Anyone else think the old boring cars were the last honest machines?

I daily a 2006 Tundra with 240k on it and I do basially everythign myself, so I get the pull of the old stuff. Ball joints, alternator, water pump, all done in my garage with a socket set and a service manual. But I'm not going to pretend that makes it the smarter family car. My truck has one airbag, no blind spot monitoring, and stopping distances that would scare you if you ever looked them up. My wife's 2019 Highlander has been nearly maintenace free in six years and the times something did act up, the code readout pointed us right at the part instead of guesswork.

The driveway repairability thing is real but it gets romanticized. A 90s Corolla still needed a timing belt, radiator, and half the gaskets eventually. Older cars are cheaper to fix, not less likely to break. My truck breaks plenty, I just choose to eat the labor cost in weekends.

My honest take for a family daily is buy the newer car you can afford, ideally one or two years old with the factory warranty still running, and keep the old beater as the second vehicle for hauling and learning wrenching on. You get the crash protection and the backup camera your wife likes, and you're not signing up for subscription heated seats either, that stuff is mostly avoidable at that price point. The sweet spot is boring, slightly used, and modern enough to have the safety tech.

I went newer a couple years back with a 2017 Mazda3 for the family hauler and honestly the repair fear never materialized. I've done the front pads, both serpentine-adjacent jobs like the alternator, and a battery swap in my driveway with the same old toolbox I've had since college. Oil changes are trivial. The dealer wanted silly money for a cabin air filter and it took me four minutes with the glovebox out. What sold me was my daughter's school run. There's a pickup line full of distracted people and the rear cross traffic alert has caught a truck barreling through twice now that I genuinely woud have missed with my old Buick. My dad drove big 80s sedans his whole life and walked away from two crashes, but I've seen the IIHS videos comparing older body-on-frame cars to even a mid-2010s small car and it changed how I think about it. The subscription stuff is real and annoying though. I shopped a German wagon before the Mazda and walked out when they told me some features needed an app. My advice would be to find something new enough for the safety tech but boring enough that it skipped the fancy touch-everything era, like a mid 2010s base trim with physical buttons and a normal key. Cheap to insure, cheap to fix, still has the camera your wife wants.

I split the difference and it worked out better than I expected. Bought a base trim sedan a few years old, nothing fancy, and the thing that got me over the hump was a cheap bluetooth OBD2 reader. Plugged it into my phone the day I got it home, and now any wierd light on the dash just tells me what's going on before I even decide if it's a driveway job or a shop job. That little box basically killed my fear of the newer electronics. Still wrenches like a normal car for most stuff, and the wife gets her camera. My only regret is I paid the dealer for an oil change once before I realized how easy it still is.

This thread is making me think about my aunt's old wagon from the 90s. She drove that thing into the ground and the only scary part was when the thing that makes the steering easier started going bad and it got relly hard to turn the wheel. Turns out it was just low on fluid and a hose was leaking. My question is, do the newer cars still have that same fluid setup or is it all electric now? Because that's the kind of thing I'd want to be able to top up myself in the driveway instead of paying a shop to plug a computer in.

One thing nobody factors in when they do this math is insurance. I put my teenage son on our 2018 Camry last year and the premium was a couple hundred less than it would've been on my older pickup, purely because of the safety ratings and the airbag count. Newer family cars are literally cheaper to insure in a lot of cases. That alone moved the needle for me when I was agonizing over the same decision.

Update: ordered one of those cheap bluetooth scan tool things after reading this, shoud show up this week. Gotta admit the Tundra guy's point about the airbags hit me, never thougth about how many my daily has. Question though, does a scanner actually tell you much when there's no dash light on, or is it only useful once somthing's alredy acting up?