The “Forever Car”: Why Longevity Is the Luxury Advantage Against Chinese EVs
“In a world racing towards even more disposability, permanence is luxurious.”
In my previous article, I argued that the “Quartz Crisis” that reshaped the Swiss watch industry offers a blueprint for how legacy automakers can survive, and even thrive, as Chinese EVs remake the global car market. I made the case that legacy brands should lean into their heritage, move upmarket, and treat ICE not as a liability but as an emotional asset.
There is one dimension of that argument worth expanding: longevity.
A high-end mechanical watch can cost as much as a very exotic car, yet it can last multiple lifetimes with proper servicing; that comparison is not trivial. If a luxury watch is worth five or six figures because it endures, then what does it say about luxury car pricing for a vehicle that is expected to depreciate to scrap within a few decades at most?
In other words, it does feel strange that a watch, with its limited utility and functionality, could cost so much; so, is watch pricing too high, or is car pricing too low, provided some longstanding assumptions are overturned?
The asymmetry is not technological. It is philosophical, regulatory, and strategic, and rethinking it points directly to where legacy automakers can go next.
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The “Forever Car”: Durability as the ultimate luxury
A mechanical watch is valuable not because it is the most precise timekeeping device (that advantage vanished the moment quartz arrived), but because it is repairable; springs and gears can be cleaned, oiled, regulated, and replaced.
A quartz watch can also be serviced, true, but for the most part, a quartz watch is viewed as a cheap watch, eventually headed for an unceremonious end.
This is a fundamental difference, because longevity is the hidden engine of luxury, and in fact, before today’s mass-market luxury adoption, it was one of its pillars. As Robert Dumas, ex-president of Hermès said: “Luxury is that which can be repaired”.
“Luxury is that which can be repaired.”
A 1940’s Patek Philippe, properly serviced, can still keep excellent time today, and will still work 100 years from now. The value is as much in the permanence as the ingenuity it required to be conceived.
So here is the strategic question:
If a mechanical watch can be built to last a century and be priced with that capability in mind, why can’t a Porsche, BMW, Lexus, or Ferrari, or even a Ford, be built to last a century, and also be priced with that capability in mind?”
This is a monumentally expensive challenge, but one that is technically feasible, with potentially monumental returns, and it actually represents a return to an era that has existed before, the era before planned obsolescence.
Metal can be used instead of plastic, real leather can be used instead of imitation, engines can be rebuilt indefinitely.
ICE components can be refreshed, upgraded, or retrofitted in ways batteries fundamentally cannot.
The constraint has not been engineering, for a long time, it has simply come down to business incentives.
The moment an automaker chooses longevity, the economics shift completely.
Longevity leads to a different profit model
A car engineered to last a lifetime creates a flywheel of value:
An actual claim to being sustainable, as companies going down this path would essentially be shrinking to grow, producing less but at a higher margin
Higher initial margins, because buyers already understand why durable craftsmanship commands a premium
Recurring revenue from multi-decade servicing, official restoration programs, parts certification, and brand-licensed upgrades
Additional opportunities to really lock-in second-hand sales, keeping a customer within a brand ecosystem for a literal lifetime
Stronger residual values, which reinforce brand prestige and desirability
The possibility of a true collectible ecosystem, where cars become heirloom objects rather than depreciating appliances
This is precisely how the Swiss watch industry rebuilt itself after quartz.
It reframed longevity as a luxury good in its own right, a source of emotional meaning that no competitor could cheaply copy; a watch was no longer a timekeeping device but rather a companion on which one could record their life’s stories.
China can surpass Western automakers in cost, scale, battery tech, and manufacturing efficiency, but China cannot manufacture heritage.
Legacy brands already have this and are in a position to ensure that their individual products have the capacity to capture and create the heritage of their owners.
Anecdotally, Toyota represents an indication that customers would be willing to pay for it, because it is well-known in car enthusiast circles that one pays a sort of “Toyota Tax”, a premium above the price of an equivalent car from another automaker, for the perceived longevity this manufacturer has relative to the rest of the market.
Regulations are absolutely an issue, but they aren’t insurmountable
Regulations are a crucial difference in applying the case of watches to cars, and understandably so. Regulations exist to protect both the environment and personal safety. However there is usually enough flexibility to acknowledge a simple reality: just because a car was sold long ago does not mean it cannot be driven today.
Governments routinely allow grandfathering, historic-vehicle categories, retrofit pathways, and low-volume exemption. Furthermore, there are options already on the market today to modernize older cars, one of my favorite examples being how Porsche offers upgrade kits to the entertainment system of cars going back decades.
Owners of forever cars would have to follow maintenance schedules to keep their cars running, so there would be plenty of opportunities to make sure they remain safe as well.
Furthermore, this is a highly sustainable behavior and is very much in line with various “right-to-repair” laws which have come about, especially in Europe.
It’s my hypothesis that if forever cars were legitimately presented as a means of making transportation more sustainable in conjunction with EV adoption in other price segments, the appropriate regulations for allowing cars to be manufactured with a life span of possibly centuries (like a mechanical watch) could be worked out.
Conclusion: Maybe the future of ICE isn’t extinction, but rather immortality
EVs are not “good” or “bad”. ICE is not good or bad. They are technologies for different use cases.
Climate change is real, and transportation must evolve, but the path forward will not be singular.
Just as quartz did not eliminate mechanical watchmaking (indeed, it ended up propelling it forward), Chinese EVs, and EVs generally, should not, and likely will not, eliminate ICE.
They will force ICE to rediscover its true value:
Mechanical permanence
Emotional identity
Motorsport provenance
Craftsmanship
Longevity
The endgame becomes clear:
ICE will no longer be the default means of propulsion, but it can become something far more defensible: heirloom engineering for true connoisseurs.
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Main image source: Spencer Davis via Unsplash