In other words (and this is using newer statistics from the Bureau of Labor than the article used because the article is older), you need $8 today to buy what $1 bought in 1965. Most people who are not CEOs have not seen 800% wage increases in that time span, and so things are indeed more “expensive” today when considered alongside actual wages. Cars are actually a little better - their prices haven’t risen as fast on average as other things we buy, but it’s still bad especially when you consider that the other things we buy still need to be bought and therefore cut into the pool of cash available to buy cars.
The average wage in 1965 was a little under 7 grand a year, which works out to around $3.50 an hour. You could easily earn that as a high school graduate. The average wage today for college graduates is just under 20 an hour, which works out to about $40,000 a year. This, of course, means that many of those average wage earners are paying off tens of thousands of dollars in student loans that the average high-school-graduate wage earner in 1965 did not have to concern himself with.
The original MSRP of a Ford Galaxie in 1965 was $2,730.
The MSRP of a 2018 Focus sedan, which is probably the closest equivalent to a Galaxie, is $17,950.
If you were making 7 grand a year in 1965, and you bought a new Galaxie, it cost 39% of your income if you were making the average.
If you’re making 40 grand a year today (which is somewhat misleading because that average counts CEO salaries which skew the data higher, and CEO salaries have increased by an astonishing amount since the 60’s) and you buy a new Focus, it costs just under 45% of your income.
And that’s not factoring in the idea that today in many markets, a $250,000 house is considered a starter home and apartment rents are well north of $1,000 for a 1 bedroom dump. It’s not at all unusual for people to have to spend 50% of their income on housing - a big change from the old days - which means that 45% to buy a car stings even more because after you pay for the other stuff you have to buy, you have even less left over to put toward a vehicle.
I never said it was a conscious decision to crash it. I would, however, say it’s a conscious decision not to care if the dash crashes due to use outside of the parameters intended.
Yes, my Acura is the same way, and mom’s ancient flip phone isn’t on that list. Seeing as that’s the phone that crashed her BMW, I paired it to my car for fun. Know what happened? Nothing, because the car refused to pair with it. That’s how it should work; if pairing with the phone will cause problems, then pairing should be rejected
I mostly agree, although a lot of drivers tend to get distracted easily, and trying to figure out why everything to your right just went black is a real good way to be distracted. But no, it’s not going to send the car out of control, and that’s great, except that it goes toward my point that, not being a strict safety issue, it’s an engineering decision that can and does get past regulations requiring safe engineering.
Red herring. It’s already stipulated that the phone isn’t going to work with the bluetooth module. That’s fine. It’s even, sort of, fine if the bluetooth module crashes when trying to deal with the phone. What’s not fine is that the bluetooth module crashing causes collateral crashing. Other car makers have managed to figure out how to avoid the situation entirely. I would expect The Ultimate Driving Machine™ to not be worse than other cars.
It doesn’t matter. Hardly any engineering screwup is on purpose. Even the deadly ones. An airplane mechanic once accidentally used the wrong screw to secure the plane’s windshield. The windshield blew out when the plane was at altitude, and sucked one of the pilots halfway out the window. They couldn’t get him back in until the plane landed. It’s a miracle the guy survived.
That was entirely accidental on the mechanic’s part. He did not set out to almost kill a pilot. But it happened, and it’s because he screwed up.
I’m not accusing BMW of intentionally doing bad things. I’m accusing them of not caring if bad things happen as a result of people using the car in ways they didn’t specifically dictate.
This is funny. I’ve seen it before. As an engineer I’m sure you know that this joke is meant to be internal to engineers/IT professionals/etc, and the sentiment it expresses should not make it into design, because you know that your designs are going to be used improperly by idiots and smart people alike, and you need to at least make an attempt to keep the mess to a minimum when it happens.