You're a mechanic. Most people can't just roll up their sleeves and do a major mechanical overhaul in their back yard in an afternoon.
That I can agree with though. You are right there.
So the cars that people sell just disappear? When you sell a car, someone else buys it. If these cars were as dependable as you claim, then they'd have had four or five owners by now and would be seen every day on the streets. However, cars of the 70's are a rare sight, becasue most of them rusted away or broke.
I'll give you an admittedly weak example, but it's the best one that I can give from my personal experience. My parents' 2010 Honda Fit has 19,000 miles on it. Nothing has gone wrong. Not one single thing has needed to be serviced, replaced, tightened, loosened, or otherwise repaired. It's had two oil changes and a tyre rotation, and it's otherwise the same as when we bought it new.
Trade -ins, scrap yard, sold to others then scrapped. Things happen. Most of those cars
did have 4-5 owners
New cars will rust just as easily as the old ones. Nothings really changed there.
That Focus I told you about had 50,000 put on it in the first 2 years we had it and it's inching towards 120,000 now. No real problems with it despite hitting a racoon and general maintenance like brakes/tires etc. That said, my 1999 Dodge Caravan is on it's way out. 185,000 on it, rust everywhere, the hatch door handle is totally shot, so much that the hatch is held down by a rope. There is a large hole into the body next to the pinch weld on the drivers side and the sliding door is extremely hard to open. The thing stalls out all the time, brakes hang up (admittedly from sitting), and generally runs like poop. The motor is the 3.3L Non-Flex fuel.
No, the old cars that weren't meticulously maintained fell apart. That is why you see so few of them.
But 99.99% of consumers do, including myself, and I'm an engineer!
Not always true. Why do some survive that weren't maintained that well? That weren't garaged or babied? I see a lot of old cars that were never restored around here. Not hard to believe. I do agree that a lot of them fell to that fate at some point in it's life, but there was a significant number that hasn't or didn't.
I can agree with you there about the driveshaft though, a lot of people do consider that a large replacement
But it's not exactly a hard fix, and anyone that can understand how to remove a few bolts and look at a few pictures or even get walked through on the phone I'm sure could borrow a family members tools and fix it themselves.
My dad's car is easily compared to the original 1974 Volkswagen Golf, because for all intents and purposes it is a 1974 Golf. The car that basically destroyed the auto industry as it had been up to that point, especially in America. And it's a convertible too, which means less in the way of chassis stiffness and the like.
It's just as solidly built as anything I've been in that was made the past 5 years. There was serious thought put into designing that car. I can't say the same for the 1990 Cavalier Z28 that he used to own, as much fun as it was and as nice as it was to look at; and in theory that car and his current car were direct competitors. There were solidly built, thoughtfully designed cars from that time period that weren't carryovers from the end of the 60s that tons of effort was put into making right. The Fairmont was a big one, and so was the downsized Caprice. Even the original Seville had tons of effort put into it. But those 3 models did not make up the entirety of Detroits output in that decade; nevermind the even more disastrous following ten years.
I agree with you. A lot of the older stuff was solid, and there was a lot of stuff that wasn't. Simple as that. Really depends on what you bought.
