Some folks like to say that cars aren’t built like they used to. It’s a tired and old cliche, but there is a grain of truth to it, just not quite in the way people joke about it. In just the span of half of a human’s life, cars have advanced perhaps further than the people of the past could have imagined.
Matt wrote about how the American government is no longer going to push the advancement of car technology. That’s sad, but hopefully, automakers will continue to innovate without government incentives. 4jim says:
I am old enough to have seen the remarkable advances in automobiles over the last 1/2 century and have heard old men bitching about it the whole time. I was behind first gen chevy nova yesterday and it stunk. The smell of un/partially burnt fuel. The lack of headrests, airbags, real brakes, seatbelts, rolling on god know what kind of tires. I do not want to go back. The fast, well handling safe cars we have today would not exist without Gov regulations. people complained about OBD, seatbelts, Fuel injection, ABS, traction control, emissions all of it. I like breathing air and would like to continue to. People forget the air pollution now that it has been gone for a while.
The gov supported the oil and gas and car companies for a century + to get ICE cars where they are. Time to keep making things better.
I remember when my parents used to talk about a car having just 100,000 miles as being worn out. Now, your everyday Toyota Camry will easily drive 300,000 miles or more on its original engine and transmission.
David witnessed a horrible crash on the iconic Angeles Crest and, aside from pointing out that life is delicate, he wonders if he did the right thing in keeping people away from the scene and having emergency services called, but not actively running to the scene. Hautewheels:
You did everything you could and should have done, David. My youngest son and daughter were EMT’s for many years (and now are a nurse and a police detective, respectively), and according to them, the WORST thing you can do at the scene of an accident is get someone out of a wrecked car unless the car is on fire or about to topple over a cliff, etc. As I’ve said many times on this site, you’re one of the nicest human beings on the planet and what you did today just adds more evidence to support that statement. Bravo!
Tall_J:
HUGE plus one. Former volunteer fire fighter here and came into the same thing. You don’t know of the severity of the injuries if you try to get them out. You can check on folks, and let them know help is on the way, but do not get the out of the car (an old episode of CHiPs also covered this when two PG&E employees pulled someone out of a truck with head / neck trauma).
Best action is to call 911, slow oncoming motorists down while being safe!
All in all, you did EXACTLY the right things.
I agree. Technically unrelated, but I was swimming in Lake Michigan a couple of weeks ago when a man, maybe 20 feet or so away from me in the water, began drowning and went under the surface. I made the risky decision to dive under to get him. There was no time to swim back to shore to grab a life ring, and everyone on the shore stood there, shocked, and not doing anything. I pulled him up and kept him above water for a few extra minutes, long enough for someone to bring a flotation device into the water to help me. But this wasn’t easy; I spent a great portion of that time underwater, and it could have gone south. Just be careful. You don’t want to add another victim to an emergency!
Have a good and safe evening, everyone.
I’m torn on “they don’t make ’em like they used to.” Can’t they find a way to make them the way they make them now, but make them look better and more distinct from each other, the way they used to? If you held a gun to my head and told me to differentiate between a brand new RAV4, Equinox, Santa Fe, and Escape without showing me the badges, you’d probably just have to shoot me.
But yeah, I had this argument in the context of drumming the other day, with a young drummer calling a 1989 set of Pearl drums “vintage.” No, those aren’t “vintage” – they are modern drums with 98% of the functionality of brand new ones. Not all old things are “vintage” – some are simply old. He pushed back saying that 1989 drums today are like 1953 drums would have been in 1989. Nuh uh – they were a totally different animal back then, and thank GOD for the improvements. I used cars as an example – “A 1989 Toyota Corolla isn’t terribly different from whatever you drive now. A 1953 Studebaker Commander or a 1953 Ford F-100 truck sure is, though.” He was forced to grant my point.
As for that Chevy II? Body swap.
You should live through the unrepairable not ready for the road crap fest of govt ordered damage.
My under 100, 000 miles Camry is dead in the water now because it was mass produced with defective temperature gauges that will never read past dead center.
