Overall cost of ownership is rough due to terrible MPG, but maintenance hasn't been an issue at all.
Point being, 200k and 25yr on an SUV isn't that impressive on something expensive enough in its day to mostly avoid being rode hard and put away wet from day one. There are a lot of pretty pristine 90s Jags kicking around too and they weren't exactly the pinnacle of reliability. Minivans, commuter compacts, station wagons, they got chewed up and spit out.
(of course for something critical such as brake booster I would only use OEM).
[1] I've had to do the PHH on a rusty-ish 80, not fun: https://youtu.be/WQabGr4KY5g?t=158
So unless your household (or your maintenance crew) is 100% electrified, your part of the problem.
https://www.pressherald.com/2022/03/31/our-sustainable-city-...
It’s basically the now is unacceptable, and the future is impossible.
But you're saying you're required to own an addition car?
If you get an early Civic or VW Bug, you're going to get pretty good mileage as long as the engine is well adjusted.
I ended up having to get a proper truck because I kept breaking suspension components in my Forester shrug.
And for all the climate sin folks, it’s to manage 90 acres of previously overgrown timberland which was a huge fire danger and would have gone up in smoke in short order otherwise.
It’s now happily sitting there sequestering far more carbon than the truck will ever release.
It does come with the territory though, and anyone owning an 80 (and probably a 100 series) at this point isn't doing it really to "save money" imo.
That being said, the recently outgoing 200 series LC didn't really do all that much better[1], and neither does the new 300 series.[2]
[1] https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/2021_Toyota_Land_Cru...
I don't mean to judge and am genuinely curious -- I have a fairly fuel inefficient vehicle as well and it weighs on me sometimes that I maybe should try different, more climate friendly hobbies (like, stopping overlanding and pick up knitting or something...)
Same argument I have with aquaintainces that switch their cars to an electric ones... it's worse at the end if your previous car was in working order.
I've argued* that, because we drive our second car so little per year, that it makes more sense for us to buy an inexpensive, relatively gas-guzzling used car rather than a more economical hybrid. Reasoning being that someone is going to drive the gas guzzler and someone is going to drive that hybrid and better the hybrid go to someone driving a typical amount and we drive the worse one only 2-3K miles/year.
* - so far unsuccessfully, but the crazy used car market has made that moot for now.
They are also one of the few petrol vehicles that are still built to this kind of standard, so they do demonstrate as the “smoking gun” that the industry itself engineers obsolescence into their vehicles and could do much better.
Somehow we’ve all been reduced to yakking on and on about fuel economy. There are 30,000 parts in the average car, and almost all of them are manufactured and shipped. What’s the impact of tens of thousands of components and built onsite for JIT manufacturing?
If we wanted to change this, we could do very easily. We would just need to put a sticker in the window of the car that says: “Designed to Last: 12 years” or whatever. That way people could make an informed decision and game theory would come in to effect. Auto makers know this information: every car has a design life of you wouldn’t have anything like the “25 year design life” of a Land Cruiser in the first place.
I consider it the impact of car and oil company propaganda, as they’ve narrowed the discussion to “miles per gallon” rather than the overall impact of design life and the constant need to remanufacture the same vehicle over and over again for the same customer throughout their lifetime.
The hidden danger is in the subtle propaganda of suggested talking points from industry that subtly moves the conversation over decades. Propaganda isn’t to tell us what to think, it’s to frame and influence the things we talk about and give us a industry favorable set of opinion talking points to frame a conversation that benefits the status quo.
The Land Cruiser is one of the last petrol vehicles that demonstrates without a doubt that we could be building to a much higher standard for viritually the same money. It was 84k when it went off the market in 2020, and Toyotas next most expensive vehicle with half the service life was about 75k. The Land Cruiser has a 10,000 usd tax because it isn’t assembled in North America, so double the service life vehicle can be delivered at the same price as the top end vehicle in a lineup. Its simply a choice by car companies not to do it.
But all we as a society can talk about is gas mileage, because that’s something the “industry can get behind.”
It’s something to bear in mind.
This isn't really true. The manufacturing is intensive but not nearly as intensive as setting fire to 1/4 gallon of gas every mile.
This impact is also significantly lower for gas cars than electric, which achieve parity around 15,000 driven miles.
And that's before we account for any additional trips needed for personnel movements, car and track servicing, and other such things.
The Bart number may have been during peak only so fair point there, I can certainly look for the systemwide average. [1]
The Caltrain number is average over FY2016-2018, from their sustainability report page 5. [2] They completed roughly 436M passenger-miles per year, and consumed roughly 4.4M gallons of diesel. Clocks in around 100 passenger-miles per gallon. I'm sure its worse now with the COVID numbers. I think it's a fair ballpark point of comparison though, and you can consider the Bart number an upper limit.
You're of course right its a function of ridership. An average freight train gets over 400 miles per gallon per ton of cargo.
[1] https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/GreenSheet.pdf
The official EPA rating on my 1995 is 12MPG city, and 14MPG highway. Real world, I'm more often in the 10-12 MPG range. If you add heavy offroad accessories, expect that to drop further.
The Diesel engine you can get in other parts of the world can get 20+ MPG in the same vehicle.
Economically wise, a 2 years old mid sized SUV here costs around 40000 USD, meanwhile I bought my FZJ80 with 6000 USD (with 200000 km on the ODO). Even if I drive 1000 km a month it will take me more than 30 years of driving to start losing money compare to buying a modern one.
We can praise those who organise their lives in such ways as to not be too much of a burden on the planet but I don’t believe it’s effective to shame those that don’t, or do it in different ways than you expect.
It is effective to put pressure on governments and industry though.
Get it fixed ASAP.
Now, could a master cylinder and a brake booster fail this way? I suppose if the brake booster was already failed and leaked vacuum at the booster/cylinder interface, and then the master cylinder seal at the main plunger also failed, that this could happen. But I don't see one causing the other.
Since then, any sign of a leak == park it and take the bus.
Other than that, the first spider I had was a wonderful thing. Plenty of performance, dynamic handling, looked gorgeous. The 2nd one was a complete sh*tbox because it was allowed to rust and never fixed properly or drove properly.
Chryslers have a bad reputation in Australia. Poor quality control, bad reliability (compared to Toyota), hard to get parts, interiors that eat themselves etc. I should know having owned a few (and rebuilding a 300C at the moment). Once they bought AMC all the terrible Chrysler problems seemed to be like a virus on Jeeps.
[1] The so called 'emission computer' unit on the car is a simple pulse counter/comparator that activates a VSV on the carb to reduce backfire while descending downhill with the foot off the throttle.
[2] My brake booster is leaking a little bit, but at least it won't suddenly gives up on me while I'm riding, still looking for a replacement.