"Jan Andersson" <bugfuel@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:65dnqkF2etcsvU1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>snip anecdotal evidence<
>
> Modern cars are packed full of useless junk that not only creates more
> need for maintenance and potential breakdowns, it alienates the operator
> from actual driving skills, and makes him a passenger with no brains,
> rather than a driver.
>
> I'm just ranting I guess, you do have a point.
>
> I'm just so tired of where the industry has gone and how unexciting cars
> have become. I can't remember seeing a new car that made me think : WOW,
I
> gotta get me one of those. I get that with cars older than myself. (I'm
a
> kiddie though, only 35)
Anecdotal evidence aside, the average car coming off of the average
American
assembly line in the 1960s was a piece of junk the day it was built. Cars
in
the 70s were worse.
Because the Japanese were kicking our collective butts, somewhere in the
1980s quality became Job One. And it wasn't until well into the 90s that
the
Big Three finally got a handle on this whole quality thing.
The vast number of cars built today are aimed squarely at the mass market
driver, what I call point-and-shoot cars. Get in, start it up, drive to
work. In a few years, all of those ads and incentives convince these folks
to trade up to a new model. But, through innovation and government
regulation, these point-and-shoot cars are also designed to protect these
drivers from themselves. That's fine, since these folks aren't really into
motoring, they just want reliable trans****tation. And more air bags and
cupholders, apparently.
A very small minority actually likes cars. These people could have bought
any model from any year over the past five decades and kept it beautiful,
kept it running like a clock, and kept racking up the miles beyond 100,000
or 200,000 or much more. These are the cars that we see at shows, that we
see tooling down a back road on a sunny day. While the build quality of
previous decades was suspect at best, no car was built to fail within
four,
five, or six years. Every car came with a little book that describes the
care and feeding of the animal, and owners ignore that little book at
their
own expense.
I'm somewhere in between. I own two Fox Mustangs, both coming up on their
15th birthdays. Neither is a show car, both are daily drivers, neither is
babied. I have regular maintenance done, and when things break, they get
shop time. For whatever reason (that I still haven't fully figured out), I
am in love with this particular model/year and haven't yet been pursuaded
to
trade up.
BUT... How can I argue with the new Corvette? How can I look at the new
Mustang GT, without getting goosebumps? I even see the attraction of the
Nissan Altima! Toyota has nothing that stirs my blood, nor Honda, but I'm
not their target market, am I?
There are a small number of cars built today that can get me excited, and
there have been times that I thought all cars like them would disappear
completely, given the rise of influence of the insurance and government
regulations. And now the growing Green forces threaten them even more with
extinction. Yet, for some reason, performance is growing across all lines,
with V6 engines putting out the power of V8s.
I have no doubt that any car built TODAY, in the hands of a caring owner,
could easily go 500,000 miles in the years to come. The sad truth is that
the bulk of new cars today will be recycled within ten to twenty years,
just
as previous generations before them. It's the nature of consumables...
dwight
www.tfrog.com
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