Why Old Cars are Better

my first car was a truck a 1998 manual 4cylinder Chevy S10 that a few years prior to me inheriting it lost its pristin when my younger brother was playing in it pretending to drive and he popped it into neutral causing the truck to roll backwards through our barb wire fence this was a vehicle that despite having features like abs and airbags and a towing capacity of about 350 lb would Now by definition be considered a classic I had many firsts in that truck I learned to drive a stick in it it was the vehicle that

I used to pull off my first donuts and then get my first ticket for doing said Donuts I tried putting a cheap Sub in it for some reason and I distinctly remember getting off work at Barnes Food Land and walking across the street to where we employees had to park and just being so proud to own such a cool vehicle even if I only paid about $11,000 for it and you know the seller was my dad since then I have owned nine vehicles the newest of which was a 2014 Volkswagen purchased in 2016 now that

98 S10 was until last year by far my favorite vehicle that I've ever owned or driven and it was also the oldest vehicle I'd ever owned prior to purchasing a 1962 MG out of a barn that I somehow got running and driving now I'm not going to say that I look back fondly at that truck primarily because of its age I know my judgment is at least somewhat clouded by Nostalgia but I don't don't think it's a coincidence that when I rank all of the cars that I've owned in order from favorite to least favorite

the three oldest sit comfortably at the top is there something about older cars that actually make them better than newer cars that's the question we're tackling today to get a more objective perspective I think that old houses are actually an interesting test case if cars aren't made like they used to be then houses really aren't now of course we can't ignore that house indeed are in some ways you know safer better insulated they have better electrical systems and of course we know we all freak out about lead paint and asbest and stuff like that but

on many levels the materials used and the care with which those materials were put together made for a product that really could withstand the test of time literally the materials were better from solid hardwood floors to larger solid beams used throughout to just more solid hardwood and plaster walls everything was just over engineered versus today's cost cutting model used by large companies old homes give you a sense of quality like they were built with a higher level of care and craftsmanship than you know the houses that get thrown up today building a house wasn't easy

in 1840 or 1913 it took a whole host of skilled people who you know would put today's Builders to shame in all honesty this is even true of smaller what standing 250 years from now I'm not so sure of course we can't oversimplify all this there are great Craftsmen and bad ones from every part of the world and from every era it just seems that in general homes today are all too often built not for people to live in them for a very long time but rather for developers to make a profit and in many

ways cars are no different this brings us back to the world of cars and a very simple question what makes a car good for many and I would in some ways fall into this Camp a car's quality is mainly defined by its ability to reliably get me where I'm trying to go for others a car's goodness is found you know in its spec sheet whether that's 0 to 60 times or towing capacity I won't deny that at many points my personal favorite kinds of cars to purchase were the ones that just didn't cost much to

buy or maintain for many the car of choice is the one that gives them a feeling you know a feeling of superiority as they speed out of McDonald's drive-thru now sure if you need to tow a large camper or haul your family safely across the barren vast expanse of the United States for days on end which I just recently did or even travel across town to the soccer game of course a classic vehicle from the 20s or the 7s would rarely be the best option but if you go back to the beginning of this whole

motoring thing when there really was just one type of vehicle and even today look at what people praise cars for and especially sports cars I do think this all begins to make more sense so I would like to propose an alternative to all of this believe it or not there was a time when SUVs and crossovers didn't exist a time when there was just four wheels a frame and an engine controlled by a man with a very thick mustache there was just the car or the motor car you didn't have much helping you in terms

of driver assists and you weren't listening to a podcast while you drove this machine but you we're getting to do something so few of us will experience the car in its Primal form I don't think we should ignore the original intention behind that thing I think a car really any car through history is at its best when it's functioning most as a car so without further Ado here are the ways that old cars and older cars do the whole car thing better than new cars it's pretty obvious that the further you go back in time

the more mechanical cars were from carburation to power steering to non-synchronized gearboxes to literal crank starts for the most part the newer the car the less mechanical the car we'll talk about what this means for the car's reliability and safety in a bit but what does this mean for you the driver experiencing the car before you ever get to drive the thing you should probably do a few checks maybe you know make sure some of the oil or the other fluids hasn't leaked out all over the garage over the weekend and you know make sure

