A scoring instrument for buying a car that doesn't watch you and that you can actually fix. Built from the argument in Old Cars & The Analog Resistance, then extended to cover what that argument leaves out. Everything resolves from a model year, a spec sheet, or a recall database, from your desk.
The reference set, and the fastest way to calibrate. It spans the full range, covers every marque the video names (Bronco, Land Cruiser, Tacoma, Volvo, Land Rover, Porsche, Mercedes), and includes ordinary appliances as a control group. Switch views, sort any column, load a car, then change whatever you disagree with.
MSRP and market are reference only. Neither one feeds the score, and neither can veto a car. An expensive car is not a worse car; it is a budget question, and yours to answer. Figures are approximate 2026 values, rounded, and move constantly.
An earlier version of this page claimed the middle was empty. That was wrong, and the way it broke is the interesting part. The claim was that every car without an embedded modem scores 65 or above, every car with one scores 43 or below, and nothing lands between. Two deliberately built test cases falsified it.
The test: hold the vehicle constant, change only the modem. The 2013 4Runner and the 2020 4Runner are the same truck. Same body-on-frame chassis, same naturally aspirated port-injected 4.0 V6, same parts supply, same Techstream diagnostics. The 2013 scores 78. The 2020, with a live 4G modem, scores 56. The 2015 Wrangler JK scores 80; the 2019 JL, same truck plus a modem and a security gateway, scores 55. Both land inside the band that was supposed to be empty.
So the corrected finding is narrower and more useful. The modem really is worth roughly twenty-two points, and it really does arrive with over-the-air updates, a remote path in, and subscription gating. But it does not by itself push a car into the basement. What put the 2022 Bronco at 44 and the F-150 at 37 was the modem plus a fragile turbo-DI drivetrain and worse access. A connected car that keeps a simple engine and stays wrenchable lands in the middle, and that is exactly what a modern 4Runner is. The middle is thin, not empty, and it is where the honest compromises live.
That claim rested on five cars, two of which were the pair used to break the original one, so it was close to circular. Six vehicles were added to test it properly. Three landed in the band and sharpened the rule: the 2021 Tundra at 59 (live modem, naturally aspirated V8, open tooling), the 2019 Sienna at 54, and the 2019 Chevy Express at 53 — a van on a platform from 1996 with a 4G modem bolted to it, which is the thin middle expressed as a single vehicle. Three missed, and they are kept here because a failed falsification is still evidence: the 2017 Frontier at 73, because Nissan did not fit the Frontier a modem until 2022; the 2018 Odyssey EX-L at 65, because Honda's embedded 4G was a Touring-and-Elite option that year; and the 2018 Tacoma at 70, which turns out to be the only car in the set scoring 4 on the modem criterion — the network is dead, but the unit is built into the radio rather than bolted beside it, so you cannot simply pull it out. That option had never once been used before this batch.
A later batch put three more in the band without trying to: the 2026 Wrangler at 53, the 2026 Frontier at 51 and the 2026 4Runner at 45. Twelve cars now live between 45 and 64, and the pattern in all of them is the same — a live modem sitting on top of a drivetrain and a parts supply that are still ordinary. The band is no longer thin because the evidence was thin. It is thin because very few manufacturers still build like that.
The lesson from the misses is the more practical one. The modem did not arrive everywhere at once. It reached luxury flagships years before it reached work trucks, and on several models it was an option box rather than standard fit, which means the trim matters as much as the year. A 2017 truck and a 2018 minivan can both be modem-free while a 2010 E350 is not.
Honda was the last manufacturer holding the line. It stopped. This page used to end that thought with "whether that survives the next redesign is a different question, but as of now you can buy a new car that is not on a leash." That is no longer true, and it is worth saying plainly rather than quietly editing. The 2024 Civic scored 64 because its telematics unit talked over WiFi and your phone rather than its own cellular connection. The 2026 Civic ships a telematics control unit with an embedded modem, a WiFi hotspot, geofencing, speed alerts and remote power on/off from an app. It scores 45. The Civic ladder now reads 75, 66, 64, 45 across twenty-one years: two points of drift and then a cliff.
