cars today go 0 to 60 faster than we could ever need the dashboard looks like a bloody spaceship and they can park and drive themselves but the cars of today are not the simpler cars of the past and the way that things are changing are a little [Music] terrifying all right so we're going to set some expectations right off the top here of course we are not saying that new cars are objective ly worse than old cars point blank in many ways new cars today are objectively better than the cars of the past but in
this video we are going to show you how the Auto industry has changed over the generations and how cars today are worse in some very interesting and problematic ways but we're not the only people saying this if you follow a little query online or on YouTube you will find lots of people talking about this phenomenon of modern cars falling short on some pretty key things that we've come to expect from an automobile now a lot of this is opinions and people yelling about how they dislike EVS or something but in all of this mess there
is a general shift that encapsulates what is going on or what is going wrong and that is technology if you explain to Henry Ford that the Cyber truck is the most talked about vehicle in 2024 he might have an aneurysm [Music] sorry a self-driving electric power Tech filled speed machine that you can buy but not resell is taking over the internet but it represents a sort of peak in our modern car culture and we're going to come back to that vehicle later in the video but first we're going to talk about how we got here
see over the past 80 years there has been a series of changes making cars easier and more convenient to drive automatic transmissions Lane Assist Technology infotainment systems heated seats backup cameras and so many other features are now standard in many cars and the purpose of all of this is to make driving easier for everyone now some of this technology has been a real benefit to people's Driving Experience and is partly just the natural progression of the automotive industry but whereas older vehicles were designed for Simplicity and repairability today's technology dependent cars are falling into the
Trap of planned obsolescence in a really big way okay so the reason why the car can Community has been talking about declining car quality for years now is because by and large the car Community is a pretty passionate one car views are incredibly thorough and there are whole communities and allegiances to certain brands and models that make them pretty careful consumers when it comes to one of the biggest purchases you'll make in your life back in the day there were lots of people who worked on their own cars and most people knew how to change
their own oil and perform basic maintenance as a result the repairability and service industry around cars was extremely well-developed but this has been slowly changing over the years in a very careful and strategic way and it's the reason why people who like cars are mad about new cars so earlier we said that a lot of this technology is making cars easier and more convenient to drive and this is good for the car industry because if cars are easier to drive more people will buy cars now of course all of these conveniences make driving better for
everyone theoretically but it also has the double effect of separating people from their cars one of the earliest and most obvious examples of this is the transmission see on a manual transmission you are physically moving the clutch in and out you are choosing which gear to go in which tells you how fast you're going to go and you are just fundamentally far more involved with the whole mechanics of your vehicle granny shifting not double clutching like you should in an automatic however you press the gas to go faster and the brake to go slower automatics
hit the market in 1939 setting a trend leading today where almost no one knows how to drive a manual transmission but now that cars are easy to drive it also had to be comfortable windup windows were replaced with power windows and cruise control became a must for many car owners these and many other features meant that you could drive comfortably for long longer periods of time and you can save all that energy for other activities while you're behind the wheel but starting in the '90s right around the time that I was born digital media started
making its first move into cars in the form of CDs making driving even more fun in the 2000s TVs became common in some minivans and I just have to ask for anyone who lived that dream was it as good as it looked from the outside because my parents never got on board and and I I would see kids in the back of the minivan with the TV and I just thought man and my life would be so much better if I could be watching Looney Tunes right now and this was really a Tipping Point once
the technology got into cars they weren't getting back out from the 2000s onward the more features a car had the higher the price tag would be so manufacturers Just leaned in and tried to automate every single part of the automotive experience rear view cameras meant that you didn't need to turn your head anymore automatic seats meant that you didn't have to lean forward to grab the hand and remote start fobs meant that people didn't even need to use their keys and I feel like in a lot of ways the key was the last real physical
connection that people had to the mechanical functioning of their car and with this last final mechanical part taken away from the driver we are now firmly in the era where cars are more computer than machine today every car has full internet connectivity and Bluetooth with huge displays where you can play video games adjust your interior settings and access navigation and whatnot and these screens are kind of a focal point for what people hate the most about modern cars you see that screen right there in the dash it's basically an iPad and I don't know if
you've used an iPad from 5 years ago but they don't work that great and you know that automakers aren't partnering with apple to offer the most up-to-date chip technology for their displays so there is speculation around how long these things are truly going to last but not only this these dashboard entertainment systems are the antithesis of what we have been taught for years that you're not supposed to do while you're driving which is looking at your phone these screens have become such a selling feature the cars now have no knobs the entirety of the car's
internal functioning must be accessed through some menu within a menu on the screen and you got to somehow find it when you're driving 100 km an hour on the highway which for everyone in the world you understood for Americans that's like 65 or something miles I don't know so we put this giant distraction in the dashboard but what did we do to address this new safety issue we threw literally billions of dollars at Tech driven solutions to make cars safer when it comes to car safety in particular it is pretty easy to argue that cars
today are safer right I mean we didn't even have seat bels back in the day and now we have cars that will tell us when a pedestrian is walking across the Road or when we're drifting out of our lane well except in that one instance when the car just blew through a crosswalk while pedestrians were crossing that was that was crazy but here's the thing a lot of the changes that are being implemented based around safety are in an attempt to remove the human variable from the Driving Experience because if you ask the tech Bros
