... and there are reasons for the rollover odometer meme too.

Is the supposition that they didn't need the digit until recently? I doubt that was a concern - if any, more financial/cosmetic than engineering.

The older cars didn't fail spectacularly. The used car market is made mostly of these repairable cars.

Again, they lasted long enough for the odometer rollover... but also for Toyota trucks to become an icon. These 'junkers' (said lovingly) are how 'everyone' in the Midwest learns to drive and gets to their first job, too.

I'll close with my own crazy assertion! Leases are for people so bored with their work, they need financial commitments to spice things up

> The older cars didn't fail spectacularly. The used car market is made mostly of these repairable cars.

Well, we need to specify which ages of car we are talking about.

The used car market is probably mostly made of cars built in the last twenty years. I also had even older times in mind, all the way from Model T to today.

Hah, totally fair. On a long enough timeline... survival drops to zero. I was pretty firmly in that past 20-30 years era indeed.

Anything older is legally defined as a classic, to my knowledge. Most of those are either proper junk or collectibles. Not what I'm talking about.

I was sort-of talking about the cars driven by your typical sitcom dad who's always tinkering and repairing that damn thing. Perhaps 1960-1980s or so?

It was entirely because people didn’t expect those cars to make it to 100k miles.

The engineering and tolerances on an 80’s/90’s car just isn’t as good as a modern car. That lead to a lot of premature failures on major components.

Modern cars certainly have improvements in those areas; I'm not dismissing that. Just... the engineering and tolerances didn't 'have' to be as good. The performance numbers weren't nearly as good - that afforded a lot.

They were primitive, and if the manufacturer chose it to be, robust as a result. The alternative was cheap.

Like the Death Star meme, every mechanical thing has a weak point. Well-designed cars put the stuff that breaks in cheap consumable parts in an easy to reach place.

That last piece can have more impact on the price of a repair than the part itself

Hondas and Toyotas from that era easily surpassed 100k miles. I owned one.