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I care very little about food and despise cooking (mainly because it takes me a very long time to do it; while food prep time scales sublinearly with the number of diners, I'm only making for one), yet I eat more than I drive, to the point where I'd rather the twice-weekly ride out to get take out be more enjoyable than the food ultimately is.
Why else do you think they spend so much time texting behind the wheel, and why the industry has pivoted to making it easier to text behind the wheel? The very late-2000s through the mid-2010s was the era of car manufacturers thinking they knew better than your phone's software and voice recognition (spoiler: they did not), and then after that it was all screens for cost-cutting reasons (and also backup camera mandates, which given safety standards mandate poorer and poorer visibility was kind of a given at some point).
And given that most of the cheap cars in the 2010s were made by Kia/Hyundai, and are all ticking time bombs because of their engines, buying slightly newer isn't even going to help you. That's why you pick the slightly older cooler car, take heart that the market doesn't [generally] understand pricing (because for all Ford's/GM's problems, they at least don't tend to fail that catastrophically), and drive it until you cannot drive it any more.
You're tracing very well a significant fear I have around the death spiral of vehicular design. Safety -> Ugliness, Boredom, and Complexity -> Lower Engagement and Skill -> Safety....
And the general public will parrot the (very real!) reduction in injuries and deaths but barely consider the trades they've made for environmentalism and freedom. Using 5,000 pound cars to move a 175 pound human is a fucking farce, and all that nice GPS and cell-tower connected hardware is every 3-letter agency's wet dream.
I can't shake an overwhelming feeling of anxiety about the future of freedom of movement. I'm 140k into probably a 250k mile lifespan and don't know where I'll get my next car 10 years from now. The particular model still appreciates instead of getting cheaper, a replacement with more life in it will be expensive. I forsee a brief window where self-driving software for the masses makes more of my driving pleasant before keeping my hands on the wheel becomes outright illegal.
I love when folks get a $1,000 maintenance bill for their current car and then decide to buy a $50,000 car instead of pay it. It's fun breaking them down slowly by walking through how insane it is.
This has reversed in the United States in the last few years. Presumably some of that is Steve Sailer's deaths of exuberance hypothesis, but it also seems like idiots staring at phones is getting pedestrians killed at higher rates now too (I am referring to both the motorists and walkers as idiots, to be clear).
And pot. Potheads, unlike alcoholics, tend to think that they’re perfectly fine or even better driver under the influence.
When I was a kid the stereotype was potheads being pulled over for doing 35 under the limit, and complaining they were being profiled for their grateful dead and Legalyze Medicine bumper stickers.
Now they're tearing through red lights like alcoholics running from DMT demons, I don't understand it.
Hasn’t lot changed pretty substantially? Like it’s gotten stronger, at least.
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