The $25k car is going extinct?

I work on my own cars now (as a hobby really) and one of the reasons the new cars are so expensive is they are much more complicated. A lot of this seems to be over-engineering IMO. This is alluded to in the article, but not explicitly stated.

The cars I work on are from the early 90s and everything is very simple to understand.

e.g. Electronics are normally simple circuits that aren't much more complicated than what you would find in a door bell and finding faults is normally just tracing wires and using a multi-meter. I had issues with the brake lights / reverse lights not working, the issue turned out that the spade like connector in the fuse box was pushed through and was making partial contact. Price to fix this was £0.

EDIT: Just remembered this isn't accurate. I had to buy a new reverse light. The entire reverse light assembly was ~£20. So the price to fix was about £20. The light assembly itself was like a big bicycle light.

My newer car needs a OB-II scanner to diagnose anything with a phone app. While this is arguably quicker it can be misleading. Sometimes it will be telling you that something is malfunctioning but it is really the sensor itself. These sensors are £200-£300 a piece. Replacing 4 glow plug sensors cost me £800. I was paying essentially to make the "you must service your engine" light to go away. There was nothing wrong with engine itself.

> A lot of this seems to be over-engineering IMO. This is alluded to in the article, but not explicitly stated.

I think a large part of the problem is that a sort of very scientific "modify a single variable at a time" type of engineering culture permeated academia a couple decades ago and now we're reaping what we sow.

The sort of practical "I snipped this corner so now they pack neatly four to a box from the supplier and I altered that curve so now there's clearance for more types of wrenches around the bolt head and I smoothed out the rib shape for die longevity and in doing all that I reduced the mass by 6.5%" type stuff that engineering culture used to look up to has been replaced with KPI chasing "You told me to reduce mass by 6% and I reduced mass by 7%, 2nd and 3rd order consequences be damned" engineering culture that used to be fairly confined to the rich half of a certain continent is now what is worshipped.

And likewise you get spiraling complexity because the only thing holding it back is the bean counters (when doing so is a priority) whereas before there was kind of natural restraint keeping it back on both sides. So as they go around updating platforms and models and sub-assemblies as whatnot the compliance ratchets up, unless the mandate at the time is to reduce it.