> It must either be maintained or treated as disposable.

While I agree with this, I understand where Swizec's comment is coming from. I have a few business acquaintances who have been automotive engineers for 30-40 years now. They have an excellent idea of how their cars work. And yet, they rue that earlier, they could open any broken car and get it to run. Now, there's not much they can do to fix their own cars. Pretty much all they can do when they see a blinking light is take the car to a mechanic. The older generation has learnt that they can't fix their cars. The newer generation, unsurprisingly, doesn't even want to make the effort. The older generation could fill up their oil, change their filters, etc. Now, most people just get their mysterious machine serviced every few months. "I don't want to maintain my car" seems like a natural consequence of how cars work now.

Right but a service interval now is about the same as an engine life from an older car.

> Pretty much all they can do when they see a blinking light is take the car to a mechanic.

Why? Don't they have OBD-2 readers?

OBD2 doesn't tell you much, in a lot of cases. It might identify a loose gas cap or a broken plug wire, but for everything else that can wrong on a modern car you need the manufacturer's proprietary scan tool and a subscription to their online service documents. These cost thousands of dollars, needless to say.

Not that, but certain "luxury-brand" cars specifically don't want you fiddling with anything, and to simply bring it in for a service.

E.g. The weirdest part of it (after driving an old car for the longest time) was they explicitly tell you not to have gas-station attendants check your oil for you. If you're leaking/losing oil, the lights will at some point come on and prompt you to take the car in for service.

> E.g. The weirdest part of it (after driving an old car for the longest time) was they explicitly tell you not to have gas-station attendants check your oil for you. If you're leaking/losing oil, the lights will at some point come on and prompt you to take the car in for service.

Why is that weird? It's a pressurized system with plenty of sensors, you are certainly better off following the data than a gas station attendant (which itself is an old fashioned concept in most places).

>Why? Don't they have OBD-2 readers?

What if they have? It's not like they'd bother to (a) decipher them, (b) fix the issue themselves.

Don't know. The last I met them was about 10 years ago.

And this becomes even more true as the thing with moving parts becomes more expensive. For an excavator which costs several hundred thousand dollars, when a shaft wears out of spec, they send it to a welder to apply more metal, then onto the lathe to trim it back into spec. In other words, when the equipment gets expensive enough, parts which you wouldn't normally consider to be maintainable become maintenance items.