@teddanson

You can make fun of those cars all you want. Majority of them actually look good and with a different paint job would be drop dead gorgeous.

There other massive benefit. No utterly useless electronics which makes them timeless. They have airco, heater, radio and ultra comfortable seats, I don't want anything else in a car. And they are very easy to repair unlike the driving server farms that are on the road today.

Not denying that some would look great fully restored. Given modern tweaks they might actually brake and handle properly too. Less technology, less to go wrong, less privacy invasion too.

On the other hand you can keep the ugly as sin 1986 Ford Taurus and any of the cars that do less than 0.1cm to the gallon, which is essentially all of them.

Cars are great. To look at. And on forecourts. Other than that they're just transport moneypits imho.

These cars all have three speed automatics, handle worse than anything you’ve ever driven, would rarely go 60,000 miles without needed a transmission and they top out at 90mph. You’d be blown literally off the road in one of these today and you would be killed because they are super unsafe. Also, these indeed do have useless electronics. Not as much but they require a lot of more brains to fix. Power doors, windows, locks, roofs, all existed back then and were massively less reliable than modern equivalents. Early catalytic converters weren’t a ceramic monolith but rather a sack of beads that would get slowly plug up from the time you bought the car until you replaced it. Not to mention the worst thing of all about cars from the 70s: vinyl seats.

When the speed limit was still 55 and people didn’t drive 150 miles a day these were more practical cars..although they’d still break down 10x as often as VW...Beetle or Rabbit, from the same era. If there are any good cars from the 70s they are going to be from a company on its way up, not on its way down. Toyota’s weren’t bad. Honda...sometimes was. The first gen Civic was not a long running car. There were a lot of engineering challenges in the 70s, the oil embargo, emissions, and globalization of the market were more important than reliability or performance legally and the American side in particular was convinced all cars were ruined for good by these things. Many cars imported into the US at this time were ruined by badly designed emissions stuff slapped on to once-decent designs. The USDM Fiat X-19 made less power every year from 1977-1980...which is sad...but not as sad as Americans selling HUGE big block V8s that only made 189HP...twice as much power as a Rabbit, from 5x the engine size...the result when coupled to a three speed 70s automatic is...a much slower car, particularly around anything like a “corner”, while burning more gas.

I'd still love a Buick LeSabre though. Also, I'm growing fond of the Ford Country Squire LTD. I'd actually love one. The front bench and the tailgate are genius.

Those boats are super hard to drive today, I drove a 1999 Lincoln and that was near to impossible.
Reminded me of when I got my first dog, walking her on a leash was like trying to steer a car with a rope, near to impossible.

Its easier for me to drive a cargo van than one of those boats.

As for someone who lived half their life without a car, I have to say that I much rather prefer a car.
You don't have to wait for the time of public transportation to leave, you can come and go at your leisure.
If you live in a large city with great PT then its better to not own a car.

If you need to get to work everyday at a specific time then its horrible as well with traffic and they really need to change up hours for workers
rather than remove cars completely.

GOOD public transportation is way better than owning a car. If you live in Chicago, NYC, DC, SF, a college town, much of Europe or anywhere in Japan, cars are a luxury you may not want. In most of the US though you pretty much have to own a car. It sucks. It’s a total screw job.

My ideal situation would be that I own garage space at the race track where I store a half dozen track machines. I’ll be glad to take a 20mph robo taxi everywhere else. I hate almost everything about modern day driving on public roads.

(Northern Virginian here) DC won't be on that list for long unless politicians in all three of Virginia, DC, and Maryland can finally agree that Metro is worth supporting even as a net expense. When I visited Japan I was floored that the Tokyo metro's trains had a full timetable for the entire day instead of just general guidelines on how often trains will show up. In DC it's more like "every six minutes during rush-hour, plus or minus ten minutes, unless the tracks are on fire at the moment."

So many missed opportunities in the US to build and improve public transit. It's depressing.

I will just keep my Old Laser Disc. VHS Tapes.
It's just fun to watch them now & then.
You will never get this stuff again.
Yes, the past was a blast.

So what kind of car do I get next?

That’s a trick question. The correct answer is to just keep driving whatever you’re currently driving.

That’s what I was thinking.

I'm still driving a 2005 Kia Rio with high km's. Just had the rear repaired before Christmas because some fool gave it a love tap at a roundabout ("I thought you were going to move mate" ). His insurance covered the repair but it was still inconvenient to be without a car for a couple of weeks.

Not the best car to have really, the head design is interference so if you're unlucky with the timing belt you can wreck the head completely (yep, not just some bent valves). It's black so it really cooks in summer (at work there isn't much shade).


I do have an ok older car in the shed but haven't got around to doing some more stuff to it in the last few years (think it needs a screen plus possibly a clutch replacement, need to pull the driveshafts for a check too, other stuff is minor like brake pads/shoes etc).
Mazda 121 DA (1990) 3 door hatch (Shades version which is like Super Deluxe), it's basically the same car as the North American Ford Festiva WA, although mine is all Japanese built nothing is Korean. These 121 Shades 3 door hatchbacks come with a rear sliding bench seat so they transform into a nice little cargo carrier Fairly low genuine km's for it's age, this car is carby it isn't injected and it isn't the pitiful 1138 cc Mazda B1 engine, it's the 1324 cc Mazda B3 with 5 speed manual. So no computer at all
The only major issue I have with it is the air conditioning. It has never worked as long as I've had the car and fixing it would probably be pretty expensive given the value of the car. The other thing is AC on older small cars like this tend to suck a lot of the available power.

Drive whatever you have in to the ground. Drive it until it can give you no more. Everyone goes on about cars getting more unreliable as they get older. Maybe. But mostly because the owner's don't look after them.

Service it regularly. Keep it clean. Pay the repair bills. Enjoy cheap transport. Sure the car may enter negative equity, but I'd rather have a car I own outright than a horrendous car loan payment every month.

My car gets littered with all sorts of garbage, dog hair, children's toys, sand from the beach and all the rest of it. If I had a new car I'd be having a Sean Connery every day if it got dirty. Batter the damn car to the ground if you can. Cars are money pits. Just look after them and keep them safe and roadworthy and you'll be grand.

I would really like a Honda E though...

My current car is a 2014 model with 108k miles. I am much closer to my work now. My annual mileage went from 20k to 6k miles. It’s a diesel too. It’s nice to fill it up once a month or less.

I have a 2005 Chev Impala. Runs great. Looks great.
And paid for.
No need for a new bucket of bolts.

An all Japanese Festiva sounds wonderful. I would put a B6 or a BP in it. IIRC there is some law in Oz than says you can only swap in engines of equal or lesser displacement. Is that real?

We have two cars, we both drive only 10-15 min to work. Their actual MPG is almost irreverent. The SOHC Fit gets gas every 3-4 weeks and the TDI lasts even longer. With fuel being $2/g for a year now almost and every place worth going shut down we haven’t been spending a lot on fuel...

$2 a gallon.... check our prices in the UK - price per litre here.

In fairness, petrol could be $937/gallon today and I'd still love to buy a 1985 Cadillac Fleetwood Sedan deVille.