“I’m Sorry, Dave. I Can’t Let You Get Groceries”

A reader left a comment that got me thinking. Are cars today better or worse than they were in the 1970’s?

Cars are safer now. Can’t argue about that. The also have more gadgets, like USB ports for music, DVD players, devices to heat and cool seats, recordable seat positions, and so on.

Cars are also faster now. Teslas are not even worth discussing in terms of comparison, because they’re faster than many professional drag cars. They also have high top speeds. You can buy a gas SUV that will take you to 185 mph now, just like Joe Walsh’s Maserati.

Cars go around corners better now. No doubt about it. My run-of-the-mill SUV, which appeared on the market about 13 years ago, corners far better than the Z28 I drove in high school, or that year’s Corvette.

Many parts in modern cars last a lot longer than the corresponding parts in old cars. Some things are much easier to maintain.

Now for the bad things.

The paint on modern cars is eco-garbage. It WILL peel off after about 7 years in the Florida sun, even if you wax it, wash it, treat it with every conceivable maintenance chemical, and cover it with kisses every night. It can’t be repaired. You can either paint your car, at enormous expense, or live with it. At the very least, you have to paint a panel, and the painter will not match the paint correctly.

Paint used to be permanent. Now it’s a consumable, like a spark plug or tire. If your car gets a lot of sun, you can expect to spend thousands of dollars before you’re ready to sell the car. The cost is about like replacing an engine.

The paint on old cars had no clear coat, so it could not separate into two layers. It lasted as long as the cars. If it got damaged, you could repair the area of the damage. If it got dull, you could buff it back up to a high polish. It’s cheaper and much less dangerous to apply. The new stuff causes life-threatening chronic asthma that never goes away.

New cars are impossible for owners to repair, apart from the basics, and many mechanics lack the mental horsepower to get up to speed on them. When they are able to figure them out, the repairs can be incredibly expensive because of the complexity and the way cars are jammed full of parts intended solely to improve mileage and emissions. A repair that might require an hour in a ’67 Impala might require pulling the engine in a 2023 car.

Modern cars are cramped inside. People love to say modern cars are actually roomier, but it’s not true. You can literally jump into the backseat of a 1970 sedan. Try that in my Ford Explorer, and you’ll end up in the emergency room. People used to have sex in their cars. Not possible now. When I was a kid, I used to lie across the rear windows of my parents’ cars, in what was called the parcel shelf. That shelf doesn’t exist now.

Modern cars ride very badly. Young people have been convinced that European cars were always better, which is not true, and that one thing that made them better was their superior handling. Now we make cars that handle better than they need to, and the price is a harsh ride with lots and lots of noise.

We stick low-profile rapper tires on cars moms use to take their kids to school. Those tires can’t absorb bumps, and when they hit large bumps, they can fail to protect the rims, which can be permanently destroyed.

Do you need a car with fantastic handling? No, you really don’t. Not unless you want a sports car. A 1970 Sedan Deville will go right around any curve in America if you’re anywhere close to the speed limit. Isn’t that how you drive 98% of the time? When you’re going to get groceries on a curvy road with a speed limit of 45, you’re not going to try to fly around curves at 65.

I owned a sports car, and I can tell you this: the time I spent putting it to the test amounted to less than 1% of the time I was in it, but the time I spent dealing with the ride and noise amounted to 100%.

A good ride and low noise are much more valuable for most people than European-inspired handling.

We forget that Europeans built cars and roads the way they did because they were unsuccessful, not because they were smart. They built narrow, winding roads, and their cars were light because they could not afford a lot of steel or gas. If they could have built Cadillacs and nice, wide roads, they would have.

America used to have extreme economic superiority, back before we started losing God’s favor by promoting sexual sin and every other type of evil. Now rich Asians buy our farmland because we can’t match their bids.

Here’s an interesting question: do modern cars get better mileage? The answer is: sometimes.

You can get a subsidized Prius and barely ever visit a gas station. On the other hand, my normal family car probably gets 15 mpg. I haven’t checked, because I have no incentive. I have to buy gas, and I have to drive, so there is no point in measuring my mileage. It would be like measuring the price of water.

I accelerate normally, which means not like an old lady, which is what you have to do in order to get the published figure of 20 mpg combined. No one gets car company’s published figures. They’re a joke.

My gorgeous 1970 Buick Electra 225 convertible had a 455 in it. That’s 7.46 liters, or more than twice the volume of my present engine. It was rated at 370 horsepower and 510 foot-pounds of torque. You can have a somewhat slow car with 370 horses, but if the torque figure is 510, it’s another story.

That car got 17.5 miles per highway gallon, at 70 mph. I checked it.

My boring Ford has about a thousand economy-related advancements in it, but it’s still pretty close to a 1970 455 in a glorious barge that made women swoon.

In terms of pleasure, the Buick and the Ford are in different universes. I felt like a celebrity every time I drove the Buick. I loved driving with the top down, especially on clear nights. Every time I approached it as I walked back to it in a parking lot, my spirit lit up.

