIC-VEHICLES/EMISSIONS/rlg...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...
I also wonder about the original humvee, which I think was designed to be "user" serviced in the field.
The disposability has to be factored into the environmental impact.
Most MGs have been in the landfill for decades. It wouldn't be a surprise if this car had been sitting on blocks in a garage for decades. It's disingenuous to imply this car is still running for any reason other than because it has an owner that both wants to restore it and has the ability to do so.
I suspect once its restored there's a fair chance that it'll park in a proper garage and be driven a couple of times a month on nice days during summer until the days start cooling off and it gets stored for winter.
My current car, which cannot be jumpstarted since it has a 48v battery for ignition and driving, and has dash-breaking OTA updates requiring a visit to the dealer or a proprietary 1200 usd software, and can be easy stolen by unplugging a headlight and feeding data into the common bus, would disagree.
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.
Driving emissions numbers I remember off the top of my head are Swedish averages, around 2.5 tonnes CO2e per year (15000 km/year). This is averages for the Swedish car fleet, which tend to be smaller models and more modern than many countries.
So: sure, production emissions are a big factor, but driving the car can easily win the efficiency savings back in a fraction of the car’s lifetime.
On the other hand I also know people who drive a multiple of that.
