What happened to new cars
This is a second posting of the same essay.
Until about twenty years ago I still got a kick every time a maker brought out a new model. Then the cars stopped interesting me, imports included, and I lost the habit completely. When did the roads fill up with machines like these?
I found an essay that put it better than I could, so I want to pass it on.
Why the Jimny was slow to adopt high-tensile steel, and the weakness it leaves in Japanese cars
By Mitsuha Miyode. The middle of the essay is omitted in the original post. What follows is the argument as it was quoted.
High-tensile steel now makes up more than 80 percent of the body of a current kei car, and ultra-high-tensile steel, harder still, has reached about 30 percent of the whole body.
"High-tensile" is not one material. Grades are sorted by hardness. Anything from 980 MPa up is generally called ultra-high-tensile. Steel in the 300 to 420 MPa band already makes up most of a modern monocoque, depending on the car.
In plain language it is steel that is hard and does not like to bend, and because of that it breaks more readily. It is extremely strong up to a point. Past that point it does not bend. It snaps.
People say a four-wheel-drive, which can meet any load while it is moving, should use as little of it as possible. That, the essay argues, is a story design offices like to tell. High-tensile steel lets you thin the panel and save weight, and unlike aluminum it has a fatigue limit. Rally cars use it on purpose. Adjust the carbon and the outside can be hard while the inside stays tough, so a body can be both strong and good at absorbing a hit.
Chrome-molybdenum steel, a cousin of high-tensile steel, does not press well, so it rarely becomes a monocoque or a ladder frame. In tube frames it has been "about as good as it gets" for years. Aerobatic aircraft still build frames from it. Off-road buggies use it. Call it short on ductility if you like. "No good off road" is simply false. Leave the thickness alone, ignore the weight saving, and it gets stronger, not weaker. Ladder-frame four-wheel-drives at home and abroad use it as a matter of course.
So why was the Jimny reluctant? One reason is cost, obvious from any materials magazine. High-tensile steel is expensive. It pays on a mass-produced car only because the panel can be thinner, the welds fewer, the process shorter, and the steel consumed smaller. Keep the thickness and then make the body stronger, and the price jumps by half a million yen without trying. A kei car that uses a lot of high-tensile and ultra-high-tensile steel lands in the two-million-yen range. One that uses almost none can still be sold for under a million. Luxury ladder-frame four-wheel-drives have room in the price, so they can adopt the steel and leave the thickness alone. A Jimny is still a kei car. Option it up and you are already looking at two million yen. Pushing the base price over that would have hurt sales. Easy to guess that they stopped there.
Specialists say cost is not the only reason. There is also the cost of living with the car. Some people claim high-tensile steel was avoided because it rusts faster than ordinary sheet. Paint and the rest of the protection can deal with that. The real problem is built into the material: a car made of it is not simple to repair.
The National Consumer Affairs Center has been hearing the same stories. A side impact that looks minor is written off. A repair bill arrives that no one can square with the damage. People on both sides of the crash start to ask whether modern cars are fragile. The essay's author says the steel itself does not make a car fragile. The body design, and the way the steel is used, does.
High-tensile steel, used at full thickness the way Saab once showed, can make a monocoque last far longer. An SUV calculated to the limit around it has even been claimed not to need a ladder frame. The steel is not a fragile material, and it is not planned obsolescence. The question is not whether you use it. It is how.
Look at a current car. A "luxury" kei car around two million yen is full of ultra-high-tensile parts, not merely high-tensile: 1,500 MPa stock, past the old 980 MPa line. That hardness was once called too hard to press properly, and forming it is a special process. Press it cold and, when the stress lets go, springback pulls the panel back toward its old shape. Springback can keep going while the monocoque is being assembled, loading neighboring parts and, at worst, twisting the body. So ultra-high-tensile parts are hot-stamped: the sheet is pressed at about 900 degrees and quenched, which is how you get a 1,500 MPa part. Steel from 980 to 1,500 MPa, made that way, is called hot-stamped stock.
Anyone with a technical background, reading that, will ask how you put a bent piece back. You mostly cannot. And yet this material is now used, without much fuss, in rocker outers and B-pillars, exactly the parts that fold in a side impact. It used to be local: the root of a B-pillar, a bumper beam, places you truly did not want to bend. Then it spread, because it saves weight, and makers began advertising the percentage. Toyota's highest is about 32 percent 1,500 MPa hot-stamped steel. A conventional frame bench cannot repair the result. A modest impact can scrap the car.