Which means the answer to "can I buy a new car that isn't watching me" is now no. Not "yes, if you pick carefully" — no. Every 2026 car scored here carries a live modem — that part has held. The rest of the sentence has not. This page said yesterday that the best of them was the Civic at 45, the very bottom of the Transitional band. Five more 2026 cars were added the next day and the top of the range moved to the Wrangler at 53, with the Frontier at 51 and the 4Runner at 45 behind it. The claim was true of the four 2026 cars then scored and false of the nine now scored, which is a good reminder that a range is only as honest as its sample. The 2026 RAV4, the best-selling vehicle in the country, adds an infrared camera on the steering column and Toyota's Arene platform, which lets the manufacturer change how the car behaves after you have bought it. The 2026 Outback scores 34, exactly what the 2020 Outback scores, and the 2026 F-150 scores 37, exactly what the 2024 scores: no movement at all, because there was nowhere left to fall. So the honest version is narrower and worse. You cannot buy a new car that is not watching you. You can still buy one you are allowed to fix — and this page guessed wrong about what it would be. It said a body-on-frame truck. Five cars were then added specifically to break that, and one did: the 2026 Mazda MX-5, at 56, is the highest-scoring new car here. The 2026 BRZ manages 46, twelve points above its own Outback stablemate. What actually predicts a fixable modern car is not the ladder frame. It is the absence of a camera pointed at your face, a naturally aspirated engine, and a manufacturer that still sells parts — and a two-seat roadster satisfies all three as well as an F-250 does. The used market is where the unwatched cars live, and this table is a map of both.
And the ceiling is exactly what you would guess. A 1957 Bel Air scores a clean 100. Nothing to transmit, nothing to update, nothing to plug into, and a reproduction parts catalogue thicker than the factory one. It is also a car with no airbags, no ABS, drum brakes at all four corners and a steering column pointed at your sternum, which is why it carries three vetoes. The top of this scale is not a recommendation. It is a definition.
Luxury fell furthest, and it is not close. Three nameplates run the length of this table. A 1991 Mercedes 560SEL scores 85; the 2025 S-Class scores 17. A 1991 BMW 325i scores 92; the 2024 330i scores 27. A 1991 Lexus LS400 scores 85; the 2024 LS500 scores 34. Same badges, same market position, drops of 68, 65 and 51 points. The pattern is not subtle: the features that sell a premium car in 2026 are precisely the ones this rubric penalises, because a flagship is where every manufacturer ships its cameras, its subscriptions and its remote access first. The cheapest car in this whole set, a $7,000 1984 Toyota Pickup, outscores all three modern flagships by more than sixty points.
The 4Runner ladder is the cleanest thing in this table: 2013 at 76 (no Safety Connect), 2016 at 73 (Safety Connect fitted, killed by the 2022 3G sunset), 2020 at 54 (live 4G), 2026 at 45 (all-new generation, turbocharged). One truck, four configurations. A dead modem costs three points. A live one costs twenty-two.
The Frontier and the MX-5 hit the same number, and the reason is worth being precise about. Nissan did not fit the Frontier a telematics unit until 2022: the 2017 scores 73 and the 2026 scores 51. The 2016 MX-5 scores 78 and the 2026 scores 56. Both drops are twenty-two points, the same as the 4Runner’s.
This page called that a replicated result. That was overstated, and here is the correction. Twenty-two is arithmetic. A modem never arrives alone: it takes the modem criterion from 10 to 0, over-the-air updates from 5 to 0, the remote-immobilization path from 4 to 0, and subscription gating from 5 to 2. Ten plus five plus four plus three. Any car that gains a modem and changes nothing else must fall exactly twenty-two points — that is the rubric’s structure, not a discovery about cars. The genuinely empirical part is the nothing else: three vehicles, three manufacturers, and in each case the other ten criteria did not move at all. The trucks really are as repairable as they were. Only the leash is new.
