British Automobiles, Aging Theory, and the Death of Complex Machines

Abstract

Machines provide a longstanding model for how organisms accumulate damage, age, and die. However, the large-scale observation and analysis of complex machine populations under real-world conditions is routinely missing from this framework. Here, we analyze survival and repair patterns in sixty-five million complex machines to reveal fundamental challenges to our theories of biomechanical aging. We measure the reliability, survival, and mechanical failure rates of every privately registered used vehicle in Britain from 2005-2021, using comprehensive samples from 397 million mandatory annual inspections and billions of accompanying repair records. These data reveal that vehicle survival patterns are not a fixed outcome of mechanical reliability or accumulated physical 'wear-and-tear' but display non-aging and anti-aging patterns of survival. These patterns are robust to multiple reanalyses and remain after correcting for diverse external and mechanical predictors of mortality rate using survival forests. These findings challenge the perception of aging as an inevitable and cumulative physical phenomenon, complicate our longstanding comparison of organisms to machines, and highlight exciting new pathways to study the evolution of death in complex systems.