the safest cars are the ones that are not operated by people but this didn't really work out the way that they wanted to the first issue with the tech solution is that it has problems oh my God are there problems new vehicle quality in general is on the decline and it's not like you can just turn the thing off or back on again when you're flying down the highway you might also notice that the company that's making the biggest claims about the value of tech in cars is the one that has the most problems this
is a crazy stat cars with Adas which is Advanced Driver assistance systems are actually more likely to get into a crash than less techy cars the same thing happened when we put seat belts in cars people started taking more risks because they thought that they were being kept safer by the technology around them because here's the thing if you put a bunch of Technology around a person one that's supposed to distract them and then another one that's supposed to keep them safe while they're distracted it's going to make them a worse driver then you combine
this with all the conveniences and modern functionality of cars today and it means that you have worse drivers driving a lot more than ever it has actually gotten to the point today where some new cars have driver monitoring systems that are basically like a tiny cop in your car to make sure that you're looking at the road and holding the wheel properly but the hilarious irony here is that the one driver assisted system that could actually reduce death which is intelligence speed assist is not being used basically at all for some reason so instead of
humans driving cars we have cars that are driving humans and this is fundamentally the problem because driving used to require skill you had to understand how the car worked how it reacted to different inputs and how to make sure that it didn't break or wear out too fast driving and owning a car used to be a very involved and thorough experience and now it's not and that is exactly the way the automotive World wants it to be this is why a lot of people are actually pissed about electric cars it's not that they don't like
electric motors or whatever or that they hate the planet it's because they represent a new world where people don't know anything about cars and where owners have really no control about how their cars operate or how to fix them and in this sense I actually agree with them see the less that we know about what's going on with our cars the more that we're at the whims of car manufacturers and listen if you're into cars you already know that it's a lot harder today to fix your own car than it used to be I mean
other than the fact that you can google and find basically any bit of information about any repair on YouTube I don't know why he's not texting you right now hey guys Chris fix here but let me explain right to repair issues that are well documented within the tech world are becoming a bigger and bigger problem in the Auto industry in fact new cars are harder to fix even if you take it to a professional not all mechanics want to invest in the computer diagnostic technology that they need to work on new car systems but even
if they have all the gadgets and gizmos to Tinker on with the new bells and whistles and whatnot the newest of car systems are only set up to share information with car dealerships supposedly for copyright and security concerns this has led to a whole reactionary culture of people modifying their cars without manufacturers permissions famously Tesla won't allow anyone to modify or work on their cars themselves without voiding all of the warranties but Rich rebuilds basically started his entire YouTube channel taking apart Teslas and putting them back together against company policy but for most people who
maybe knew how to change their oil in a pinch car repair is going to get a lot harder and probably a lot more expensive car repair is a very competitive market so dealerships are trying to lock everyone else out of the market and force you to go to them only for repairs your local mechanics and aftermarket Industries are at risk of Extinction along with old cars leaving you with an exclusive relationship with salespeople which are our favorite people if you seen our video about car dealerships you will know a little bit more about that world
which is also depressing and hey if you like depressing subjects about our consumer World consider subscribing and if you want to support the work that we do go over to patre it's hard to make the pitch when we're on a downer note but don't worry it gets worse and now today the whole concept of car owner ownership is kind of in question Tesla vehicles since 2016 have self-driving technology built into every single model but the option to turn it on is an extra package that must be purchased since 2020 BMW has been selling cars decked
out with all the latest features that you can't use unless you pay for them get this the cars are fully loaded right they have heated seats driver assistance some app that will alert you if there's traffic camera is coming up ahead but they have put all these features behind a software block so you can't access them without a subscription you've already bought the car you paid it off you own it outright but you're paying $18 a month for heated seats do you smell that everybody that's a smell of a subscription scam and they're everywhere nowadays
let us know if you want to hear a freaking video about subscriptions oh my God and most recently another example is the Cyber truck of course oh my it is unsellable yes there is a clause in the purchase agreement that you are not able to sell the truck within the first year of its release which is just for these models I guess but it does set a bit of a scary precedent that probably won't pan out very well for consumers and in many ways the Cyber truck is kind of the ultimate manifestation of this feature
forward driverless car world the features on the truck are the only thing that people talk about it has rear steer and absurd design meant only to get stairs on the street clicks on the internet and Tesla's full gamut of novelty features that people love to show to their families and friends however it doesn't take a Tradesman to realize that the cybertruck is objectively unnecessary for most people who buy it for truck things because real truck people are not buying the cybertruck our relationship with cars has never been so confused and the Cyber truck is perfect
proof of that but the craziest thing about all of this is that consumers don't actually seem to care about all this extra Tech like they care about some things like safety features and navigational systems which are definitely convenient it's like car manufacturers think that they need to compete on having the latest tech and obviously they like that it makes the cars way more expensive that's convenient but most people either don't use the advanced Tech features at all don't even know that they exist or they just don't care but here is the Silver Lining before we
go as the tech industry and the Auto industry become more synonymous with each other we're seeing a counter movement of people preferring things to be a little more simple people are keeping their cars way longer than they ever used to and there is a rising interest in simpler models such as key cars and trucks but you know what's actually crazy is we already have self-driving technology that gets you to where you need to be while watching Netflix at the same time and it's called the bus or the Subway or the tram car or whatever okay
like we get so FOC focused on cars being this sort of crazy Innovative technology that we forget that we already have a lot of the solutions to these problems so don't buy a cyber truck thank you for watching if you want to see more make sure you're subscribed and we'll see you in the next one [Music]
