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I know nothing about car repair except changing oil and tires. From what I've been reading lately is that cars are becoming too complex to fix than they did a bunch of decades ago. I do recall a buddy of mine doing some car repair on an old Camry and saving a bunch of bucks.
New cars have warranties, so you shouldn't have to learn how to do repairs on them. That being said, probably the simplest cars will be base level trucks and base level economy cars.
The majority of things aren't harder to work on, and the things that are, well those would have required skill to work on yesterday, and today it's computer diagonistics, so in a way those are easier too.
Brakes, fluids, shocks, hoses, pumps, those wear items are still as easy as ever.
Lots of things on new vehicles almost never need repair. Today's cars are all fuel injected, but that almost never needs service. Spark plugs on most cars now last 100,000 miles or longer. They don't have distributors. Many don't have spark plug wires.
Brakes haven't really changed much - and it is easier to service disk brakes than old drum brakes.
Routine maintenance on most cars today is straightforward and not difficult.
I don't think newer cars are really that much harder to work on; in fact, there are lots of repairs that had to be made requently on older cars that don't even exist on newer cars (distributor, carb, points, etc.).
The big difference is that when an older car quit along the side of the road you had a fighting chance of getting it back on the road with duck tape, baling wire, and whatever common hand tools you might happen to have in the trunk.
Stick with something simple. Naturally-aspirated inline four of some kind, and preferably not AWD.
Mike
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