No. of Recommendations: 5
Back when I was a kid, car companies would change the appearance of each model car every year, I guess hoping that people would be as embarrassed driving last year's car as wearing last year's width of necktie. Frankly, between shoddy manufacturing and lousy design. the massive, fuel guzzling cars used in the US burned gasoline like it was going out of style and tended to die in (what we today consider) middle age.
Then Japanese cars started being imported in quantity. They burned less fuel, needed less maintenance and were built to last.
Shortly afterwards, under President Carter (I think) the US started laying on fuel economy standards.
To both meet new fuel economy standards and the competition from Japan, the American manufacturers started spending on quality control and product quality. To save money, they started standardizing on a model appearance - and kept repeating it year after year. If the manufacturer had multiple divisions, other than the "skin" the electrical and mechanical infrastructure of their cars shared a large percentage of parts and design.
They only extended the life span of their cars because they had to.
When I got into the PC business (in 1980), chips would change on pretty much an annual basis. The difference in performance (for nerds: from Z-80 to 8080 to 8086 to 286 to 386 to Pentium and so on) was significant and it was not unusual for customers - both commercial and personal - to "upgrade" machines frequently as new software wouldn't work well on previous generation equipment. Intel did great. At some point, PC's got fast enough for all but the most intensive application - and people started stretching their upgrades to once every few years and then even longer - as the improved performance theoretically available didn't help them. And then, as if from left field, competitors like AMD and Nvidia cropped up and Intel began to melt down.
When AT&T ruled the roost, telephone bills could reach $35. Nowadays (after inflation), that would be the same $350 that many pay for data/com between cable TV, internet, land-line and cell phone for the family. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
So, we are on the edge of AI controlled autonomous cars. If Tesla is a template, these will require subscription oriented software. That may change the metrics of owning a car.
Jeff
