The big automobile manufacturers have long ago stopped producing the best cars they could figure out how, instead, they plan to make money before and after the sale. The add all the bells and whistles, because that makes the price tag bigger, but they designed everything on the vehicle to break down shortly after the warranty expires. (no, seriously, their are engineers that work on making parts break down.)
These automobile manufacturers are designing these big wrap around head / tail lights, which might look cool, but what they really are is a big ticket item to charge for a repair. Something that has the same amount of plastic as something from the dollar store but costs $500 or more for a replacement. And then it snaps in to a sheet metal hole, that if twisted and bent a little makes the part not go in right, and, and…
Basically, the automobile manufacturers are robbing you and the entire economy because they want extra profit this year. What they have done is harmful and wrong. They even put a price tag on life. Calculating if they cut this corner, and it costs X number of deaths, is that more or less than the savings of cutting that corner. These groups are doing evil, and it has to stop.
And until now, we really could do nothing about it. The auto manufacturers had a monopoly. Both via regulations, and because they had the big capital of a production facility and tooling. Today, we are seeing CNC come to the homefront and allowing people to actually produce things themselves, that would have been unheard of before.
Edison Motors of Canada built a diesel/electric truck. A heavy duty hybrid truck. And they built it with mostly off the shelf components.
In the video, the guy asks, "Why hasn't anyone done this before?"…"They've been doing this in trains since 1940s".
And yes, these ideas where in 1970s HotRod magazine as well as Popular Mechanics. As well as running cars off of wood gas, or propane, and even cooking oil. So much technology was purchased up by the big motor companies never to see the light of day again. (and yes, i know of many such things from the actual inventors, so i know who sold it and who bought it)
But now, today, a group of Canadian logging truckers have built a hybrid truck. Built it all themselves. With mostly off the shelf parts. Anyone with enough skill could follow in their footsteps. (they are even talking about making kits)
In America there are interesting laws regulating car manufacturing. But, there has always been a little caveat, that a person can build their own car. Of course it has to comply with the vehicle codes in the state it is registered, but that usually isn't too hard.
Mostly this is used by people who build kit cars or modify existing cars. You see, you can build the kits, and you aren't really building a car. You do not have to work through the onerous piles of regulations that any new auto manufacturer would have to comply with. And i do not have any problem with building cars for safety, but there are regulations that are just tedious. And you have to prove you are following each and every one of them. At your expense.
The neat part about pickup trucks is that they are a couple of rails that everything is bolted to. The cab, the engine, the axles. You can quite literally mix and match parts to built a pickup. (except Ford and Chevy decided to make things slightly different so you would have to buy their replacement parts)
And so, if someone started making kits, or parts of kits, then we could see people building their own pickups in their own garages.
The environmental destruction of building something that breaks down decades before it should is reprehensible. Doing this, and tell us that we need to protect the environment by buying new hybrids is just plain evil.
That we have millions of replacement parts that are all, almost the same thing, but each slightly different is an atrocious affront to mechanic. There is no real reason most trucks aren't using the same brake rotors and calipers, except greedy automakers want more money. We can really make parts that are very interchangeable. Pickups have 8 bolt wheel pattern, all standard.
We could dramatically improve the environment, make people's lives easier, have reliable trucks, by just building to one set of standards. (this has nothing to do with the looks, you put whatever truck body you want on the "standardized rails", you bolt whatever engine in between the "standardized rails")
And once we start this kind of project, all kinds of people can add to it.
Where, in the end, there are 1000s of people making parts, and 1000s of people putting pickups together in their garages.
(The greedy auto manufacturers becoming a thing of the past, a footnote of history)