Dealer repairs cost thousands, and Toyota will NOT back up their cars.
Additionally their barely good enough engineering means their cars eat water pumps , fans and radiators.
Meanwhile my costly Tier Zero epa model turbodiesel is cheaper to repair in the real world, and highly sought after purely because it lacks govt imposed defects.
The Camry isn’t the only “superior” car I leave parked because fixing the finicky systems cannot be justified.
A superior car that can’t be repaired and maintained in the real world is yard art.
Perhaps the govt nannies could focus on cars that keep running?
Many times I have urged friends on a budget to buy a simple older car over a newer one.
As far as being behind an older car hand not liking the smell, remember that odors are subjective. Where I live, there’s a stoplight at the bottom of a hill and every time I’m behind a new Toyota climbing that hill, I can tell, even in the dark, as the exhaust reeks of burnt sulfur or something similar. I would much rather be behind a ’60s straight-six vehicle that was running a little rich. I rather enjoy the smell of unburned hydrocarbons, but maybe that’s just me.
Congratulations Mercedes you are a heroine. The difference is DT did what was needed but the victims were okay you had a victim that could have died without your intervention because they could disappear below the surface. That needs intervention. You both did the appropriate amount.
I was asking about pool rescues after seeing one, and it was ultimately explained to me how dangerous it was for the rescuer.
Worst case, they may have to fight a panicked victim or abandon them.
An early lesson in the details.
I think about it every time I read about a rescuer that drowned too.
Used to work as a lifeguard. Dad did too. Dad always tells the story of when he saved a little kid in the water. Kid was maybe 6, dad was in his 20s. Kid grabbed on to his neck as hard as he could. Dad just swam in the rest of the way holding his breath. if they’d been further out they might have both drowned.
Rescuer safety is a big thing taught in Red Cross and other lifeguard programs. Using tools to save people before resorting to contact, avoiding dangerous victims until they’re passive enough to bring in, how to break away from chokeholds… It’s probably more intensive than some of the rescue techniques.
I had a 67 Nova as a daily driver for years until just a few months ago. It didn’t stink, handled just fine and had good brakes. I know how to rebuild and adjust a carburetor, do an alignment properly and adjust drum brakes properly. I felt perfectly safe in it and it had no problems with modern traffic. If you don’t know how to maintain and adjust it properly it will be as described above.
The problem with today’s cars is that in order to meet fuel economy and emission requirements ( I am all for that BTW) they had to come up with things like direct injection, exhaust treatment systems and other stuff that causes the intakes, valves and so on to clog up. The heavy use of CVT transmissions also means a lot of people will be getting 50,60,000 miles before they grenade. That video of the former GM engineer was super revealing: The focus is entirely on cost savings to a point where they are cutting critical things such as using less durable alloys which in turn leads to premature wear. Things like that. And its not just GM. This is what you also get when wages stay stale yet everything else has gone up. And with vehicle prices at nosebleed levels they are having to cut back on quality to keep some level of control on costs. I will probably keep my old truck forever.
The more mechanics and computer safety devices we add the more we take from the driver and increase the danger.
20 years ago you had to turn your air conditioning off when driving up the mountains where we camp every summer or your car would overheat. Now the temperature gauge doesn’t move, even when towing a camper. It really is remarkable.
That said, we still shut it off for tradition’s sake. We did see a guy at a turnout a couple of years ago with an older car who had his hood up because it was overheating. We asked if he had his air conditioning running, and he denied it just a little too quickly to be believable. 😉
It’s like acid rain and the hole in the ozone. We did what was needed to fix the damage we were doing, then people act like that means there never was anything to fix.
We don’t have emissions testing in my part of the state, and I hate it when I’m stuck behind a car without catalytic converters. I have an early wrx with stock exhaust and will keep it that way—no ‘test pipes’ or high-flo (wink, wink) for me. The few extra hp up top aren’t worth the sickening smell.
