Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Bart's Car Stories" channel.

It's the EPA! A vehicle with that small of a footprint needs to get something like 35 mpg, which just isn't possible for a compact pickup with good power and torque. You can sort of replicate the highway power you (OK "I") want, with today's turbo 4-cylinders, but I'm just going to keep fixing my '93 Toyota forever. If it needs an engine re-build, I'll replace the 3.0 L V6 with a 3.4 L V6. It's over 200K and still doesn't burn any oil. Compression is 130-140 psi on all 6 cylinders.
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@Strideo1 If they made a basic pickup with zero electronics and just did things mechanically, like they did 40 or 50 years ago, they'd last longer, you could repair them forever, and there would be a much better used-car market. I always drove compact pickups because I was poor and I didn't need to tow a huge payload. You can't even find a decent compact pickup, these days. They're all mid-sized 4-doors, mostly because of the EPA and how auto makers got around their ridiculous regulations by just making bigger trucks, rather than wasting their time making compact trucks, because none of the compact trucks that we wanted get good enough gas mileage to satisfy the EPA's ridiculous "standards" that are just a bunch of made-up nonsense by some stuffed shirt in some office building 2000 miles away.
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This is your government, working with the richest lobbyist. The EPA destroyed the compact pickup in America.
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We'd have to get the U.S. Government out of the business of telling auto makers how they should make cars. I think that's #1. A lot of the phoney-baloney's the automakers have done over the last 50 years have been because some bureaucrat, with no stake in the game, decided he knew better than the automakers and the customers what the automakers and the customers need. Once you get beyond switching to unleaded gas, the EPA has been terrible. They create more pollution by making cars that don't last. They put a bunch of extra "features" in that will break or cause your car not to work, because of one microchip. "My taillight stopped working." "That'll be $5,000, sir."
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@JoshuaOverman My 2012 has HUGE roof posts that obstruct my vision. My '93 has great visibility, 360 degrees. I don't think you are correct. TONS of plastic in my Taco, including the bed and wall liners that come stock.
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@all_my_friends_are_dead They used to be cheaper to maintain. Nowadays, it's getting harder and harder to find parts for older vehicles. There's more money in selling you a new one when the old one breaks down. In the '80s, before the Internet, you could order catalogs FULL of new-old parts and darn near build an entire vehicle by buying parts from the catalog(s). Most of the guys I knew who had cars in high school bought junkers and fixed them up, themselves. Parts were cheap. There were junkyards, and you could roam the lot, yourself, finding parts you needed and removing them, yourself. They'd check you at the gate and you'd pay for what you took, and it was CHEAP. Those days are gone.
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I just thought the CyberTruck seemed pretty out of touch, from the get-go. More of a plaything for a rich man than something practical for a schmuck like me. But don't go by me. I'm pretty regressive about vehicles. I wouldn't mind if they still built cars like they did in the early '70s. The tech then was not much worse for the environment than the tech, now, but they built things to last, and they actually gave thought to whoever had to work on the thing, later. I think an old-fashioned car that you can repair and maintain for 20 or 30 years is way gentler on the environment than something with all the government-approved gizmos that's going to wear out in 5 to 10 year, no matter how well you take care of it.
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