I am never buying a new car again. It will be hard, but I'm only buying old cars and repairing them. Not sure what to do about fuel when that stops. I Not sure about how to deal with a lot in the future, but I'm going to keep trying.
You can have good luck just by buying 10 year old cars - they might have connectivity, but the it will be to a cell/network standard that no longer exists and so for practical purposes the car cannot connect to anything.
toyotas are typically outdated. my 2002 car has a cassette deck, but no CD player. i can imagine a car from 2010 barely being able to recieve DAB.
that car will last 20 more years anyway, so i'll just wait this dystopian shit out. why "upgrade" when your car starts every morning and gets 35-40mpg?
not even that. there's LS-400s that have 1M miles / 1,6M km and still use the first engine and transmission.
the engine in my car (1SZ-FE) is known to regularly last 400.000 km. it barely has 100k after 20 years of being a grocery getter for an elderly woman, and the engine shows literally no signs of wear. you drain exactly the amount that goes in.
Oh, I was being cynical, lol. Worst case, ya know!
The Corolla 4 cylinder is probably the most robust engine I've seen. Chain drive for the cam, so no timing belt to wear out, and just rock.
I had a 1982 22R engine go 300k when I was poor- rarely did oil changes, really didn't take care of it. Still started on the first try (with a carb!) when I traded it at 300k, and everything still worked. Only maintenance it required was a water pump at 100k or so, and the usual belts/hoses/brakes. Kind of miss that car. It was gutless, but damn reliable.
I did more maintenance on a 90's Ford with less than 100k miles, ha!
We have numerous Honda and Toyotas in my family, I appreciate that I rarely have to work on them - even the 30 year old ones.
I have thought about something like that. Maybe getting an early model EV and maintaining it. I love the idea of electric vehicles, but they've just always been expensive. Cost is also the reason I have never bought a new vehicle in my life as well.
I don't think there is such a thing as a non-connected early-model EV, aside from really niche stuff that was mostly leased to fleets, like the 1998-2002 Ford Ranger EV or the 1997-2003 Toyota Rav4 EV. Good luck finding one of those, though, and also good luck getting reasonable modern-EV-equivalent range out of the lead acid or NiMH batteries.
Fortunately(?) the planet will have no future if it continues to be the case that basically everyone needs their own personal automobile to function in it.