I’ll admit I bitched about the early cats—even rodded out a clogged one once. But that was almost 30 years ago: I’d pony up the cash to do things right now
So you don’t have catalytic converters but have a problem with others that don’t have them? Just trying to understand your point
No: early wrx have cats. I said I did rod out a clogged cat once nearly 30 years ago, but that I dislike the smell of uncatalyzed exhaust enough that I will not put test pipes or the high-flow exhausts sold for the ej205 (my understanding is they are only a nod to the regulations, and don’t do much if anything to actually mitigate the controlled pollutants)— and am willing to spend the money to buy real cats if needed.
tl:dr. I do have catalytic converters—and will continue to do so
Most of the govt added junk like cats are only there for people that don’t maintain their cars.
Well tuned engines never were a problem.
I own several old cars and there is a HUGE difference between what they smell like versus newer cars. Untreated exhaust, even from a well-tuned older engine is going to stink major and it does. Not the most pleasant experence.
Well, they call it the Malaise era for a reason. The Hitatchi carburetor on certain 1987 Subarus was a nightmare of circuits. I spent multiple of what the car cost trying to get it right. Even our local suby guru said there wasn’t much point: he tried on his wife’s car. My 87 Wagon came with a mostly blocked catalytic converter because of that carb. I put a Webber on it, rodded out the cat, and just drove it. That’s when I learned that I didn’t like the smell anymore. I used a Color Tune kit to adjust the Webber, and it ran well, but I haven’t gone without converters since.
not giving anyone crap for what they do to their car—but I don’t like being behind a certain local ‘pro street’ early 90s Camaro much
Now we know Autopian writers are also part time hero’s in their spare time! Of course hats off to the professional hero’s keeping us safe everyday!!!
Just wondering if the comments on the weekend posts are skipped, probably should review the article about the Escape not being sold in CA due to not meeting zev, totally misrepresented in the article and header as they’re banned, and a lot of us were disappointed in the take.
I do review comments on weekends, but I might have missed that one. I’ll bring up that concern with the editors.
Thanks, in this day and age the comment review isn’t expected as much, but definitely appreciated.
Ah, I see why I missed it, now! I was entirely out on the 4th, so I missed the comments on that day. Anyway, I brought it up with the editors, and I’m sure they will review it. 🙂
Not weekend but the site clearly said the Canadians were covering because the American writers had the day off
One of the biggest ways new cars are better is safety!
Going back to David’s story from yesterday, if all of those vehicles involved were “classics” instead of modern sports cars, outcomes for the drivers would have likely been much different.
I borrowed a friend’s 1967 Chevrolet C20 for a few months while my car was in the shop. Terrifying. Never again.
1968 was the year that a lot of safety improvements were made, brakes in particular. I’m a little hesitant about stock pre-68 American vehicles.
Often adequate for normal use, and easy to upgrade.
When you put modern performance tires on an older sports car, suddenly easy to over drive the brakes when pushing it, even under the speed limits.
I did this with all disc brakes once.
As soon as I stopped, smoke from all four corners.
My brother and I would complain to our dad that he didn’t keep his classic 60s something Mustang. He told us once that by the time it was 6 years old, it had nearly 70k miles on it, but needed a lot of work. Suspension bushing, tie rods, shocks (marginally effective even new), radiator, wiper motor, transmission leak, engine oil leaks, weatherstripping and a handful of electrical corrosion issues from living near the gulf. Hoses, belts, plugs, plug wires and distributor caps were replaced often. Some of the things are still failing quickly on modern, less Toyota-like vehicles.
I remember choking on exhaust fumes while stopped at traffic lights and having to shut down the AC in slow moving traffic because engine cooling systems were marginal at best.
Absolutely the 70s and some of the 80s were dark days for power and quality vehicles, but we are better off today because of all the fails and successes of automotive innovation.
I remember that the norm was that engines were always greasy and covered in oil. Our hardware store sold GUNK Engine Cleaner, just as much as any other household cleaning product, and that’s without most people cleaning their engines. When I got my Firebird I was going to spray the engine down and clean it, but I was told, “ I wouldn’t do that, you don’t know what that grease is holding together.”
