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.

> 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.

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).

Such a thing exists. It's called a Dacia Duster. Well, certainly for utility and to a lesser extent economy.

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).

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.

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

Yeah, but how do poor VCs make money then?

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.

They’re also vastly safer

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.

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.

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.

>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

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.

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.

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/

> 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.

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 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.

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.

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.