Repair-It

Murilee Martin on Jalopnik.

http://jalopnik.com/5551040/why-old-cars-suck

The comments are also interesting as people relay their own experiences. In general, I have the following general comments on Murilee's writeup:

- I generally agree with his assessment of the current viability of 90s cars even in 2015. I have been making the very same point recently.

- Many of the terrible old car things can be fixed with modern technology, such as solid state ignition upgrades and fuel injection. His point is well taken if you want to drive a bone stock anything from the 60s, however.

- I disagree about ineffective climate control. The Big 3, by the 60s, in any of their full-size offerings (and probably intermediate) had great HVAC. The rest of the world did probably suck.

A few choice comments:

The interesting differences sum up to this: in 1980, a car from 1970 was OLD. You could expect to spend pretty much every weekend working on it to keep it running. Or a lot of money taking it to the shop.

Meanwhile you can buy a 20 year old B-body for $2k and expect it to actually function properly, except for a few minor things that are easily remedied.

My minivan had 5 layers of anti rust coating on it from the factory, but by its 11th year on the planet the doors were rusting.

Corrosion control has improved dramatically though some still do better than others, which is particularly annoying because it means designs/technology exists to make this a non-issue.

Besides better rustproofing, the one thing I really like about newer cars is that overheating doesn't seem to be an issue—even on cars with ridiculously tiny radiators.

I have plenty of old-car memories of panicking in summertime traffic jams, watching the temp needle climb, cranking the heat in the car to no great effect, and being afraid to turn it off for fear that vapor lock would leave me stranded for the next 45 minutes.

This is a good one, and true. I have memories of the family 83 Caprice wagon being pretty hard to cool. Which was ridiculous for a 145hp LG4. My Caprice, meanwhile, with the same engine design only 10 years later, is far better. My Dad replaced the 83 Caprice with a 91 Olds Custom Cruiser that did not overheat, but did get warmer than it should have. Frankly some cooling system maintenance and a new radiator would have probably helped. I've been pretty aggressive over the years about cooling system maintenance on my Caprice and at 300k, it still cools fine.

In the old days, you bought a new car because it really couldn't be relied on to get you to your destination. Now you buy a new car because the old one acquired a squeak or rattle or the paint is too faded or the seats are torn.

Ten years old and 100,000 miles used to be uncharted territory, requiring a full engine rebuild and replacement of everything else you could get at. And the beast was probably more rust than solid, with everything creaking and flopping about. Now it's just a rite of passage.

Someone else commented that getting a new car every 3 years was considered totally normal. You could push it to 5 if you were cheap/handy. Can't find it now.

Vacuum operated wipers

Vinyl seats

Bondo

Tube tires

Oil consumption

Amusingly, we still have vinyl seats (base seats in entry level German cars mainly) and oil consumption (same vehicles in many cases). It's OK though, because German engineering.