This might be fact, but the cause might be open to interpretation. For one thing, it might be that cars were simply more often replaced in the past than now, even though they still functioned properly. As you may or may not know, real purchasing power has declined over the years for lots of people, at least in the US.

It might just be that in the years before the first and second oil shock, it was normal to replace your car with a newer model more often than it is today. And indeed, nowadays both cars and so-called durable appliances are both explicitly designed NOT to last indefinitely. Light-bulbs are one notourious example, cd-rom drive lasers are another.

Other items simply have intrinsically short lifetimes,like cpu's and such which last logaritmically longer when run at lower power.