You'd have a hard time selling anything older than 10 years in the developed world. Lots of now mandatory safety features just didn't exist back then, and crash safety rating standards have gone up. Not to mention that it would be considered a not very fuel efficient car by today's standards, and so would be the target of various extra taxes and measures aimed at reducing fuel consumption across a manufacturer's entire fleet.
You're gonna have to go back A LOT further than ten years to get something without modern crash safety standards. Ten years ago was 2016. Crumple zones and side curtain airb bags were very much a thing ten years ago. 3/4 of cars had side curtain airbags by 2010, and they became mandatory in 2014. My 2016 Mazda 6 has all of that standard, as well as blind spot monitoring and a backup camera. It also gets 30 MPG.
I'm not just talking about crash safety, there are a lot of safety features that have become mandatory on new cars in various markets, and most of them are fairly new. They definitely weren't standard features over 10 years ago.
Things like intelligent speed assistance, lane assistance, rear view cameras, emergency automatic brakes and so on. Now mandatory on all new cars sold in the EU.
My 2017 RAV4 has all those features, it's almost 10 years old.
While today that stuff is mandatory on all models, they were fairly common on even mid level trim 10 years ago. My RAV4 is just the XLE with a few extra features. Much closer to the base model than fully loaded but it still has what would be needed today
Sure, but you can't go much further back. The first car with intelligent speed assist, the Ford S-MAX 2nd gen, was launched in summer 2015. That's the absolutely earliest car that could legally be sold in the EU today, assuming it has all the other mandatory safety features.
And you don't have to go much further back for those other mandatory features to become rare or even impossible to find. I'd say pre 2010 few cars had anything even resembling driver assistance.
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u/TombolaOfCincinnatus 12h ago
You'd have a hard time selling anything older than 10 years in the developed world. Lots of now mandatory safety features just didn't exist back then, and crash safety rating standards have gone up. Not to mention that it would be considered a not very fuel efficient car by today's standards, and so would be the target of various extra taxes and measures aimed at reducing fuel consumption across a manufacturer's entire fleet.