When I approach the Ford, I think, “There’s a nice practical car. Thank God I don’t have more problems with it.”

I miss that Buick every single day of my life. It still hurts me that I lost it.

If somebody out there made a car like a Sedan Deville today, with the same nice ride, the comfort, and the giant trunk, combined with air bags, crumple zones, and ABS, I would be sorely tempted to get one. I think there would be waiting lists to the moon and back.

I’m thinking I may get rid of the Explorer and get a Toyota 4runner. This is a truck-based SUV, whereas the Explorer is half car and half truck. A real truck has body-on-frame construction, which is superior. You can work on a 4runner, because there is room around the engine.

The 4runner is more like an old car because it is an old car. It debuted in 1984. Through its generations, Toyota has been extremely slow to make changes. As a result, it is one of the most trouble-free cars in existence. Nearly everything that could have gone bad went bad years ago, and Toyota fixed it. Toyota has an obsessive model-improvement program even Honda can’t match. It approaches mental illness.

People put the 4runner down, saying it’s like driving a truck. I have a truck, and I love driving it, except for parking. The 4runner has high-profile tires, so surely it can’t have that driving-on-the-rims feeling nearly all ordinary cars have. It’s about the same size as an Explorer, so parking would not be harder. The Explorer is wider than other cars, and width is the main thing that makes parking difficult. The 4runner is 2″ narrower.

The Explorer is 191″ long, and a 4runner is 198″ long. My old Camaro, a small car for the time, was 198″ long.

People say the 4runner has a truck-like interior. “Bonus,” I say. I don’t know why that would be a disadvantage. Maybe it bothers men who wear women’s underwear and have a hard time opening jars. My truck has a truck-like interior, and it’s great. More comfortable than the Ford.

To get back to my theme, cars all look like suppositories now. They look like mints that have been sucked on for a while. Parallel evolution dictated by socialist nuts has made them all look alike.

Modern cars spy on you. Not all, but some. And they are starting to incorporate gadgetry that allows them to be shut down by other people, remotely. Cars record private data about their owners, and manufacturers sell it without permission. In the near future, if the left gets its way, the government and the manufacturers (and random criminals, possibly including rapists and wife-beaters) will be able to shut your car’s engine off from a distance.

Old cars don’t have that problem. We’re talking about a fundamental threat to liberty. If there is a schism between the states, who will the carmakers side with? Not conservatives. Not Christians. People in red areas will have to pay hackers to hack-proof the vehicles they paid for.

I would say cars are fundamentally worse now, but the safety upgrades are huge blessings. There is no reason those upgrades could not be incorporated in a car that’s actually a pleasure to drive and work on.

Questionable car expert James May says he doesn’t like old cars. He loves to rattle on about all the ways in which modern cars are better. Thing is, he’s rich, and most of the cars he has driven were handed to him, in perfect condition, by manufacturers who worked on them beforehand to make sure they were as good as they could be. He got to abandon nearly all of them before anything bad could happen.

It’s very different when you have to drive a car for 10 years, you have to pay for every repair, and the manufacturer sees you as an orange to be run through the juicing machine and discarded.

If James May had to pay $4000 for a water pump or $12,000 for new paint, he wouldn’t care. That’s like you buying a new shoelace. If one of his cars has a problem, he makes a call, someone comes around to get the car, someone brings it back fixed, and an inconsequential charge appears on his American Express Plutonium Card. He never has to touch a wrench or his savings. And what are the odds any of his cars have expired warranties?

Also, he drives on horrible, shoulderless British roads originally designed by the Romans for carts pulled by pigs. A real American car would occupy two lanes.

May is a leftist, so he can’t possibly fear having his car controlled by the establishment. He is the establishment. He doesn’t realize he’s a fascist. If our government starts bricking the cars of people who don’t believe in global warming or reject bizarre “pronouns,” he’ll probably be thrilled. I’ll bet he would have supported bricking for people who didn’t wear face diapers.

Many young people have no idea what riding in a real luxury car is like. They will never know what they missed. My dad had a 1985 Town Car, which was one of the last true luxury cars made. It was like riding around in an expensive hotel room. I loved it. No kid raised on Accords and Camrys will ever know that feeling. They’ll never know how it feels to be riding in the backseat of a car and turn around to face the person beside them. Do that in an Explorer, and you’ll tear an ACL. Your head will face one way, and your feet another.

I admit, the smaller cars of the past were worse than today’s small cars. They were just as cramped, and they had none of the advantages of modern cars. I would rather have my Explorer than a like-new 1970 Camaro or Cutlass. Economy cars like Mavericks and Vegas were actually insulting to buyers. Economy cars were almost always ugly.

I think the carmakers made them repulsive to shame buyers into buying more-expensive vehicles. I doubt anyone ever drove home from a showroom in a Vega, full of a sensation of triumph.

Maybe immigrants from poor countries.

The pleasure of driving a nice, big, powerful American car with high sidewalls and no emissions control. One more thing I got to experience that today’s kids can only dream about.