[SPBS]

> You think your surrogate key will save you? It will not. The world has an external reality that needs to be reflected in your database.

Yes, it will. It is precisely because of a messy external reality that you need an unchanging internal ID that is unaffected by changes to the external ID. If the software designer in the article had followed your advice, changing the chassis number would have likely resulted in broken car ownership records.

Whoever is reading this in the future, please don't follow the parent comment's advice. Use surrogate/synthetic keys for your primary key.