No, obviously not, for a car it's impossible
You didn't make a realistic comparison
For a software it would be perfectly feasible
It is a non-material product and therefore it is only the manufacturer's will to stop marketing it
But the thing that would be PERFECTLY practicable would be to allow the downgrade of any license, I buy an Office 2021 and you authorize me to use an Office 2013, it's only a formal question, it doesn't imply any exchange of documents or materials, nothing at all
It would allow Microsoft to sell a copy of Office and me to remain perfectly legal.
What do you think could be the reason why this is currently NOT possible?
Sometimes analogies are not intended to be "reality"; sometimes analogies are intended to illustrate a point about
logic, which in this case is that the expectation of "forever green products" is not realistic.
The_Doc_Man's more technical explanation is on point. I don't think it's just that it would cannibalize sales from newer products, though.
It's the whole phenomenon of backwards compatibility. It would mean that MS, or Quicken, or Adobe, etc., or any other software vendor would have to guarantee compatibility across all of their products, and do so indefinitely. If you want Office 2013, why not Access 2.0?
Even if the market share for Office 2013 is, say, 10% of the total, and the market share for Access 2.0 is less than 1%, they would have to invest in making sure they were still compatible with the other 89%. They would also have to ensure that security updates were pushed back into the older versions forever as well.
You could offer to pay those costs as part of your license agreement for an older version, I suppose. I'd go along with that, in fact, as long as those costs were borne by the purchasers of older versions and not merged with the costs of owning and using newer versions.
It's also true that companies want to continue to sell newer products. I suppose that's a matter of wanting to stay in business, unless they can figure out a way to get people to keep paying for that Office 2010 installation they bought a decade ago.