I so much wish my mother at the cabins did not replace our 40’s classic figidaire, only needed new seals, got a chintzy fridge instead, course sister nearly blew up the little cabin because she did not know you needed to light the oven, then she replaced some log walls withthe fake log wall siding, breaks my heart to this day. There is a product by Abatron, drill holes and inject, it turns rotted wood into an epoxy, That turns black rust stopper has worked well on cars for me.
I paid $300 for my Eureka 38 years ago and still works fine but I’ve relegated it to just use in the basement. I’ve replaced some parts on it like the plastic blower and cord etc. but when I put brushes in, it didn’t even need them. When I bought my new Riccar, the guy was going to give me $100 in trade but decided to keep it. The Riccar is very heavy duty, made in St. Louis, dual motors, 40" cord, hepa filter, etc. so should last longer than me. Just a little heavy is all.
Interesting bit of trivia regarding Riccar vacuums. They are the somewhat more upscale version of Simplicity vacuums. Both are products of Tacony Corp. headquartered in Fenton, MO which is a suburb in southwest St. Louis County.
Both brands are manufactured at a factory in St. James, MO which is about 80 miles down I-44 west of Fenton. There is a small and quite interesting vacuum cleaner museum at the factory.
A dear friend of mine worked for Tacony for many years. That’s how I learned about their vacuums and the museum and that the museum is also a factory outlet store that sells vacs that are NOT “seconds” but are unblemished straight from production ready to ship.
When my trusty 1979 Kenmore vac was getting very worn a few years ago I decided to replace it with a Simplicity upright and a small Riccar canister, both of which are much, much lighter weight and have Hepa filters. I saved considerable money by taking a scenic drive down to the factory and buying the new vacuums there. And I donated “Matilda” the Kenmore vac to the museum.
Yes, I name vacuum cleaners. It beats calling them less polite terms on days when vacuuming is particularly tiresome.
The powerful and heavy Hoover upright and heavy Eureka tank canister of my childhood were Griselda and Dammit (the latter only when my mom wasn’t listening!)
My 1979 Kenmore canister now in the museum was Matilda. The current Simplicity upright vac is Gretchen because it’s catchin’ all the dirt and the Riccar canister is another Matilda. I also got a small wet/dry shop vac for the basement and garage when having renovation work on the house a few years ago. It’s named Samson. 
But, no, I haven’t named any of my cars. Although the 1973 Corolla was known in the family as The Toy due to its small size and hamster powered engine. And my mom dubbed my 1987 Olds as the Brat Buggy. 
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The only one of my cars that was ever named(and not by me) was my '75 Olds 98 Regency, white with navy vinyl roof and blue crushed velour upholstery. It was called “The Pimpmobile”.
Years ago, an old mechanic advised me that when purchasing a car, to stick with Fords or Chevrolets. He said that parts were available everywhere and all mechanics were familiar with them. Unfortunately, I didn’t take his advice and bought a Rambler. When I went to graduate school, there was no Rambler dealer in the University town. When a snap ring broke in the transmission, the main drive gear had to be shipped in from a dealer 60.miles away.
I did take his advice on vacuum cleaners. I decided it best to stick with Hoover or Eureka. Bags are still available for my 1977 Eureka on the shelf at Walmart. The belt that drives the revolving brush broke a couple of weeks ago. I went to a local vacuum cleaner shop and for $3.25 I came out with a new belt which took less than 5 minutes to install.
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When I was a kid, our Plymouth’s slant six broke its plastic distributor drive gear while we were on vacation. The mechanic at the Shell station in Gatlinburg, TN diagnosed it almost immediately, but there was no part to be had in that town, and it was a Saturday morning.
Luckily, they were able to get in touch with the Chrysler dealer in Knoxville (about 40 miles away) just before his parts department closed for the day, the part arrived on “the afternoon 'hound”, and the mechanic was able to get us up and running by the late afternoon.
I’m not sure, but I guess it is possible that the local parts stores might had Chevy & Ford distributor drive gears in stock.
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Locating parts 40+ years ago was done by making multiple time consuming phone calls. Today you can find that part at multiple locations with a simple google search in a few seconds.
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I bet Gatlinburg was cool back then. I still like to visit, even though it’s gotten very touristy, but I bet it was really nice back in the time when folks were driving Plymouth’s with slant sixes.
It was a nice, placid town with just the very beginnings of being tourist-tacky. Most likely our old motel no longer exists, but it consisted of several buildings, each under a big canopy of trees.
IIRC, each building had 5 or 6 units, and there were probably 8 or 10 buildings, with a good amount of separation between them. Even on a hot day, it was cool and comfortable under the shade of those big old trees. And, it was only a short stroll to the Little Pigeon River.
That motel was really nice and it was nothing like the high rise highway hotels of today.
It’s called leasing.
You give me a car. I make monthly payments.
At the end of three years you give me another car and I’ll continue to make monthly payments. Of course this only works when you can limit your mileage.
It’s great here in NYC. We have so much traffic that at the end of three years, we have a car that has been running quite a number of hours but they never go anywhere because the traffic is so bad.
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Except that doesn’t always hold true. Extreme example, a modern unibody is a lot more complex than the ash body substructure used in an old Morgan +4. But that complex system in my vehicle isn’t going to get eaten by termites. 
More seriously, if greater complexity always led to greater failure rates, then modern cars should be much less reliable than a Model T. And that’s not true. Even though everything in modern cars, from the tires to the electronics, is vastly more complex than a Model T, a modern car can go over 5,000 miles without an ail change, a Model T can break if you don’t top off the engine oil daily.
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Yes, but you don’t have to go back as far as the Model T.
