Daily driving in a 40 year old car? – EPautos

Many people are understandably wary of buying a new or even recently made car, partly because of the things they don’t want that now come standard in every new car – including creepy driver monitoring/data mining “technology” – and partly because of the cost of a new or even recently made car.

Their thoughts turn to vehicles made long ago, when cars were completely under the control of the driver and did not collect or transmit any “data” about the driver.

But is it practical to buy a 40 year old car?

That’s about how old you have to be to be completely free of electronics beyond the ignition system and some hot wires to power accessories like headlights/brake lights. A car that old is going to have a carburetor – a purely mechanical fuel delivery device that needs no electronics to maintain/adjust it. It will have accessories controlled by simple switches with hot and ground wires, no body control modules and computers. If the car has AC, mechanical slides will regulate the temperature. The brakes will be just brakes. No ABS. So no wheel speed sensors or ABS pumps.

Such a car is completely under your physical control. It cannot be “updated” – unless you decide to open the hood and turn a key. It does not betray you to the insurance mafia. It does not try to influence your driving.

Sounds appealing, right?

But how practical is it?

Actually more than you would think.

And in some important ways even more so.

Let’s start with what you might call fixability. Those who remember what cars were like before they became what they are today, know that it was normal to have to tinker with them – their engines – on a fairly regular basis. Little things like cleaning/adjusting the carburetor, which had to be done about once a year.

Maintenance visits in the spring and again in the fall were a regular occurrence.

But the point was that almost anyone could make these adjustments – and perform a tune-up – himself and even if it wasn’t, the cost of having it done by someone who could would have been negligible compared to the cost of having a new model car repaired today.

Partly because there are few people who are not professional ‘technicians’ who have the skills (or the tools) to do the work themselves, and also because the work itself is often very complicated and expensive – as are the electronic parts which generally need to be replaced when they break (as opposed to mechanical parts which need to be replaced frequently). repairable and it’s much cheaper to get it working properly again.

Of course, 40 years ago people were happy when things started to improve so that they no longer had to tinker with their vehicles so much; because new cars became – and have become – largely maintenance-free as far as the “little things” that people used to have to deal with on a regular basis.

But we’ve now reached a point of daunting complexity—and daunting cost. The new stuff generally works seamlessly—for a while. But when the day comes that something doesn’t work, it usually means a trip (even a tow) to the dealer and—routinely—hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in repair bills. Nearly everyone is also completely dependent on a dealer—and its technicians—to fix whatever is wrong. Because almost no one who isn’t a dealer technician is capable of figuring out what’s wrong, let alone fixing it.

Owning something much older isn’t – and while it may be a bit of a hassle to deal with the various “little things” that come with older vehicles, the message to take away from this is: can deal with them. Or you can afford to have them dealt with, for much less than it costs to pay a dealership technician. Someone you know – a friend or neighbor – probably knows how to figure out what’s wrong with (and fix) an older vehicle with a carburetor and no computer.

And having spoken there.

There’s nothing inherently bad about computer controlled fuel injection. There’s a lot to like about a fuel delivery system that can precisely meter fuel and mix air and fuel just right for optimum performance, fuel economy, and (yes) low emissions. The problem arose when computers started controlling everything – including things like the power windows, even. And the gas pedal. A cable works better – and is much easier to adjust and much cheaper to replace, should the need ever arise. It’s nothing more than a cable connecting point A (the gas pedal) to point B (the throttle), and most computer controlled fuel injection systems used cables until the early to mid 2000s, believe it or not.

Until they were replaced by drive-by-wire throttle bodies.

The point is that it is simple and not very expensive to convert an older vehicle’s engine to electronic fuel injection, controlled by a simple computer that only controls the air-fuel ratio and related aspects of fuel delivery. There are “bolt-on” systems available that almost anyone can install or have installed for much less money than it costs to buy a new vehicle with computers – plural – controlling everything. Once installed, the engine of a 40-year-old vehicle will start immediately and run without hesitation or stalling, just like the engine of a brand new vehicle.

Without the countless computers that control everything.

My nearly 50 year old vehicle still has a carburetor – because I to like fiddling with carburetors – but I did replace the original transmission, which had no overdrive gear. It was easy to bolt-in a modern transmission with overdrive gearing and now the engine of my almost 50 year old car runs at a high idle of 70 MPH just like the engine of a modern car. All the benefits – none of the drawbacks.

Hence the italics above. With the old stuff, you can bolt on modern stuff, like an aftermarket Throttle Body Injection (TBI) system or a modern transmission with overdrive gears. You can replace the stock disc/drum brakes (or even all the drum brakes) with modern four-wheel disc brakes in a weekend, using only wrenches and other basic tools. Or have someone else do these upgrades, which will cost you a fraction of what six years of $600 a month in new car payments will cost you.

Because there are no computers to control everything.

And once these upgrades are made, you’ll have a modern car that you can drive every day, without all the hassles that come with modern cars.

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