Minor nitpick and I know there’s absolutely no difference between it and the Ford LTD, but it’s the Mercury Marquis.
You can thank the EPA for that. When they mandated that emissions controls on cars had to last 50,000 miles, all the manufacturers went to stainless steel exhausts.
My laces break or wear out on a regular basis. Part of it is that my feet are very narrow so I have to have the laces tied very tight.
Motorcycles. Much like cars, they used to be something that you worked on a lot. Not nearly as much today. My 2007 Honda 600 still runs like new with nothing but periodic oil changes.
In a management class the professor used to mention how Ford wold buy back their cars from junkyards and go over them to find out what was still original and working on the car so those items can be redesigned to fail faster. Now one can say if their cars would only last X miles, there is no reason to put a alternator that would last 2x miles in it, so in that sense it was designing to cost, but the motivation was to have to car ‘fail’ all together after x miles so the person is encouraged to get a new one, and to destroy the secondary market.
Don’t know if that is true, but it was going into the philosophy of TQM - Total Quality Management (basically high quality is cheaper then low quality) where TQM was not the ongoing US business philosophy and the US manufactures rejected TQM, the person who proposed it went to Japan who adopted it, and Japan went from cheap crap manufacturing to some of the highest standards, and took substantial market share from the US companies, who then went the TQM route to compete.