My W126 has leaky valve covers when I got it (which is a common issue as they get older) and retorquing the bolts improved it significantly (some were just barely tight). Once everything was cleaned up it was pretty evident that undercarriage bits that had been covered in oil for the last decade were rust-free while the rest was…not so rust-free.
“Free” oil undercoating… Now that’s what kept our old Subaru Forester looking so good underneath…
It’s what has kept British cars rust free for decades.
I spent a week in 1989 on an island off the coast of Maine that had only one vehicle on the island, a mid 50s Chevy pickup. One day they changed the oil. Then they took a rag and wiped the entire truck down with used motor oil thing used about a quart or so. Then they brought a garden pump sprayer , poured the rest of the oil in it and sprayed the underneath of the truck, inside the doors, up in the fenders, then a mist under the hood.
I had never seen anything like that. I had to admit that the truck looked pretty good for having spent 30+ years on an island in the ocean.
A preservation trick is diesel fuel on bare metal.
Not noticeable and easy to clean
I was roadtripping to FL with my parents in the middle of Covid when my grandmother was put on hospice (we were 2 hours too late). On the way home, on I-10 across the FL panhandle where everyone goes 80+, I saw the car in front of me had a wobbly rear wheel. Most of the time this is an optical illusion from a bad hubcap, but I actually saw it deflecting laterally. As soon as I opened my mouth to comment on it, said wheel blew a tire in spectacular fashion, sending the car fishtailing into the median sideways, where it promptly flipped twice. I’ve seen a couple rollovers from a distance, but never from a few car lengths away.
I slammed on the brakes and ran over to find two 20-somethings in shock, a little bleeding but nothing obviously serious. I grabbed the driver some paper towels to hold direct pressure on a small head wound (it wasn’t too serious, but people in shock need something to do. That’s the main reason airlines make you take your shoes off for slide evacuation, the idea is that keeping your hands busy will prevent you from grabbing baggage or worse, the sides of the slide). The car was still running, so I reached in and turned it off, walked around the back of the car to smell for any fuel leaks, then checked on the girl in the passenger seat. She was already getting out of the car, apparently fine…just looking for her phone. A couple minutes into the ordeal and I already had a couple off-duty deputies coming to help with medpacks. So I just got back in the car and left like it was nothing.
It’s amazing the amount of stuff that gets ejected from a car during a quick rollover.
Also, interstate medians with deep channels and heavy grass are a godsend. They did the job of stopping the car with the least possible drama, and without being able to cross into oncoming traffic. Honorable mention to berms. Anything to slow the vehicle down and minimize damage to others.
My condolences.
The strangest thing I’ve seen flung from a car was apparently a small dog which we first responders never found…
Thank you — oddly, I buried the lede in that she didn’t die of Covid, ironically. Just the fact that she was 99.
I’m completely against animal cruelty, but comically the idea of small dogs being tossed around is still gold.
Or a stuffed animal dog.
I was once first on the scene of an accident where the guy fell asleep, crossed the median, wiped out a bunch of those sand barrels intended to keep the concrete median from splitting a car in half (he was coming from the direction that had the concrete divider and crossed at just the right place to catch the barrels as it ended), and somehow a tape from inside his van ended up sitting in the road where he hit the barrels. I can only imagine the impact it took to flex all of the components between the cab and the road enough to allow an object that large to fly out.
This wasn’t even a rollover and he ended up being fine, AFAICT. He actually met me on the shoulder as I was running back to check his van, which had ended up 30 yards off the wrong side of the road. I didn’t even realize what had happened until I checked my mirrors after navigating the newly formed sand trap on the highway. Just two taillights sticking out of the weeds at the bottom of a hill.
Condolences on losing your grandmother. Since she reached 99 yo, hopefully you got to have plenty of quality time with her.
