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Except it wasn’t the Japanese that went EFI early on. It was the Europeans! Mercedes, BMW, Jaguar, VW - all of them had at least overdrive-equipped manuals by the mid-60s or early 70s, with electronic fuel injection starting around 1970 and becoming truly reliable with a clear performance and reliability advantage over carbs in 1974 with the advent of L-Jetronic. Overdrive transmissions also started appearing about this time in European vehicles.

Side note: Bosch made the first practical EFI with the D-Jetronic system in 1967 - but it was based off of abandoned *Bendix* patents and designs from the 1950s when US companies tried to make it work and failed miserably. Bosch picked up the dropped Bendix project, dusted it off, paid Bendix for it, and ran with it. The rest is history.

The Japanese also went down the overdrive transmission path that the Europeans did, but they explored another route besides EFI (which most people don’t know about). The Japanese put EFI on their top models starting in the 70s and 80s, but they also had electronic and computer controlled carbs starting in the 1970s and running all the way until the mid 90s. They got acceptable performance and excellent reliability from this method at reduced cost over EFI; however, ever tightening emissions standards eventually killed it off - but this was another way the Big Three could have gone, an interim step between lame “dumb” carbs and full up EFI... and didn’t.

Regarding your “bitching”: If I plopped you down in front of my ex-1966 E-Type and told you that it had just stopped running, would you be able to fix it without a book? How about a 1965 Porsche 911? Or a 1978 Ferrari 308? All of these are “conventional” carbed and ignition-systemed vehicles, so you shouldn’t need a book, right? (If you say yes and you have no experience with those systems used on those cars, I will keep you the HELL away from my cars with a cattle prod if I have to, because they’re NOT like GMs or Fords.)

All systems need documentation. If I stuck you in front of a 1970 Firebird 400 with a dual plane dual quad intake bearing twin Edelbrock 1406 carburetors, would you *instantly* know how to tune and synch those two? Probably not. Learning EFI is little different from learning, say, how a car with 3-6 Webers or Hitachi carbs works - you have to start over. And, by the way, back in the 80s when EFI was new and self-diagnostics weren’t quite there, most makers actually put the test documentation IN THE OWNER’S MANUAL. You know, the one you’re supposed to keep in the car? That one? :P

I found it easier to get parts for my Nissan Pathfinder than I did for my “conventional” Jeep Wagoneer when it had a Motorcraft carb on top of the AMC 360 V8. Cheaper, too. Stuff being shipped from Indonesia seems to be more and more the province of the old domestic stuff. I can’t think of a single critical part that I’ve had to have shipped in from Asia for any of my Japanese vehicles over the last 10-15 years.

And, since you probably don’t know, oxygen sensors are consumables. Older ones are supposed to be replaced every 30-60,000 miles, new ones between 60-120,000 miles depending on design. So, yes, that is often the actual cure for a car’s driveability problems - replace the consumable, you know, like you used to have to rebuild a carb about every 30-60k?

But let’s say it doesn’t fix the problem. How is Autozone blindly telling you that you need an O2 sensor any different than Chief Auto Parts blindly telling you that you needed their “tune up pak” back in the 1970s? Nothing has changed there except the item or items they’re trying to sell you. That’s all. Nothing else.

Also, what do you do when your Ford Mustang has a coil failure at 11pm on Sunday in a small town in Texas? If you have an old school Mustang from, say, 1970, you’re done. You have to wait until morning, at the earliest, to get a coil. You’re not going to be fixing that by the side of the road or limping home. If you have a 2003 Mustang, the Check Engine light comes on, the single coil pack goes offline and you DRIVE HOME on the six remaining cylinders. Distributorless ignition is a wonderful thing.

Likewise the fuel system. What do you do if your carb’s primary passages gets plugged up in the same scenario? That’s it, you’re done until you can rebuild the carb. Hope you brought the special carb tools. If the EFI car has a stuck/clogged injector, you simply return home on the remaining seven cylinders.