| ▲ | patagonia a day ago |
| Except, with advances in computational design and engineering, manufacturing automation, and moving to plastic for the body I would expect a reduction in price, in real terms. Not impressed. |
|
| ▲ | Suppafly a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| >Except, with advances in computational design and engineering, manufacturing automation, and moving to plastic for the body I would expect a reduction in price, in real terms. Except with all the safety equipment, crumple zones, airbags, sensors, etc. I would expect an increase in price. |
| |
| ▲ | Spivak 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | And this back-and-forth here is why the folks at the BLS
have a hard job. Both options—
a car in 1990 is a car in 2025 and real value/utility is unchanged and price should be compared 1-1 ignores that cars are actually better now. But at the same time you literally can't buy a new car at 1990's quality so the additional value/utility might not actually be wanted by some and so this in effect makes real price go up. |
|
|
| ▲ | kube-system a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > moving to plastic for the body Some of those $10k cars in the 90s had more plastic in the bodies than cars today, e.g. Saturn S-series, where all body panels below the belt-line were plastic. It isn't necessarily the cost savings one might expect though, because steel panels can also be load bearing and part of the crash structure, which is not really practical with plastic panels. |
| |
| ▲ | dogline a day ago | parent | next [-] | | With plastic panels, that means they're replaceable. Possibly even swappable (custom 3D printing?). This just adds to the "modding platform" they could be marketing to. | | |
| ▲ | kube-system a day ago | parent [-] | | Steel panels can also be made to be replaceable. Plastic has to be because it can't be welded to the frame. | | |
| ▲ | riehwvfbk a day ago | parent [-] | | In fact, on modern cars many times these panels are replaced. If you get a big enough dent in a door, a good body shop will offer to replace the outer skin instead of filling with bondo. They cut the weld on the inside of the door all the way around, take off the shell, and epoxy a new one on. The body shop owner told me that the epoxy is actually stronger than the factory weld. | | |
| ▲ | kube-system a day ago | parent [-] | | Yes, bodywork is quite a mature discipline. I was presuming the parent commenter meant user-replaceable, i.e. bolted on. > The body shop owner told me that the epoxy is actually stronger than the factory weld. Often this is because the special high strength steels used in vehicles today depend on proper heat treating to attain their strength, and welding can compromise this. Many OEMs even specify panel bonding for repairing particular crash-critical parts of vehicles now because of this. | | |
| ▲ | potato3732842 a day ago | parent [-] | | It's mostly because the factory welds are the result of someone running numbers until they find the bare minimum whereas the autobody guy would rather not risk it. | | |
| ▲ | kube-system a day ago | parent [-] | | The OEMs have proper repair procedures that are the correct way to fix the vehicle, and if the autobody shop is reputable, they follow them. And the stated reason OEMs specify panel bonding instead of welding is: 1. because UHSS is sensitive to heat, and robots are much more accurate in how they heat than Jimmy with a tig torch, and they were programmed by a process engineer, where as Jimmy welds until 'it looks good'. 2. welding may compromise anti-corrosive treatments on the inside of inaccessible cavities, which can lead to corrosion issues e.g. https://rts.i-car.com/crn-24.html A crappy shop will certainly just weld panels in without any regard for materials engineering, but it results in a crappy repair. |
|
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | all2 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The Pontiac Fiero has notoriously bad plastic panels. | | | |
| ▲ | KerrAvon a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Cost savings wasn't the reason for the Saturn plastic panels, IIRC -- they were intended to make the car more durable; they were hard to dent. Some Saturn salespeople would kick the side of the car, hard, to demonstrate their resilience. | | |
| ▲ | kube-system a day ago | parent [-] | | Those cars always looked great on the used car lot because they never had any door dings. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | kasey_junk a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Modern cars are almost universally safer and more fuel efficient than the older models. And in many cases faster. |
| |
| ▲ | kube-system a day ago | parent [-] | | In nearly all cases they're faster. 10+ second 0-60 times used to be pretty normal for "regular" cars. Now days, people will complain that a car is slow if they can't put down 7 second 0-60 times. And "quick" boring cars of today are as fast as sports cars of the past. The 1996 Ferrari F355 Spider and the 2025 Hyundai Elantra N both have a 0-60 time of 4.8 seconds. |
|
|
| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| [deleted] |
