What Cars do You Swear By?
Just found out that my current car will die any day now due to a known defect. It's out of warranty and I have no money to replace it right now.
I've been cursed with car problems my whole life, no matter how well I take care of them, I keep getting screwed.
All of the cars have been Fords because I always heard they were generally dependable and cheap to repair/upkeep, but so far they have all failed me.
What cars do y'all recommend? What cars do you have that just won't give up the ghost no matter how old/beat up they get? If your life depended on your car lasting as long as possible, what car would you drive?
I want whatever car I get next to last me 10-20 years. I want to be that person posting a picture of the odometer hitting 300k miles. I also don't care much about features, reliability is key.
If I'm gonna have computers in my car, ideally they'd be arduino-like such that I can modify the code on-board as I see fit or replace the parts relatively cheaply if damage were to occur to the electronics.
And if there's some issue of people making modifications to that code that should reasonably be illegal, that part could be made read-only. I can't off the top of my head imagine what people would want to modify but shouldn't but if it became a problem it would be easy to fix.
For me, I'd edit things like timing as well as whether a given cylinder/rotor is actively firing based on engine load, disabling cylinders under low load (eg: already at speed, idling) to improve fuel efficiency and maximize power output for a given amount of fuel based on load and whatever the task at hand is (eg hauling loads, hauling ass, or gentle driving)
Edited: I was really tired when I typed this and missed a couple very important words.