Competition, in theory, should combat this. It does, but it should.
Cars do have failure modes other than rust, like crashes. Having not yet read the article, I expect crashes still destroy cars.
Edit: having read the article, it was not a dense technical work and was disappointing on specifics.
Having worked on and had every major brand (and some obscure ones) in my family, there’s a reason Japanese cars are considered the most durable.
We’ve driven numerous Toyotas and Hondas 300k+. Some we still have, 30 years old or more.
Working on Toyota and Honda is generally much easier and far less frequent than other brands.
You can see how American car companies enshittify things when there’s a joint platform (Ford/Mazda, GM/Toyota, Chrysler/Mitsubishi). Invariably the American version is inferior, and even the Japanese company version often suffers with some of the same shitty design/engineering choices.
I refuse to ever again own an American vehicle, or even one of the joint platforms. I’ve had both - they suck to work on, require more frequent repairs, sometimes to things that just never fail on Japanese cars (especially electronics and control systems… Looking at *you" Jeep/Chrysler).