The frightening case is when ultra-high-tensile steel does not break. If a body and a body have someone between them, a rescue spreader can run out of force. That has already been a problem in a rail accident, where automotive spreaders were not strong enough. You may have to cut steel while fuel is leaking. Older design put the steel only where bending was unacceptable, and used it as a composite: that piece can break, and the rest of the body bends or flexes so the whole thing does not come apart. From about 2010, makers everywhere started using it across a much wider area. Crash survival has improved. Situations that used to kill outright now leave people critically injured, and rescuers in Europe worry about bodies that take too long to open.
Heat the ultra-high-tensile part again and the 1,500 MPa is gone. It becomes thin, soft sheet and tries to return to the shape it had before forming. Heat it again without the proper process and you get springback, or you never get the strength back. The old body-shop method, a torch on one spot to move the metal, is impossible. Makers forbid it. Heat can also weaken the parts next to it. Toyota has a manual, special equipment, and temperature control, and that only covers steel up to about 1,000 MPa. At 1,500 MPa the rule is to replace the safety part. Those parts used to be a small reinforcing plate. Now the part is the whole B-pillar, and replacement is not simple. Damage on the left can spring the right-hand parts when you start the repair, so the manual seriously requires left and right to be done together. And that is only inside the "repairable" range. In practice the important section has often already cracked, and the car is finished.
In the days of ordinary steel you bent it back and loaded it with filler. This is not that steel. Toyota and the other big domestic makers also forbid sectioning a 1,500 MPa body: unpicking the welds and joining in a new piece, the overhaul that used to follow a wrecked monocoque. The joints are often laser or TIG welds, not ordinary spot welds, and the repair needs specialist gear. The bill gets large, and a total loss arrives easily. A total loss is not "cannot physically be repaired." It is "the repair costs more than the car is currently worth." A car worth one million yen and a repair of 1.2 million is a total loss. Whether it could be repaired is not the point.
That is why the Jimny was slow to adopt the steel. A Jimny is driven on rough ground, and a bent body is normal. The ladder frame is strong enough that a slightly bent body still drives. The body is not welded to the frame, so in principle the body can be swapped. Use high-tensile or ultra-high-tensile steel and a distorted body can pass damage into the frame. Distortion on one side is said to affect the other. Even with a frame that is not welded to the skin, nobody could be sure what a small twist would do, so the designer stayed reluctant, and rustproofing was left for later.
That later car is the JB64. Rustproofing waited. What they did revisit, thoroughly, was how it drove. Catalog numbers mattered. Knowing Suzuki, the essay guesses they assumed owners would rustproof the thing themselves, and compromised on purpose. Suzuki does that on two wheels and on four: wherever they expect the owner to modify the machine, they leave it alone. On four wheels some of the results rust so readily that the author does not want to own them. A new Alto, designed with that compromise and then properly rustproofed, might last. Used prices that fall fast are a fair report on durability.
Jimny specialists study the weak points and sell complete cars. The essay still does not think a new one is worth two million yen. A rough road or a forest track is within reach of a four-wheel-drive kei truck, and Suzuki already builds a decent one, the Carry. Spend the hobby money there. The Jimny is safer in a crash, because a kei truck's body absorbs almost none of it. The author would still rather play in the truck.
That essay finally made the repair problem clear to me. A small bump, an absurd bill, and the practical answer is to replace the car. Scrap and rebuild keeps an economy moving. Heavy tax on old cars pushes the same way. Who is happier because of it?
Parts last less because they were cost-cut, and the recalls follow. Idle-stop saves a little fuel and demands an expensive battery, which then becomes waste. Features nobody asked for throw errors that only a dealer computer can read. A blown bulb means a LED unit and tens of thousands of yen, plus the particular glare of LEDs in your eyes. Bodies full of curves and steps that freedom of design made ugly. A theft alarm that screams at full volume while you are washing the car. A stall from nowhere, undoing the only things a car has to do: go, turn, and stop.
Are hybrids and EVs kind to the environment? Where do those used batteries go?
I could keep going. You cannot build an appealing car out of this. The last time I bought a new car was 1999. Since then I have moved through a few used ones. I currently keep a 1992, a 1996, and a 2005. They are enough, and I will keep fixing them for as long as I can.
A car the local shop cannot repair.
A car that is scrap after a small bump.
A car you cannot work on the way you want.
I do not want to drive that car.