I’m sure my sister wishes that there had been a deeper channel and heavier grass in a median near Kansas City years ago. She was on one side of a divided interstate and a car going the other direction slammed on the brakes and swerved to avoid a slowdown, launched themselves over the grassy median and t-boned the car in the righthand lane pulling a trailer that she was alongside in the lefthand lane. No time or space to do anything. Totaled the small pickup she was driving, the shoulder seatbelt didn’t quite work as it should have, she got a nasty forehead cut, a collapsed lung and two heavy duty black eyes, luckily nothing too major or long lasting. The Kansas City emergency room on a holiday weekend was apparently quite its own “adventure”.
If you think cars expell items try a flipper moving van. A whole family worth of items
Car doesn’t even have to rollover to fling things out.
You don’t have to go back to the Nova era to see just how much better cars are today. Even going back just 30 years cars are MUCH better and cheaper today.
Base spec of top spec the 2025 Civic is cheaper than a Civic from 30 years ago and better all around. It is also larger than a 1995 Honda Accord
“Base spec of top spec the 2025 Civic is cheaper than a Civic from 30 years ago and better all around. It is also larger than a 1995 Honda Accord”
The only sad part of that is if you want a Civic-sized Civic, you now have to go with the Fit… which Honda stopped selling in North America. The stupid CAFE footprint rule helped kill it.
How does the footprint rule work?
“Starting in 2011, the CAFE standards are newly expressed as mathematical functions depending on vehicle footprint, a measure of vehicle size determined by multiplying the vehicle’s wheelbase by its average track width. A complicated 2011 mathematical formula was replaced starting in 2012 with a simpler inverse-linear formula with cutoff values.[9] CAFE footprint requirements are set up such that a vehicle with a larger footprint has a lower fuel economy requirement than a vehicle with a smaller footprint. For example, the fuel economy target for the 2012 Honda Fit with a footprint of 40 sq ft (3.7 m2) is 36 miles per US gallon (6.5 L/100 km), equivalent to a published fuel economy of 27 miles per US gallon (8.7 L/100 km) (see #Calculations of MPG overestimated for information regarding the difference), and a Ford F-150 with its footprint of 65–75 sq ft (6.0–7.0 m2) has a fuel economy target of 22 miles per US gallon (11 L/100 km), i.e., 17 miles per US gallon (14 L/100 km) published. Individual vehicles do not have to meet their fuel economy targets; CAFE compliance is enforced at the fleet level. CAFE 2016 target fuel economy of 34.0 MPG (44 sq. ft. footprint) compares to 2012 advanced vehicle performance of Prius hybrid on the compliance test cycles: 70.7 MPG, Plug-in Prius hybrid: 69.8 MPGe and LEAF electric vehicle: 141.7 MPGe. The compliance fuel economy of plug-in electric vehicles such as the Plug-in Prius or LEAF is complicated by accounting for the energy used in generating electricity.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy
It makes everything unnecessarily large in exchange for Big Oil campaign donations.
The larger the footprint of the car, the lower the fuel economy standard/target is. So cars just end up with bloated footprints in order to be able to have lower fuel economy.
It was supposed to be changed in the near future to make it a lot less of a loophole, but like everything else now, that’s probably up in the air.
My 66 Fairlane with the 289 looked large, but got 25 mpg highway and outran every modern mustang I met.
Factory stock.
Foot Print is wheelbase x track. There is a sliding scale for both light trucks and passenger cars where the smaller the vehicle the higher the fuel economy required. (Which logically makes sense) However, this isn’t an unlimited range. For passenger cars the minimum footprint is 41 sq ft and the largest is 56.
For 2025 a car at the bottom of the scale is required to get 60 mpg (CAFE) and a car at the top of the scale is required to get 45 mpg (CAFE).
EPA mpg combined is about 25% less than CAFE mpg
For some real world examples:
A 2025 Toyota Camry has a footprint of 49 sq ft. The CAFE requirement is 51 mpg (38 EPA) and by 2032 that increases to 64 mpg CAFE (48 EPA). It is EPA rated at 51 mpg so Toyota is booking a lot of GHG credits by exceeding the requirements for the Camry – and then they can use those to offset vehicles like the Tundra.
