That's going to be an expensive test any way you do it.

I did have to replace the air bag module behind the radio.  Got a
perfectly good used one from Tim (Musttanguy) a while ago, been fine
ever since.

There a few advantages to lower tech cars but they are far outweighed by
the advantages this technology brings regarding efficiency, longevity,
reliability, performance and convenience to modern vehicles.

My first car ws a 1971 Nova with a 250 CI inline six.  It was about as
simple as they came.  I had plenty of issues with it.  Before it hit
100k miles it was rusting through, I rebuilt the head, it was a constant
battle to keep it in a good state of tune and the gas mileage wasn't all
that great.  It was fairly reliable though and never left me stranded
anywhere.

Many foreign cars were built better than domestics.  Especially after
WWII.  The same still applies though that the modern versions of these
cars are much better in almost every way.

The fact is 99.99% of driver wouldn't want to keep a car for a million
miles so that benchmark isn't worth much.  It would take a person over
66 years to put that many miles on a car driving at a rate of 15,000
miles per year.  Who would want to drive the same car for 66 years?
Your definition of quality is very narrow and when that definition is
broadened the new cars stack up very well against their predecessors.

Once again I disagree.  When I look at the crash worthiness of new cars
I am amazed at their quality.  Having air bags, self tensioning seat
belts, crumple zones, roll over protection etc. is invaluable, IMO.
Having the ability for a third party to know if you have crashed on a
deserted road and being able to send help directly to your location is a
wonderful thing.  Getting good mileage with very good performance is
another perk of applying technology.

We have had very good reliability from the newer cars.  The '94 T-Bird
we had went 190k miles until our son totaled it.  I have a '94 Explorer
with 186k miles that is still going strong.  The 2003 Sable we have has
90k miles and has been nearly trouble free.  It also delivers great
performance from its 3.0L DOHC V-6.  It handles fairly well too.  It is
an all around great car and we paid $18k for it brand new and it has
leather interior, sunroof and every option available for that year.

There are plenty of exciting cars for sale.  There are performance
models of all varieties.  Look at the GT500.  It has more performance
than ANY Mustang ever produced and it is for sale TODAY, not during the
1960s.  There are four wheel drive, turbocharged subcompacts that will
perform as well as Corvettes of just a decade ago.  The Camaro is coming
back and we have a Challenger on the showroom floors.  I think if you
look around you will find a lot of performance and at all price points.
 Heck, even the current base Mustang has the same horsepower level as
the old 5.0L Fox cars.

Anecdotal evidence aside, the average car coming off of the average American
assembly line in the 1960s was a piece of junk the day it was built. Cars in
the 70s were worse.

Because the Japanese were kicking our collective butts, somewhere in the
1980s quality became Job One. And it wasn't until well into the 90s that the
Big Three finally got a handle on this whole quality thing.

The vast number of cars built today are aimed squarely at the mass market
driver, what I call point-and-shoot cars. Get in, start it up, drive to
work. In a few years, all of those ads and incentives convince these folks
to trade up to a new model. But, through innovation and government
regulation, these point-and-shoot cars are also designed to protect these
drivers from themselves. That's fine, since these folks aren't really into
motoring, they just want reliable transportation. And more air bags and
cupholders, apparently.

A very small minority actually likes cars. These people could have bought
any model from any year over the past five decades and kept it beautiful,
kept it running like a clock, and kept racking up the miles beyond 100,000
or 200,000 or much more. These are the cars that we see at shows, that we
see tooling down a back road on a sunny day. While the build quality of
previous decades was suspect at best, no car was built to fail within four,
five, or six years. Every car came with a little book that describes the
care and feeding of the animal, and owners ignore that little book at their
own expense.

I'm somewhere in between. I own two Fox Mustangs, both coming up on their
15th birthdays. Neither is a show car, both are daily drivers, neither is
babied. I have regular maintenance done, and when things break, they get
shop time. For whatever reason (that I still haven't fully figured out), I
am in love with this particular model/year and haven't yet been pursuaded to
trade up.

BUT... How can I argue with the new Corvette? How can I look at the new
Mustang GT, without getting goosebumps? I even see the attraction of the
Nissan Altima! Toyota has nothing that stirs my blood, nor Honda, but I'm
not their target market, am I?

There are a small number of cars built today that can get me excited, and
there have been times that I thought all cars like them would disappear
completely, given the rise of influence of the insurance and government
regulations. And now the growing Green forces threaten them even more with
extinction. Yet, for some reason, performance is growing across all lines,
with V6 engines putting out the power of V8s.

I have no doubt that any car built TODAY, in the hands of a caring owner,
could easily go 500,000 miles in the years to come. The sad truth is that
the bulk of new cars today will be recycled within ten to twenty years, just
as previous generations before them. It's the nature of consumables...

dwight
www.tfrog.com