It’s 1992. Your mom just took you through the Dairy Queen drive in after supper. It was 30C today, and it’s going to be 35C tomorrow. You’re going to go swimming at the local outdoor pool with your mom, little brother, auntie and favourite cousin, tomorrow though. Mom will probably put on that Blue Rodeo tape on the way back. It’s not your favorite, but you find yourself waiting for the song hooks.
Life is simple and life is good.
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It’s 1992. Your mom just took you through the Dairy Queen drive in after supper. It was 30C today, and it’s going to be 35C tomorrow, but you’re an American child in 1992 and have no idea what that means in Freedom Units.
This is a mild tangent but I learned how to convert celsius to fahrenheit because of a Codename: Kids Next Store episode that I watched once wherein a character says “30c, 30 celsius that’s like 80 degrees fahrenheit”. Which is honestly not the weirdest thing to learn from but it is my number one.
I’d like to take a moment to dispel some of the claims being made in this comment thread.
Modern cars are significantly more reliable than older cars by virtually every measurable metric. They are unquestionably more difficult to work on, but they also break down far less often.
The safety features on modern vehicles are light-years ahead of anything available in the '80s or '90s. Emissions are also dramatically lower than they were back then.
A lot of people in the comments have already pointed this out.
That said, older cars were undeniably easier to work on in many respects.
Older cars also looked nicer. Yes our cars are better, and I will probably never own a classic car. The Chevrolet Bel Air looks way better than any car built in the last 10 years, and it’s a metal death trap.
If you’re not even 50 yet and already falling into nostalgia traps seek help.
I don’t need help. I need a systemic revamp of our political and financial systems, and for terrible things to happen to billionaires.
You will most likely need help making those things happen.
… and my axe?
I drive electric.
The 1992 Oldsmobile Cutlass cruiser had a curb weight of almost 4,500 lb. Compare that to my Subaru WRX, which is fairly heavy for a modern car and has a curb weight of less than 3,500 lb…
1984 LTD Crown Victoria, White with red velour interior. I closed that door (which looks a lot like this door) on my hand and it locked. Mom had already gone inside and there i was screaming bloody murder in the front yard. She eventually came out and unlocked the door and got me out. Somehow it didn’t break my hand, probly because children are made of rubber or something. Theres no point to this other than sharing my unlocked PTSD that this image unlocked.
The Corvette made 190hp at one point.
The emissions acts really forced a lot of painful innovation. Engines like the Cadillac HT 4000 went to aluminum blocks, or we utterly throttled by shitty computers and carbourator tuning.
Sure. 350 cid engine, small 2bbl carb.
Pretty sure this car had more ashtrays than it did safety features too
hey if it’s in a crash, the CAR’s gonna survive. Anyone in it? that’s another story…
And it will crash because it handles like a boat
Chunky marinara
I bet you haven’t seen what the orcas have been up to this week
Making marinas chunky?
The tar helped hold things together in a crash.
The ashtray is a safety feature.
It definitely had some in the doors.
You could drunk drive into a brick wall at forty-five miles an hour and the only damage would be yourself smeared all over the inside of it.
You’d end up with the steering column through your chest because crumple zones didn’t exist. https://youtu.be/fPF4fBGNK0U
I think we are saying the same thing.
We are. Sorry. It’s early and I misread.
It’s like 2pm!
Damn lazy hippies sleeping all day.
Dude, it’s like 5:30pm. The east coast is just waking up. It’s early.
East coast hippies smell the worst.
6am for me at time of posting. I wish I could sleep all night, let alone all day.
And that steering column turns out fine.
I had an old Malibu, and I was backing into an alley and a telephone pole was somehow out of my vision. I hit it full force with the rear bumper. Got out and the chrome was still perfect, and no dent in the bumper…but wow what a jolt.
You’re probably really lucky that you were reversing and had the entire seat to cushion you.
The entire bench seat :)
It’s 1992. Your mom takes you to Dairy Queen in her oldsmobile. She lights up a cigarette. She asks if you want one. You say no. She says stop acting like such a pussy. You take the cigarette. She lights it for you.
She throws her empty bud can out the window and hands you two dollars to get a blizzard
You walk into the Dairy Queen. A group of teenagers are smoking in a booth. One of them ashes their cigarette into a Dairy Queen-branded ashtray on the table.
Smoke up, Johnny!
Hasn’t the weight of cars been increasing? Pick a model and track the curb weight over generations. It seems to be going up.
Seriously. This is a 10th generation Oldsmobile 98, with a 4,000 pounds curb weight. That puts it in the same range as smaller crossover SUVs these days.
Except for EVs (which are heavy af because of the batteries) curb weight is down significantly from the 70s to today. It has been steadily trending upwards, but slowly, since around 2012. It’s hard to make a car as heavy as they used to be back when everything was steel and weld joints. Engines were bigger back then too — because they were less efficient.
Thanks for the input. Is there a model of car we can use to show this trend? I tried doing it with a VW Golf, but that just showed the upward trend.
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/average-car-weight.html
Here’s an article about it. Thanks for making me look it up, it has an important little fact at the top, which is the pickups have trended steadily upward over that same period which I didn’t know. However, other vehicle types have trended steadily downwards, and are still below their previous figures.
Because pickups have gotten physically bigger?
That’s my thought. The dimensions are bigger and almost all of them are extended cab or at least third door.
Thanks for that. Drawing a line between cars and SUVs helped clarify average vehicle weight as the sum of two different trends.
Definitely a lot more people swapping to SUVs now too
It’s mostly that the old American land yachts are no longer as big. Look at the fifth generation Lincoln Continental vs any after it. Or the 1960s Cadillac Eldorado, a 2.2 ton 2 door car
European and Asian cars have been trending up in size meanwhile but there have been instances where a new generation model is lighter than the old one due to the materials used.
What’s really jarring is to see the old, American land yachts from back in the day on the road next to the grotesquely-oversized pickup trucks we see everywhere today. They look, well, not exactly small, but nothing at all like the bloated whales in our memories. Heck, my grandfather’s Cadillac seemed enormous at 225 inches long (the longest ever production car at the time), but the base model of the Ford F series is now 232 inches.
And it probably still works
My step-uncle had one of these. He almost never pulled it out and certainly would not have let icecream anywhere near the thing.
They sell “fucking cars” now?
What do think self-driving is all about?
Hey man I had a 1967 Plymouth Newport that had to have 454 engine just haul the car around. Fucker was tank on wheels.
That would have been a 440 engine. General Motors made the 454.
I used to have a 69 Newport. Loved that car.
Oh thanks been long time since had that car. Was a kid 3rd car ever owned. Was a beast and loved it.
