Another example. My first car was a cherry-red 2002 Mini Cooper S.

I dunno, the engineering angle could go both ways. Many things have been vastly “improved” on over the years, but not always in the name of reliability. There’s a lot of pressure in the industry right now to reduce weight and material/manufacturing costs of so many components, and a lot of things are less robust than…

Consumer products always follow the same pattern as building construction, just several decades later.