You may be right... planned obsolescence is definitely a sign of the times. We have a “rare” 1942 Cadillac. Auto production stopped in early 1942. The Cadillac still runs like a champ after almost 80 years.. Our Piper Cherokee airplane was made in 1969, 52 years ago. It runs great as well.
We have a couple vehicles around from the mid 1970s. It was not a great time for fuel economy because compression was dramatically lowered for “air pollution”, although there are exceptions. We have a 1977 3/4 ton camper-van with a Chevy 350 with 250,000 mile on it and no rebuilds yet. It gets better fuel economy than our 2001 Chevy Astro Van which is still going strong with over 210,000 miles on it.
Scotty Kilmer a mechanic of You Tube fame says the best made cars from the USA were made from the mid 90s to the mid 2000s. This corresponds with my experiences. Although I really do enjoy working on a vehicle that has no computer. The problem with computerized vehicles is that you can have a bunch of sensors that are a little screwed up but still working causing a poor running vehicle with no good indications of what is actually causing the problems. So you end up changing a bunch of sensors one at at time until you have spent a ton of money. If you guess correctly things will sometimes improve dramatically early on. But if you don't guess correctly or one of your new sensors is a little out of whack it can be a very frustrating experience.
You will be driving around tracking a dozen different sensors using phone software and a bluetooth sending unit from the car's OBDII port and trying to figure out which one is sending an inaccurate reading. It is ridiculous, and it is much worse in certain types of vehicles. Have you ever wondered why you can buy a ten or fifteen year old Land Rover for almost nothing? It often has something to do with this type of thing.
Very good comment. I bought a 2010 BMW X5 diesel that the salesman said didn’t have the new DEF equipment on it (turns out it did - well hidden, no labels on the TWO fill ports). Loved the acceleration, mileage & driving it, despite going on a long hot summer trip and finding out when the AC refrigerant is low it will automatically heat the passenger to keep the driver cool without any sort of warning indication (thought the wife was just having hot flashes!). But the final straw was when it left us on the side of the road during another vacation (eventually determined due to a bad injector) around 100k miles. Managed to drive it back home, but local team BMW was clearly going to soak me for as much as they could to figure out the issue ($4k+), so I wound up diagnosing/fixing myself & sold it before anything else went wrong. Live & learn.