everything is is topped off but all of your pre-checks will be worth it because when you do finally turn the key you feel that surge of power through the starter solenoid turning over the starter and engine as you pull the choke cable and probably feather the throttle it's a complete body experience starting an old car you have to use your hands and your feet and your ears and your eyes this is a feeling that can't be replaced by the pushing of a button it's a visceral tangible thing that connects you to the car car and

you haven't even started driving it yet now the car is finally running but you got to keep it running because it's cold you know on a very old car that might mean fiddling with more than just the choke and the throttle you might have to also adjust the timing but that old car needs some time before you just send the RPMs to the moon like most humans when they first wake up it needs you to take it easy on it even when you do start driving you just can't go maybe you watch the temperature rise

a bit or maybe you make sure the gauges are all working make sure the oil pressure is where it's supposed to be but once everything appears to be in working order and why wouldn't it be you're good to go oh but then you should probably stop literally like make sure the brakes are working and then you're good to go now you're driving really driving because the experience is nothing like driving a new car driving an old car makes driving a new car feel like you're not even driving it's kind of a shell of the experience

of driving a real car there's no space for listening to a podcast here I mean you probably wouldn't be able to hear it even if you tried no you're busy with your ears you're partially just enjoying the unadulterated sound of explosions rocketing directly out of the exhaust behind you alongside you know the mechanical sound of carburation and just the engine working but you're also listening for anything that sounds off you know the car telling you that not all of its mechanical systems are perfectly in sync with your eyes you're constantly checking the gauges making sure

everything is in working order but there's also a good chance you can actually see with your eyes like you don't need a backup camera because you can actually see what's around you and in front of you on an old car versus new cars as much as all of this sounds like a lot of work it's really not it's kind of one single experience that's almost like meditation yes you're focused but you're also so much more in sync with the car that it kind of happens naturally you're not inhibited by electrical systems trying to do all

the work for you and so you feel the car and you feel the road and once you get past the fear of the thing breaking down then it all starts to be fun you know when you press down on the throttle with your foot that pedal is actually pulling a real cable that's allowing the fuel air mixture into the engine and you feel the weight of that mechanism and you feel connected to the power plant if you're lucky the car won't have power steering or modern suspension these older mechanisms really do allow you to feel

the road and feel the car working and you'll have a sensation of speed that just isn't there on new cars you know 35 mph might feel like 70 and 70 will feel like 140 because the sound and feel of the car it isn't muted by all those extra systems like on a new car and you don't have to go back to the 1930s to get a car that feels like this cars from the80s will give you much of this experience and like I said The more you go back in time the more mechanical and simple

the experience will be all of this to say older cars are more mechanical and that's not all bad not only are many of those systems like Distributors and carburetors and generators just really wonderful tried andrue longlasting systems that really do work well when they're understood they're also serviceable this is why old cars can be left in a field or Barn for decades and they're not that complicated to get running and this just isn't true of new cars you can also fix and tune them with simple Tools in your own garage or on the side of

the road so as much as they may be more prone to breaking down often they'll just start to run poorly and if you spend enough time with them and you know what tools and extra parts should be brought along then you can get the thing running and you don't have to have some extensive mechanical background you just have to dive in and learn and really get to know your car it's all much more simple than people make it out to be or you can also just get haggy and you know use that free Towing when

done right the experience of driving an old car especially when it's just about the experience and not so much about commuting it can be better than what you get from a new car the other thing old cars have going for them though is their looks as with the you know basic mechanics of vehicles restrictions regarding the car's Aesthetics diminish the further you go back in time through history so prior to the' 70s safety regulations were basically non-existent if you wanted to make your car look like a torpedo in the front you could or you know

a rocket ship in the back you could do that too if you wanted your car to have basically non-exist tiny bumpers or you know sharp edges you could do that this doesn't mean that for most of automotive design history it was just the wild west companies and designers knew that in order to sell cars they had to make them appealing and with virtually no government restrictions on what a car could look like what we got were increasingly appealing and beautiful cars designers were free to give their cars coherent and beautiful lines not obstructed by the

need for specific crumple zones or rollover stats or you know having to have your headlight look exactly like every other car's headlight cars were smaller and thinner and sleeker and they were made of high quality Metals even the cheapest cars from say 70 years ago feel more quality than the average new car purchased today but there was a sense of Freedom that we just don't have anymore after the war Regional Auto design really took off and so in America we saw some of the largest cars ever come out of companies like you know Chevy in

