I just wanted to share this excellent video about Japanese (Toyota..?) cars and how, if you treat the car with respect, it will last forever. Seems AI voiced, yet many concepts are very sound. Handle your car like a bonsai tree. Genius.
Some of those points aren't very relevant... Way too much hyperbole. But the main point is caring for your stuff, as well as caring for your land and country is a cultural thing and in the US we're a bunch of slobs living in squalor under a failed government. When I first started working on lots of people's Prius 7 years ago I was convinced I was going to restore them back to near new... But several of those cars I accomplished that on it all these years later are even more trashed than when I first started working on it because people don't care about themselves and their surroundings, they'd rather tune it out and not bother doing all the extra work. Meanwhile in Japan, even their garbage trucks are clean and shiny. When was the last time you saw a clean and shiny garbage truck in the US? So grateful I grew up with a dad who was obsessed with cleaning his car and fixing anything that was wrong right away. Got 200K miles on my Prius that I bought with 100K miles on it 12 years ago and still no issues. That's not good luck causing that either!
average lifespan of a vehicle in the us: 16.5 years:what-is-the-lifespan-of-a-vehicle-in-the-usa in japan: 13-15 years:owning-a-car-in-japan
I do agree in principle, this is AI hyperbole crap, but the focus interests me very much. Also, what source has stated Japanese trade cars after four years? In Sweden, most cars are bought new by companies, and after three years they sell them to consumers, since they are ”written off”… I would love to see EU or American brand cars get this kind of treatment. It’s likely a very nationalist feature, but I do follow many of those concepts. I especially like the general idea of letting the car ride ”soft” before it’s warmed up.
I stuck with it for about the first half, then got a little exasperated. If Marshall McLuhan's maxim "the medium is the message" is applied, and you listen to the format, the catch-phrases and so on, it comes across as the typical YouTube video, that does it's level best to draw you in, with multi-point lists, promises that you'll be "amazed by the last two", excessive elaboration, stock footage from everywhere, repeated, and on and on. It could be distilled down to the key points, but everybody needs a paycheck. The way of the world now I suppose.
I see them every week in my neighborhood. They look brand new. You must live in a s**thole of a town. Easy to do with a Prius. My daughter has put 125,000 miles (now at 325,000) doing absolutely nothing to her car except what I happen to have noticed over the years. And that has only been a handful of small things. I'm pretty sure the car is still on it's original struts and it still runs perfectly fine.
seems to me that most of it was common sense, and stuff we talk about all the time. follow the scheduled maintenance,and add a few things that aren't covered. i would think most people take theier cars in for scheduled service, but maybe i'm wrong.
something i've heard over the years, it's difficult to find hard data:quereadisplay.html Why-do-the-Japanese-get-rid-of-their-cars-after-30-000-miles
I actually grew up in Palo Alto, CA., which today has more billionaires than most any other city in the world and I've never seen a clean and shiny garbage truck. I've also lived in a handful of other major west coast cities over the past several decades and none of them had clean garbage trucks. So maybe your S**thole attitude is because: a) road salt in colder places requires more cleaning, or b) you live in so much squalor that even a dirty garbage truck looks clean and shiny in comparison?