A 2025 Corolla has a footprint of 43.5 sq ft. It is required to get 57
mpg in 2025 (43 mpg EPA combined) The regular gas 2025 Corolla is certified at 35 mpg EPA and the hybrid at 47 mpg.
The total fleet CAFE requirement for each automaker is calculated based on the actual mix of vehicles they sell in a year.
Honda USA will tell you to buy a HR-V. The Fit didn’t die because of the footprint rule. It died because Fit sales dropped to almost nothing when Honda started selling the HR-V. In 2019 Honda sold 99,000 HR-Vs and only 35,000 Fits.
Same happened with the Golf and the Tiguan. In 2019 VW sold 110,000 Tiguans and 37K of the Golf family combined (Golf, GTI, Golf R, e-Golf, and Golf SportWagen)
Cars are much better and cheaper today based on the value of the dollar but increases of costs are reducing that.
Heavier?
Polaris can recreate that feeling for you from within your own vehicle.
I got that reference. LOL
“Does this SXS come with the Northstar System?!”
“Indirectly!”
“How about Sirius?”
“You mean Keanu’s band?”
Should have gone full-astrology there with the Polaris.
“Northstar System?”
“Yep, you bet”
“Sirius?”
“Only on a clear night’s sky, but the Northstar is easier to use for navigation – quite an advantage of no roof”
Like the Japanese astronomer that has a Subaru that fits in his Taurus?
Between saving the kei cars and doing water rescues where do you find time for all those wonderful obscure deep dive articles?
That’s how she pulled it off! Thanks to copious experience in deep dives.
True story: she was down there researching an RV from 1952 when the man went under. Just a lucky break for him, I guess.
Sometimes I have no idea! I still manage to find some time to decompress on a weekend, but that’s also why most of my projects move super slow.
Traveling the country in forgotten RVs or campers and doing heroic deeds is a hell of a way to decompress
I turn 75 in a few days and marvel at todays cars while I complain about the difficulty of making repairs that I’ll probably never need to make. A lowly Miata is as fast in a straight line as a carbed small block 50s through 80s Corvette and has better brakes and handling while getting 30+ MPG. Or the $34K GTI that turns 13 second quarters and 30 MPG highway, fold the back seat down and you got room to sleep or haul home appliances or whatever… These are great times to be a gearhead!
Happy early Birthday
But I only look at a factory drivetrain as a suggestion.
Jeebus Mercedes. Is there anything you don’t do? Also kind of weird that your other article was about a converted hearse. Just saying
“I was behind first gen chevy nova yesterday and it stunk.”
A Chevy Nova was the top trim of the Chevy II – which was the first car my parents bought after they were married, and what I was brought home in (ours was an Aqua ’65 wagon)
Hard metal dashboard – no padding at all.
A three-on-the-tree
Untinted glass
Bias-ply tires
Vinyl bench seats
Lap belts only.
AM Radio with a single speaker in the dash
No AC – just vent windows and floor vents up front, so that when the road was dusty the car filled with road dust (that was one way to keep folks from tailgating?)
Also insects would find their way into the car via the vents.
Needed an engine-out rebuild when I was 3 years old.
Was traded in for a new Galaxie 500 when I was 4.
Yeah, cars are definitely better now.
I remember the steel dash in dad’s Biscayne. It is good that we were ignorant of the potential impending doom of those ‘cars’
Only thing that Chevy II had going for it was that a small block V8 was a factory option with up to 350 very gross horsepower and it weighted only 2700 pounds.
My mom had a chevy 2. That dash was hard.
Not having grown up in that era, it’s easy to take walking away from crashes for granted. I remember being shocked to learn how regularly people would simply knock their head and die in around-town, slow speed fender benders. Cars really were just flimsy steel boxes, and not much else.
In retrospect, I have more empathy for elder coworkers who used to tell me they were suspicious of seat belts because they considered ejection to be the favourable outcome.
We had a neighbor when I was growing up who swore he’d never wear a seatbelt because he’d rather be ejected … and at that point he had already been in one accident where he was ejected and was very seriously injured.