The 2026 4Runner is worth one more line, because it is the rare case of a manufacturer declining to add something. Toyota put an infrared driver-monitoring camera in the 2026 RAV4 and did not put one in the 2026 4Runner, whose driver monitor works off steering torque instead. Seven points, same brand, same year, and the only reason the 4Runner clears the Transitional line at all.
| Score | Band | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| 85–100 | True analog | Almost certainly pre-1996. Passes on principle, not on technicality. Realistically a second vehicle. |
| 65–84 | Analog-leaning | Daily-drivable with real compromises. Usually private by accident of age rather than by design. |
| 45–64 | Transitional | The computer arrived but the leash hadn't. Fixable if you buy the right tool. |
| 0–44 | Connected | A modern car. It may wear the costume convincingly; it still reports home. |
Fourteen criteria, scored one at a time. Each carries a pointer to where the answer lives online, so a candidate can be fully scored before you contact a seller. Your answers are saved in this browser and in the page URL, so you can bookmark a scored car or send it to someone.
The video doesn't raise any of these, which is its biggest omission. A car can score 100 and still be the wrong car. Tick anything true; one tick outranks the whole score. Price is deliberately not here.
Safety. Deliberately kept out of the score and put in the vetoes instead, because averaging it in would let a strong analog score paper over a car with no airbags. It shouldn't be a tradeable point. It should stop the purchase or not.
Price. Shown in the table, outside both the score and the vetoes. A car is not worse for being expensive, so price never costs a point and never disqualifies anything. It is there because the numbers are interesting on their own: a 1966 Bronco went from $2.4k to $85k while a 1991 LS400 went from $42k to $7k, and that divergence has nothing to do with how analog either one is.
Whether the car is any good. This is the one worth internalising. A 1978 Cutlass scores 92, inside the top ten. It is a smog-choked malaise-era sedan making about 140 horsepower from a 5.7-litre V8, with vague steering and drum brakes at the back, and almost nobody would choose to drive one daily. It scores 92 because it is genuinely unwatched and genuinely fixable, which is all this page measures. A high score means the car will not report on you and you can repair it yourself. It does not mean the car is fast, comfortable, safe, efficient, or pleasant, and the 1984 Toyota Pickup above it at 96 was a $7,000 truck. Analog is a property, not a compliment.
Electric drivetrains — a criterion this page had to rewrite. L-01 used to be called "drivetrain simplicity" and it read exactly two things off the spec sheet: aspiration and injection. That worked for combustion engines and failed everywhere else. A Tesla took full marks, because an electric motor really is the mechanically simplest drivetrain here — while the sealed structural pack underneath it, which no independent shop can open, was invisible to the score. A Prius took full marks over a hybrid battery. A Rivian took full marks despite non-certified shops being unable to order parts for it. And a 1994 Cummins was penalised for a turbocharger you can rebuild on a bench. Four failures, all in the same direction: the criterion was measuring engine architecture when the thing worth measuring is what the drivetrain forces you to maintain and whether you are allowed to touch it.
So it now asks that instead, and fifty of the seventy-six cars moved. Mechanical fuel control scores 5 and a turbo no longer counts against it, which is why the 12-valve Ram went up. An electronically managed engine you may still service yourself scores 3, which is where most of this table now sits — including cars that used to take full marks simply for being carburettor-adjacent. Stacked complications you cannot avoid score 1. A sealed or structural pack, or a drivetrain the manufacturer will not let an independent open, scores 0: the Teslas and the Rivian fell five points each. The honest consequence is that the spread narrowed. Old cars lost two points they were being given for having fuel injection at all, modern ones gained one for being complicated rather than forbidden, and the gap between a 1991 sedan and its 2025 descendant shrank from 71 points to 68. The thesis survived the correction, which is the only reason it is worth stating.
The photographs. Every car photo here is a free-licensed file from Wikimedia Commons — public domain, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA — credited under the image with a link to its source page, because nothing else would be honest to republish. A few are the right generation rather than the exact model year: the FJ40 shown is a 1969, the 80-series is a diesel HZJ80R, the 2013 4Runner is a 2011. The credit line always names the real file, so you can check what you are looking at. Where a photo fails to load, the page falls back to a drawn schematic profile.
The specific example. This rubric scores a model. It cannot score the one car in the listing, which is what a pre-purchase inspection is for. Research picks the model; the PPI picks the car.
Several claims on this page assert what is true right now — which cars you can still buy unwatched, what the current model year ships. Those decay, and a page that corrects itself is only worth anything if you can tell how old the correction is. Every revision that moved a number or retired a claim is listed here.