New Wife and I have a Saturday morning ritual which involves me making us tea and coffee and bringing the laptop to bed, where we read the online news and browse a few websites together.
The first thing we look at is this here website, because she doesn’t have time to read it during the week, so we scroll back while she gets a Whole Week Of Kim in one gulp, so to speak. (And yet she still stays with me, which is a miracle, quite frankly.)
Anyway, our first read this past Saturday was my post about beauty and the differing definitions thereof.
I should point out that New Wife has if anything more conservative tastes than I do, and anything that reeks of “flashy” or “loud” makes her nose turn up in disgust. Needless to say, she thought all the ’68-’72 cars I pictured were “dreadful” and “disgusting” except for the E-type (and even that gets only a begrudging pass from her).
One of the other websites we visit each week is C.W.’s Daily Timewaster, which on this occasion featured this vision of loveliness, a Jaguar Mk II from the early 1960s:
This she pronounced as the most beautiful car ever made, because it was classy (inside and out).
By her terms, of course, it is the most beautiful car ever made — because she thinks that almost all sports cars are “flashy”, and the family saloon car is the sine qua non of automotive desirability.
I would actually agree with her, because as 4-door saloon cars go, the Mark II is undoubtedly exquisite, especially when compared to others of its ilk and era both European and American. (With its 3.4-liter engine, it’s also plenty powerful, which she sniffily dismisses with “If you’re interested in that sort of thing”.)
And in case you’re interested in which sports car she would appreciate were we to win the lottery, it’s this one, the 1964 Mercedes 230SL W113 (“Pagoda”):
Can’t really fault her on that one, either. (I’d prefer the later-model W113 280 SL because MOAR POWAH, but she’s unmoved by that, as we’ve seen before.)
One gulp of Kim at once…… :::hold! don’t say it outloud:::::
I would agree … IF!! … the damn things were as reliable, oil-tight and well-lit (Lord Lucas, Lord of Darkness) as today’s cars. They weren’t.
Engines from 1988 to 2015 seem to be peak reliability. My 2005 Chevy I used to own was more reliable than my current 2018 Toyota. The Toyota is great and has never left me stranded but it has needed repairs that the 2005 Chevy didn’t and never would have.
Both engines were good.
Starting around 2020 (SCAMdemic) to now – so many recalls and problems with all manufacturers engines. They are being forced by the govt to squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of every little drip of fuel. This costs reliability. And longevity too. No turbo engine will last what a natural aspirated engine will. Period.
There’s ebbs and flows. Right now I don’t know if there’s many 2024 and 2025 cars I’d trust right now. If I have to pick I’d of course take a chance with a Japanese vehicle – Toyota Honda or Subaru.
There’s a term for vehicles made from roughly 1990 to 2015 give or take making the rounds – “modern classics”. The cars we know and love today that don’t have the scamdemic and moving forward bullshit on them.
The Cars Kim is writing about weee before my time but I do like the styling. They do look much more styling that today. In those days cars you could tell a brand by its style before you saw a brand badge or label
Today all the cars are like women upside down in the dark – the same. You need to see a brand badge or label to know what some of these cars are. They all look very similar.
“You need to see a brand badge or label to know what some of these cars are. They all look very similar.”
All producers have to meet corporate CAFE standards, and much of that is gained in wind tunnel testing, and Mr Wind Tunnel doesn’t give a hoot whose badge is being tested. The result is all the large production volume cars look like wedges or jelly beans, with the jelly beans tapered (squashed IMHO) toward the rear, losing many cubic feet of useful interior space.
If I were King For a Month, I’d fire all the EPA regulation writers who cost our economy billions chasing miniscule diminishing returns to justify their jobs and reset the standards back to about 1995 regulations. The remaining EPA drones could enforce those standards, but nothing more. Any changes for new contingencies or technologies would have to come from Congress, who for decades have abdicated their duties by writing laws that say “as the secretary shall determine.”
What style is preferred by which person will be discussed / argued until the end of time.
What is not debatable is that everyone will agree that the best “feature” that most all classic cars have in common compared to today’s electronic heaps of shit is SIMPLICITY.
The more shit a vehicle has onboard the more shit that can go wrong. This includes the driver paying attention to said electronic FEATURES some of which are SAFETY related and getting into accidents from WRECKless driving.