June 13, 2007
Take my old car . . . please
In Slate, a piece by Paul Boutin titled "I Hate My Classic Car: Thank goodness they don't make 'em like that anymore."
The car in question is an early '60s Avanti, but even taking cars ten or fifteen years old the contrast with current-production vehicles is dramatic. I seem to have misplaced the link, but there was an article in the (Sunday?) Times of London a while back about an experiment where several drivers of late-model performance cars were put through various gymkhana-type tests, first with their own cars, and then with a car 15 years old. Upshot was that much of their fancied driving skills was due to improved automotive technology, as control was quickly lost on the old car lacking sophisticated traction control systems, antilock brakes, and the like.
Posted by David on June 13, 2007 9:24 PM
A car 10-15 years old is what we drive. When it dies we'll replace it. My bike is younger, my spare bike older. Ditto my wife's bikes. As for your point about plonkers with "performance cars" - well, obviously. In Britain a performance car makes no sense unless you expect to drive through Germany a lot.
Posted by: dearieme on June 14, 2007 1:22 PM
In those old days, there was more of a blue-collar culture among middle-class men, and if you owned a car like that then you were at basics an amateur mechanic. (Nowadays, we have Linux users.) Men who drove such cars eventually grew attached to them; understood their quirks like a captain understands his ship.
In the mid-to-late 1990s I had a Ford Mercury Topaz, 1991 vintage. I took it to the shop every other month in its later years. Then in 1999 I bought a Civic. I've taken it in for oil and transmission fluid changes, filter changes, and state-mandated testing. Other than that I recall replacing an oil pan which the oil-changed had ruined, and a muffler which got dislodged when I ran over some garbage.
Posted by: David Ross on June 16, 2007 11:36 PM
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