The Boneyard in Las Vegas is also worth seeing. It was featured in one of the Danny DeVito scenes in Mars Attacks.

Leaning on those prior mentioned product mixes, keep in mind that Japanese manufacturers weren't in the American market 60 years ago, so market mix would be wildly different. (Multiple 400k+ mi Toyotas in my family, along with 60 year old GMs, but with aftermarket or rebuilt engines.) The cost of vehicles (and repairs) relative to prevailing wages will impact the repair vs replace balance. Trade publications like Cox/NADA/Adesa/etc. are always cited by financial blogs when mentioning consumer spending/state of economy by average age of cars on the road. Why cars get junked or totaled has shifted drastically, too. Steel bumpers were easy to replace, modern bumper covers with styrofoam backing and aluminum crumple zones, not so much. Tolerances is a vague term in that veiled PR piece on that wiki article. Machining has improved. Tech like direct injection and improved lubrication (synthetics) have done much more in terms of efficiency and longevity. In a lot of cases, manufacturers try to get more and more horsepower from the same displacement by pushing tighter engine tolerances (crank/main bearings, pistons/rings, valvetrain) and things like higher compression ratios and revs, leading to more heat and earlier failure. So while you have better initial engineering, you are closer to the point of failure. For another example, interference engines will grenade themselves if you ignore timing belt maintenance, but in the meantime, you get more horsepower by getting more air into the cylinders.

A v6 Camry or Accord is going to be have more hp, be faster,more reliable at same age, be quieter and get 3x the mpg than nearly any muscle car of the past. Unfortunately it seems that many Americans prefer giant vehicles that place more emphasis on their size (and status) than materially important factors like reliability engineering or fuel economy.

Obviously these are ancedotal examples, they can be confirmed by wasting hours reading about cars and watching mechanic review videos from people who work on them daily (I am partial to the CarCareNut on YT).

Interior wise, you can look at things like fabric durability-- lower deniers can be cheaper, but will wear sooner. Springs/foam in seats are another example, but this will vary across manufacturers, models and trims.

This isn't exclusive to financial engineering manufacturers like Stellantis or Nissan, either. Toyota has had issues with simple things like rust proofing (whether intentional or not) on 1st generation Tacomas leading to massive recalls and things like plastic timing guides prone to wearing out. Ford with the wet clutches having belts submersed in oil. German cars needing body off access for rear timing chain maintenance at 80k miles. Water cooled alternators (really, VW?). All types of "why?" if you follow cars once they are 3+ years old.

It seems like there are a lot of regressions that probably result from cost cutting, while others may exist to simply drive service revenue.

AI overviews are breaking the implicit "contract" for informational sites-- "we will create content to rank on Google with the expectation of monetization via display ads, mailing list growth and/or sales commissions of some sort." If these sites now lose 90% of their traffic, they simply go extinct. We have already seen the destruction of the old web era sites and the walled gardens being built. How many new sites, at the same frequency as 15 years ago, 1) get built and 2) get visibility without relying on one of the fickle walled gardens for an audience?

Google will probably figure out a way to monetize these informational queries by building better profiles of users. Or most likely, they start slipping in commercially biased responses-- either natively or disclosed, but probably based on all user conversations instead of the current one.

Prediction markets, as they currently stand, are at least better with regard to having a lower take and are less predatory in their wagering products and marketing (although these points can very easily change, but the complex wagering menus will be less liquid and harder to grow). If the house cut is 1-3%, that is still drastically better than the other parimutuel wagering in America, horse racing, which is typically 20-25%.

Consumers, for a product such as mortgage, will be fragmented and infrequent users, who will only be in-market for a mortgage for a ~3-6 month window every X years. For this audience, discoverability is what matters-- and they will simply go to a search engine and look for "cincinnati mortgages" for which Google will gladly show 8-12 ads with CPCs of $20. An objective ranking based on rates and fees is useful for the consumer, but not an ad network who would rather drive multiple clicks on paid ads. Being objective and useful isn't enough to play in the space, unfortunately.

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