Lincoln while in Europe companies like Porsche and mg made tiny little cars these cars were expressions of their own time and their own specific culture and unlike today cars often matched the houses that they were parked outside of and that kind of thing just isn't possible anymore in the early days of Motoring cars looked pretty much the same but after the war we began to see all sorts of variety and expressions within automotive design the design began to be a picture of the car's character so sports cars began to either have aggressive looks like muscle

cars or Sleek racy looks like you know a Shelby Cobra or an Austin Healey 3000 there was just so much more room for the designer to be creative you know take a Timeless design like the Jaguar e type in Great Britain or you know even in America something like the Lincoln Continental these cars are entirely different they serve different purposes but they're both beautiful in their own kind of simple way and when that EX executive you know got that raise and decided he wanted to get a new car he had so many different options but

neither of those cars could ever be built again for production because of the way that they're structured both cars exude luxury and sophistication in subtle ways specific laws about you know the height of the headlights or shape of the edges just weren't in existence and so the cars look completely different and unique but today we're almost back where we were in the early days in terms of design some of the the fastest best production sports cars today you know from the likes of BMW they don't really look all that different than traditional family cars and

I guess that's in part because cars now need to serve multiple purposes but it's also because there just isn't a way to really differentiate Your Design from other cars they have to be the same in essence everything at this point is basically an SUV and it's all just very boring this is why some goofy little old car from the 40s or 60s or even 80s will get way more attention than a brand new Ferrari it's because those old cars feel special they feel like pieces of Art and we can tell these designs didn't come from

a computer or you know some sort of committee rather they feel like they were sketched and molded by real artists people who wanted to just design beautiful cars not you know hit all the right market trends there are beautiful well-designed and unique cars today no doubt it's just rare to find a car that compares in terms of overall design language to the oldies now in case you think that I'm just blinded by my love for old cars and for their history you know and maybe I'm blinded by Nostalgia even though I didn't live through most

of these eras the truth is I've owned and maintained old Vehicles mainly motorcycles I do understand what it's all about and I do understand the frustrations that come with having an old vehicle because they don't just work like new vehicles so I want to address some of the problems with owning and driving an old car because it really is not all rainbows and sunshine and of course the first worry potential classic car buyers have is reliability now this one really varies just like the Driving Experience varies and I'm somewhat guilty of lumping classic cars into

one thing in this video and they really aren't you know the ownership and driving experience of say an American V8 from the 60s or 70s is nothing like a British Roadster from the 50s or a Ford Model A reliability will vary and the overall experience will vary but it is true that in general older cars are less reliable at least in the way that we think of reliability today they are prone to have more problems and to break down you know they have less reliable electrical systems and again with more moving parts and just a

more mechanical system you are prone to have more problems you know things like fuel injection just are simpler and more reliable than carburation in at least one sense and having more of a system be controlled electronically though it does kill all the fun it does technically make for a more reliable car old cars are categorically less reliable it's just true and if you can't admit it you're crazy now you might be one of the people who is firing back at me about carburation but just just keep listening cuz I do understand what you're thinking there

is another side to reliability cars used to be designed for simple Home Maintenance they even came with manuals showing you the owner exactly how you can tackle whatever job or you know testing that you need whether big or small and more of the parts were designed to be serviceable and have you know potential lifetime use again this is why some old Chevy that's been parked in a barn somewhere for 50 years can be brought back to life relatively simply in an afternoon whereas something like a modern Tesla will have no chance of that and let's

not forget that though the primary mechanical parts that make up a car are more reliable today there are also lots of primary electronic parts on a new car and you know having a brother that works at a dealership I can confirm new cars are not bulletproof they have almost as many problems as used cars and that's because they're loaded with extra bits reliability to drivers of old was very different than what it is to us today we want zero hassle they didn't mind a bit of hassle if it meant you know they didn't have to

take the car to the shop they were okay with investing a bit of time into the car to get it back up and running whereas we're so busy we can't handle the idea of mechanical problems arising and that's why simple problems come up and we aren't willing to work on our own cars so we take them to get worked on and pay way too much for it and the cars are now no longer designed with ongoing simple maintenance in mind they just aren't very simple anymore and there just aren't very many non-sp specialist jobs that

can be done on Modern new cars this is why many have found the sweet spot to be cars from the 80s and the '90s they're reliable they're simple they're cheap to work on so if you want want that sweet spot where you kind of get the best of both worlds you know that kind of modern hassle-free reliability but also affordable ongoing service ability get yourself a Honda or a Toyota from the 9s that's the way to go they're cheap to buy and cheap to maintain and like an old house you know a Honda from the

