https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/statistics-and-an...
Needless to say, almost no car in Europe has it. Simple upgrades to the model do not require an approval for manufacture.
French cars are total trash. This is a given. New cars are total trash would require more datapoints.
Sure, bits of it used to fall off with alarming regularity, and it’d just turn itself off when stopped at the lights periodically… but apart from that…
https://www.classic-trader.com/en/magazine/peugeot-205-gti-b...
Pretty opiniated statement.
I once owned a 306 Peugeot (90s) as a student vehicle and it went way over 350'000 km without any noticeable problem. The TU series engines of Peugeot were beast of a kind and pretty hard to kill as long as you minimum service them.
Recent Peugeots are like any recent, EU-made cars: full of electronics, fragile piece of tech and with turbo-compressed engine that favor fuel consumption over reliability. VW and German counterpart (which I also drove) tend to be the same crap.
Nowadays, almost only the Japanese constructors stand off for their reliability.
Can't tell about US cars but for JP manufacturers, aim for Mazda. They seem to get it right on all the points you described, and more (at least my Mazda 2 does)
Unfortunately that's not possible for me: Crit'air certificates (which are based on EURO ratings) are being enforced. Our city is going to ban anything above and including level 2 by 2025.
It means I will have to let go of my other car (a '08 Civic Type-R, rated level 2) which is a damn shame and completely absurd to have to scrap it given its overall (at ~100000km it's mint-like) and yearly (2000km/yr, emission contribution is well below the noise floor) mileage.
That's also why we bought a 2020 Mazda 2 (level 1). There's AirPlay but apart from that it's all good. 3 trim levels which basically add HUD, bigger wheels, leather. Everything else is included from the basic one, zero options, completely opposite mindset from the software-gated nonsense. The engine compartment has plenty of room for maintenance and I could swear it was designed to hold a much bigger engine. The screen is touch-able, but disables touch over, like, 2km/h. Ultimately I just use the dial joystick, which is just so good. So, definitely, you don't need to go back 20 years to get a car you are in control of.
This is working-as-intended. Some modern cars only have a very approximate sensor in the fuel tank, and then use computer modelling of fuel use to make the gauge look like it is going down smoothly. After all, the engine knows exactly how many ml it injects with every stroke, so can measure fuel use very precisely - the only unknown is what you are putting in.
Therefore, they assume that you never fill up less than say a half tank. If you fill up less, it will pretend you didn't fill up at all, and the gauge will still say three quarters when it is full to the brim.
The only way to get the gauge and actual tank back in sync is to use up at least half a tank, and then refill all the way.
So modern cars have millions of new shiny sensors, but cannot get accurate information on the fuel tank, something my old shitty car reliable can?
I'm not sure what is actually used instead, but I'd guess they just measure the pressure on the inlet to the fuel pump. An absolute pressure sensor only costs 3 cents and the fuel pump is probably already on the CAN bus.
Otherwise it was, like all things back in the good old days, incredibly precise +/- 10%
The sad thing is, if todays values are worse.
Going uphill? Gauge says 1/4 tank left.
Steep downhill? Out of gas.
Not sure which end the pump was on, but I never ran out despite what the gauge would say.