How did vehicles in America operate reliably for the first 100 years without all the extra stuff.
How did the US operate 100 years ago.
Simple reliable design.
90% of the mandated crap from DC to the Car Manufacturers contribute very little to actual function.
Now it is about tracking everyone for big brother.
The cars are so complex that the dealerships cannot do a good job of repairing them when they break.
The styles change so fast and often that parts are a real issue in repairing them.
I’m no fan of anything in Russia, but I do love good simple design. And products that are designed to make life easier and better, instead of simply more complex.
I hate cheap ChiCom crap that is glitzy but does not function well. But China is where we shipped all our manufacturing to. If you look carefully today, see what that bought us?
I have a 66 Ford Mustang with about 120,000 miles on it. It was my first wife’s first car. A contractor saw it in the garage of a house I am remodeling and told me, “you do realize that that car as it is (all 4 tires flat from age) is worth $20,000 dollars. It originally cost about $3,000.
Well they didn’t, at least not without regular maintenance. Everyone in winter cold weather always carried jumper cables. Getting cars and trucks with generator charging systems, points ignition, and carburetors was decidedly a dicey affair on subzero mornings unless the engine was kept in a high state of tune. Better heeled motorists usually got a Tune-Up twice a year. Everyone else messed around, “golden screwdrivers”, and often made them run worse. Whenever I worked on vintage iron much of what I did was simply repairing stuff or adjusting back to factory specs, that people’&$@cked up.
Modern cars often have no soul, but they have become very reliable and rarely need any attention. (God help you if they do, however)
The company that took over the McDonald’s franchise in Russia reopened its flagship restaurant in Moscow, but hamburgers and french fry wrappers were blank.
BLANK! Oh noes!
Seriously?
The secret old cars? Always pull the vacuum advance off the distributer before setting the dwell. That is the secret.
The Russian people in the future will be driving a Lada, while people in the West will be sitting in driverless cars.”
The people of Russia will retain competent skills the people of the west will become even less able.
Fixed it.
It’s the shirt buttons that are baffling me. Those aren’t exactly high-tech, they require no fancy ores or computer chips, and they haven’t changed all that much in the last century. I know people who make them by hand, just for the fun of it.
Making them precisely enough they can be attached entirely by machine might be a little tricky, but not ridiculously tricky. There are even instructions online for making them from common materials like milk.
(No, seriously. Check it out: https://lizhaywood.com.au/making-buttons-from-milk-plastic/ )
Your rhetorical question contains a hidden (false) premise: That those vehicles did operate reliably.
In fact, they were death traps!
Children's seats! Hah!
Air bags? "What are those?"
Anti-blocking systems? "Huh?!"
The number of fatalities per million miles driven in the U.S. dropped precipitously as these innovations were introduced.
Regards,
I wish they still had that little side window...and ROLL DOWN WINDOWS...cuz the elec ones fail and they’re damn expensive to repair.
I wish we could buy cars like that.
Given that every neighborhood I grew up in the #1 weekend “hobby” was fixing the car I’d say they didn’t.
Indeed a lot of cars from the 30’s to the 60’s still around no new car will be around that long they will be soup cans.
I have a 2000 Civic.
The spousal unit recently bought a 2022 CR-V. It essentially is a rolling iPhone. A little wind shield ding and half the sensing "tools" are at risk.
The Civic? Just keeps rolling along at 280,000 miles.
“How did vehicles in America operate reliably for the first 100 years without all the extra stuff.”
In the 1920’s deaths per 100 million miles traveled was over 20. Now it is down to almost one.