Contemporary cars are far more reliable than those that were made as recently as the '50s, '60s, and '70s, and our modern cars have far more technology than those earlier ones from our lifetimes
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To clarify, my point was NOT that electronic parts are more prone to failure than mechical parts but that an Older (Mechanical) car was easier to work on because it required much more maintenance to avoid failure…
My point was that any Modern car is so much better than any Older car from those “Good Old Days” that Modern cars have created a false expectation that with minimal maintainance they will never have a failure. Thus, angry consumers when anything fails.
And BTW I also agree that on Modern cars mechanical failure is more likely than electronic failure with the personal exception of any car made in Italy.
Turn on headlights the wipers startup, cold weather maybe it starts or maybe not, roll down the windows the A/C starts acting up and my favorite was when I started the car when a passenger had the audacity to roll down a window … burned out the entire fuse box
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You’re comparing new tech to decades old tech, though. A fridge (or auto, or whatever) manufactured in 2020 with add on gadgets has more components to fail than the standard upright fridge manufactured in 2020. Assuming they’re both manufactured by the same company to the same standards, etc, etc. More components, more complexity, greater chance of failure. Still generally holds true.
That being said, I have no desire to drive a car with no AC, cruise control, etc. However, if you don’t have those options…it’s going to be pretty hard for them to fail. Speaking of AC, that’s another electronic failure I’ve had. Blend door motors. I haven’t had any issues with the mechanical AC parts on my current vehicles. And wouldn’t you know, I have “dual zone” climate control. Which adds another blend door motor to fail. Added complexity, more chance of failure.
I’m not sure how some of you guys never have an electronic part to fail. I’m jealous, though .
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Back in the “Good Old Days” when my parents set up housekeeping in 1939, they bought a new Sears Coldspot refrigerator. The motor and compressor were separate and mounted on the top of the unit. About every 3 months, my dad would lift the top off the refrigerator and oil the motor.
Ten years later when I was 7 years old, I went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. The refrigerator was making a terrible noise and smoke was coming out of the refrigerator. I called to my mom, and she came into.the kitchen and unplugged the refrigerator. The next day, a repairman came, removed the motor, had it rewound, and came back.the next day and reinstalled the motor.
Now today’s household refrigerators have the motor and compressor sealed ad one unit. If the motor goes out, either the sealed unit is replaced it the entire refrigerator is replaced. Modern refrigerators are self defrosting. I don’t think I want to return to the “Good Old Days”.
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Buy a new car every 7 to 10 years, they are only $35,000.
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I get that argument, and yeah, it’s technically true that if you add a water dispenser to a fridge, that fridge is much more likely to experience a broken water dispenser than one which does not have a water dispenser. Where my objection comes in is when people see that and then conclude “and therefore I should not spec my fridge with a water dispenser.” Why? If you want one, get it. If it breaks in 5 years, you’ve had 5 years of water dispensing out of it. Sure, you wouldn’t have to deal with a broken one if you hadn’t gotten it, but you’d also have not had the water dispenser that you wanted. When it breaks, you can choose whether or not to fix it.
Where I do take exception to your example is that unless you get the top-end brands (and I don’t mean Whirlpool or GE, I mean stuff like Subzero, Wolf, and Bluestar -the stuff that’s eye-wateringly expensive) appliances are generally built to abysmal quality standards. Looking at a crappy refrigerator and its electrical problems and assuming that means a high likelihood of electrical problems with a Toyota isn’t a good conclusion.
I, too, was worried about all the electronic doodads when I bought an '07 Acura. But the thing was rock solid the whole time I owned it. None of the electronic toys died. It was all mechanical stuff (and not much of that, either). I’m pretty confident the same will be true of my current car. In fact, it’s even less likely to go out, because unlike the Acura, this car’s nav system is not DVD based, which means it doesn’t have moving parts to break.
I tend to classify motors as mechanical more than electronics. But a blend door motor can burn out because it’s working too hard because the blend door isn’t moving well. Funnily enough, while I’ve yet to have a blend door motor go out, I did have a blend door cable go out back on an '88 CRX. The blend door got stiff because the roller guide wasn’t rolling. It got harder and harder to move that lever from cold to hot. And one winter I put a little too much force trying to move it, and the cable snapped.
I didn’t feel like taking the whole freaking dash apart to replace the cable, so from then on I’d have to reach under the glovebox and move the lever by hand. This meant I had to pick my temperature setting before I started driving, and that got real annoying on very cold days, because I’d never get it right so I’d either freeze or roast the whole drive.
Abysmal quality standards with a lot of options still has more chances of having issues than abysmal quality standards with fewer options.
More complex, more issues. Again, I wouldn’t avoid all of the add on doo dads that make a new car fun. But, they do sometimes fail.
I had a blend door go out-not really. Sitting at a RR crossing waiting for a train, my heater went to defrost only. First thing I did when I started trouble shooting it was run a separate vacuum line to it and discover the rubber hose had dropped down on something hot and melted a hole in it.
I did have the electronic level control go out on my Riv. Without warning, car was parked and shorted out giving me a dead battery. Trying to figure it out and nothing showed up and then all of a sudden there it went again. Pulling fuses and then connectors confirmed it. $350 for the part so just went without and went to manual air shocks eventually. I did have my CRT screen go blank too so guess that is electronic but stuff happens. I suppose there were over $1000 new and no longer available but the junk yard still had one for $100. Like I said, glad to be off the road.
Sorry but I can’t for the life of me figure why anyone would want a water dispenser on their fridge. Ice cube maker a must but why not just the faucet? I don’t drink much water though.
Well ,it gives you cold water that has gone through a filter . In some parts of the country filtered water is a good thing.
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