a quick look around a traditional car scrapyard/breakers shows that people are willing to let their cars go sooner than later, many owners not affording repairs on them or willing to fix them themselves, its a throwaway society.
When I first started driving in the late 1980's, car breakers were full of cars that were really mangled, really rusty or just really worn out. Anything in tidy condition, especially bodyworkwise, would not have been scrapped. Rather they would have money spent on them to keep them on the road.
With the advent of cheaper new cars (plus easily available finance 'credit') and an overall reduction of the cost of motoring from the 1990's onwards, old cars, unless they were "classics", were simply disposed of when a 500 quid ECU went pop or the ABS failed. It just wasn't worth repairing them. Now add to that the demand for raw steel/ iron from places like China and India, then the moment a ten year old car needed work for an MOT it was more likely to be weighed in for scrap than repaired and put back on the road.
So now we have a situation where a lot of old cars were crushed to the point that many 15 - 20 year old models have become almost extinct. On top of that the credit crunch happend and car sales plummeted, along with many motor manufacturers getting into serious financial trouble.
Now fast forward ten years time. We'll all be skint because of the credit crunch, there'll be few second hand cars available as no-one bought new cars and the most of the old cars had been scrapped in the 2000's, plus the motor industry will most likely be centered around dodgy little cars from the far east and India.
I suggest if you have a small simple Fiat you hold on to it, look after it and stockpile spares NOW! Mad Max may have actually been a premonition of the furture!
