They don't even need to be 50 years old.
80's and 90's Japanese sports cars are my cup of tea, and mainly for the reasons you state. Even vehicles from the mid-to-late 90's that had OBD II connectivity are still relatively easy to fault find with. The ECU's are fairly basic generally, there's no outside connectivity apart from the obd port, and even if it's running a basic CAN-BUS in the vehicle, they don't usually have any DRM style nightmares in this era.
It's interesting too, that a car like a KP61 Starlet from the early 80's can achieve similar fuel efficiency as modern small cars, because what they lack in emissions control systems, optimised combustion chambers or direct injection (as examples), they make up for with a substantial lack of weight. (Mainly due to a complete and total lack of safety features haha!).
Though I think there's a lot to be said for keeping old cars running. You're not expending resources to build new batteries, mill new steel, and not contributing to landfill (or recycling byproducts and waste). I don't know what the direct environmental comparison is between running a car for 20 years and building a new car every 3-4 years (as is the common purchase cycle), but I would be under the impression that it would be comparable?
I've loved 80s/90s Japanese cars since the 80s/90s, then got sucked into the social pressures and spent 5-6 years in a couple of different brand new cars. Last year after a horrific experience with a brand new VW (3 page list of repairs and replacements in the first year of ownership, they bought it back off us), it hit home how screwed we are when a modern car breaks. They're so complicated now, with so much electronics. They even steer and park themselves. You can't tinker with them, tweak the ECU to your liking, or fix things yourself. There's some you can't even service yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo_YCC
Now I'm back in 90s cars. Something breaks? Buy the part on eBay and swap it out yourself. Anyone can do it really, they're such simple cars. They're still comfortable, have aircon, generally higher quality than modern cars, way cheaper, and they can't ever track/sell your data.
I see few things happening. There will be a time when modern connected car I own no longer receives software updates while it otherwise would remain a great daily driver. Each passing day it becomes more vulnerable to being hacked to perform variety of things. What is the level of risk that I am willing to accept before having to get rid of the otherwise good car since I no longer feel safe operating it? Eventually there will be an event where this risk gets realized. This will further hasten the move towards policies/legislation where private automotive ownership is no longer allowed and everything moves towards subscription based auto ownership. This will take longer in the US due to cultural reasons, whereas Asia and Europe will hesitate much less to implement this.
At which point I suspect also the data collected by subscribed automotive belongs to the vendor 'renting' it out.
It really isn’t a new thing in countries where (non-automated) taxis are super common and private car ownership is much rarer (e.g. much of Asia and some of Europe).
I had a laugh last night watching an episode of The X-Files. This is a show that's all about conspiracies and not trusting the government and relying on hackers, yet the show (likely due to a product placement agreement) had Scully conspicuously turning on a car's wifi hotspot and connecting to it. I'd think that the main duo of that show would be tech savvy enough to know that such a thing (since it's connected to microphones, cameras, GPS, and the internet) would be anathema to remaining clandestine.
What is, was John's telling of getting stranded with car trouble out somewhere in rural California -- central valley or the desert, pretty much the middle of no-where -- and ending up spending time at a local garage getting his car fixed up, and talking to the gearheads there.
They knew his chips better than he did, and had customised the living hell out of them. By John's own account.
I'm not convinced that this must be the inevitable consequence of Chipping All The Things, or that it's always going to be possible to reverse-engineer and hack everything and anything. And I've quite pessimistic about a great many elements of this trend, including what seems an inevitable conclusion that digitised cars will spy on and betray their owners (or more likely, merely users and/or occupants). That's a social and legal, not a technical problem, ultimately.
But ... there's some glimmer of light in history to date, as well.
(Accounts via personal conversation, though John may well have written this down or been quoted on it elsewhere. He's rather fond of the story.)
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MCS-51#Enhanced_8-bit_bi...
Comma.ai did an open source L2 autonomous driving system.
[0] https://thepihut.com/blogs/raspberry-pi-roundup/an-open-sour...
A modern full-size luxury sedan has about 110 to 130 electronic control units from simple things like automatically open the doors and the trunk, to complex things like automatic beam light control (detecting obstacles that could be blinded so that this area is switch from high beam to low beam), automatic lane keeping, and even auto park.
None of those ECU is and will be using open source for various reasons.
It's worth noting that manufacturers tried this before many decades ago, entirely without computers:
https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/great-info-on-th...
These hackable cars are not of the future, even many of today's cars can be quite easily hacked with some knowledge and the right tools. Luckily this doesn't seem to happen yet as far as I'm aware.
And I fully agree on repairing old cars and the passion that can be put in these machines. It's in a sense sad that cars like this don't get made anymore, but on the other side it's better for the planet.
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/just-pair-11-radio-gadgets-can...
Presumably it was a key amplification attack. And they knew what they were doing when it came to being tracked.
But I wonder if the repairability issue will eventually hit consumers in the pocketbook and drive demand. For instance, the risk that a car can't be repaired by an indie mechanic will dramatically lower its resale value.
An interesting opportunity might be for people to gather car performance data in real time, and tell us which brands and models have the best efficiency and reliability.
I know a few others in the tech industry who also spend their spare time collecting and restoring old cars, as in made more than 50 years ago. Parts and documentation are surprisingly available, and there's an extensive aftermarket thanks to a general lack of DRM-ish things --- these were made even before microcontrollers, so they're as "unconnected" as possible, and anything that goes wrong tends to be a relatively simple fix. Manufacturers were more concerned with actually making good products than locking out competitors or planning obolescence. The lack of annoyances such as needing to wait for the radio to "boot up"[1] or controls hidden behind layers of menus is also a plus.
They may not be as safe, fuel-efficient, nor environmentally friendly as today's cars, but there's a certain amazingly pleasant and comforting feeling of freedom in driving one. It's hard to describe.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15934023