9s is way over engineered the other main concern people have with old cars is understandably safety and similar to the topic of reliability there's layers here in and of them eles cars have certainly become safer people like to imagine these big old metal cars will do well in a crash and that's just not the case at least not in comparison to modern vehicles if you've seen the 09 Malibu versus the 59 Belair crash test you know what I'm talking about and over the past decade cars have not only gotten safer in general they're also so

much bigger modern safety features not only minimize damage to everyone inside but also prevent crashes in the first place they just are safer it's true but the way that we've built modern cars has brought about some problems you know a lack of visibility especially in the front but also all around just the sheer size of your average vehicle and a dependence on these safety features has led to more and worse distracted driving other cars may be equally safe and large but often it's the pedestrians who actually get the worst of it pedestrian deaths have increased

some 80% since 2009 when they hit their all alltime low and also since 2009 what we've seen is you know the epidemic of SUVs and cars just getting massive and I think about this sometimes when I was driving around in my old project it's unbelievable how much you can see you can see everything it doesn't feel like a car that is a danger to anyone all I'm saying is if everyone drove old cars cars that aren't as fast that aren't as powerful and that you can actually see out of and that takes so much more

work to drive we would solve the epidemic of distracted driving and we'd be able to see each other again in our cities could be once again more oriented towards walking again as the cars just wouldn't be as large today it seems that the only way people think that they can get a safe car at least here in America is to have the biggest car possible which I think is just silly now I want to end this by talking about a concept A word really that I think kind of sums up all of this and it's

something that we don't seem to be doing anymore something called motoring at the turn of the century and into the early days of Automotive development motoring was a term used to describe really car enthusiasts people like you and me and that's because that's what you had to be to own and drive a car you had to be an Enthusiast I mean why would you want to drive a car you have a perfectly good horse outside readily available the reason they use the term motoring is because Motors themselves were relatively new and they were at the

heart of the car and owning a car meant being a motor person you had to understand the mechanical parts of your car so that you could work on it yourself you had to be able to Tinker as we say there was no other option because there weren't tow trucks to save you or dealers to fix your car motoring was kind of an art that is all but lost today we no longer understand our cars we're too afraid to work on them and even if we are car enthusiasts most of us only know you know what

our cars are capable of or what makes our car different than other cars not what work capable of actually doing to our cars and I really felt this when I started working on motorcycles and cars this incredible fear of not understanding the machine and totally messing it up and breaking something and this just was not how people viewed it a 100 years ago car owners spent their evenings going over their car with a wrench making sure everything was in order and then taking on larger projects on the weekends and They Carried a set of tools

with them and they were confident enough to actually work on their cars even on the side of the road if necessary it's not that older cars are inherently worse they're just different and we usually just don't understand them when they start to have problems or won't run we get frustrated because we don't understand why and we're unwilling to dig in and learn why and so I would say if you're not willing to somewhat become a motorist you know in the classic sense of the word then a classic car probably isn't for you and that's okay

just stop blaming the car or thinking that they're worse or you know thinking it's imp possible to make them work it's not for me this idea of trying to be a motorist it all comes together to make a very different experience as a car owner older cars they have soul they have character sometimes they have Battle Scars and they're never without their problems even when they're nice and restored but they're pieces of history and they tell their own story that you as the owner get to be a part of the key though is to buy

a good old car not a bad one one that works for you maybe dealing with a Synchro gearbox just isn't for you maybe you need a car capable of going on the highway maybe getting a Japanese car from the 70s or 80s will be better than a British or American car from the 50s regardless if you do decide to get a classic car do your research don't rush it there are loads of great cars around just take your time and don't get a project if you're new to all this you won't finish it trust me

I've been there I would love to hear about your experiences have you ever owned any classic cars do you think old cars give a better Driving Experience or am I just blinded by Nostalgia thanks for watching and drive safe