All these "must have" extras like "Hill Hold" , electronic handbrake , ESR/ABS/EBD (and the list is almost endless nowadays) are all going to have issues when they get older and few miles on them , and been through a few winters.

It seems like built in obselescence to me.

However they should be showing problems from brand new!!

The list of items on which an MOT fail might occur seems to grow and grow...? And as you typed Andy,, add the passage of time, wear and tear, also include possible shortage of spares and the future of ICE vehicles seems to be on thin..err.. ice..?

In the past I would have expected the scrap yards to salvage many of the parts and hold them but they are also suffering from the expanding rule book. Will they take the time (and will it be sufficiently valuable) to harvest all these fiddly parts from the modern fail-by-wire cars? Can they test them so they know they are selling working parts or pee off their customers. It's all making my head spin a bit too fast for my brain to catch up. Suddenly even a fussy Aero is beginning to feel just sufficiently mechanical to consider suitable for a future post-apocalyptic dystopian future (this seems to be in the title of just about every film set in the future now.) I guess it would be good in a steam punk film as well.

Perhaps if we can get Keanu to do another Matrix we could get an AeroMax in it instead of the beautiful Continental they used?

I wouldn’t get too fussed.

Every vehicle built over the past 20 years has been fitted with a sleeping chip which, when activated, will selectively disable your vehicle once your weekly carbon credit allowance has been reached.

You heard it here first.

Presumably every sixth day....or is that not a number.....

It's not April 1st is it?

Built in obsolescence under the guise of 'additional driver comfort' is probably one of the main factors in keeping the motor industry going. If it were not for that, we'd all be quite happily running around in 50 year old cars kept maintained and updated by an army of ingenious back-street engineers developing effective improvements where needed and remanufacturing parts as required. As fas as I can see, most of the really important innovations have not come from the big manufacturers as much from the smaller companies like Ricardo, Quaife, and so on.

Instead we've been so thoroughly indoctrinated that many of us find the idea of not having a new car every few years to be anathema, so the manufacturers are happy to feed our addiction to the new.

I also wonder if the UK Company Car programs from 80's also contributed heavily to many of those things.

Desire to get the new car
Desire to show status (user chooser and part payment was rife)
Heavy feed into the used market of ex-company cars
Saturation of the market leading to heavily subsidised deals by vendors

If I understand it correctly the UK was one of the leading countries to provide company cars.

Good point. The British do seem to have adopted the 'Car as status symbol' thing far more assiduously than many other countries.

From what I understand in Germany there was a time you could pinpoint someone's working status pretty accurately by the car they drove.

K