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The difference between new and old cars

Back when we were young there seemed to have been a huge amount of evolution in car design so that in the 90's a car from the 70's looked really old and out of date.   The other day I was driving behind a 15 year old X5 and thinking that apart from a few exterior tweaks it really doesn't look that different to a new X5 and the evolution in design seems to have stalled.

My eldest daughter is 17 in a year. For many years I've had a little daydream of buying something around now, and spending this year as she waits restoring it and sprucing it. I did it myself with a 1957 swb Land Rover I was given by my grandfather when I was 15. For her I had ideas of an original Mini 1275GT or maybe a VW Karman Ghia.

However, rather annoyingly I've spent the last 5 years cutting people out of crashed cars, and picking up the pieces when it's all gone to shït.

Modern vehicles are quite spectacular at the way they can take big smashes. Not just a little bit either. A vehicle under c.5 years old is leagues ahead of something older. And backwards it goes. Anything pre c.15 years old is a fücking deathtrap in a smash, particularly as most other cars on the road are newer, and better designed for passenger safety.

So that plan has changed. She said she likes the modern Fiat 500, which I'd scoffed at, but that's likely the way we'll go, due to how well they do in a smash.

I’d buy my kid a newish car for sure, not least as newer cars are easier to drive. And while I’d suggest she does her test on a manual, if you’re driving a new car there’s no earthly reason to drive an auto day to day.

On the point about the 15yo cars and safety tho - we all used to drive them 15yrs ago without dying! we’re talking 2009 fgs. Any time coldplay have been in the album charts, cars were perfectly adequately safe.

My first car was a 1980's Fiesta which was great for learning driving across the farm but once I passed my test my parents got something rather newer as the Fiesta had only one wing mirror, no head rests and I suspect would have folded up beautifully if driven into anything substantial.

I can vouch for the flimsy nature of the Punto having crashed one at 5mph and the whole front end buckled.

Get her a Nissan Sunny, they seem to last forever and I don't think you can get enough speed up in them to have a fatal accident.

I agree with you Sails, its not just cars, it is all sorts of stuff, home interiors, clothes - the rate of change slowed down dramatically from  mid 90s onwards compared to the 50s- 80s.  When  I look at old photos, interiors clothes and haircuts from mid 90s onwards could more or less be now, but 50s, 60s 70s and 80s were all radically different from each other and you could place the photo within a few years from fashion alone.

the rate of quality increase with cars is slightly out of sync with what you say, Guy, although it has slowed down. It kicked in around the early 90s particularly with the new Ford Mondeo which for the mass market was the key game changer, showing you could have Japanese build quality with a tiny bit of european design (although it was quite a dull car to look at) and next gen safety etc. The quality curve continued sharply up are until at least the late noughties. I think from the gen3 Focus onwards (you can basically use Ford as a proxy for the mass market) it did slow down because the big gains had been made. My SEATs are a mid 2010s design and are as good and as solid as anything built today, in fact they’re like tanks. By contrast anything designed before abour 1992 feels flimsy as shit, even in good nickZ

Yeah, I had a 1997 Mondeo (2.0L Ghia 4 door).  I loved that car, it was fast and comfortable and looked good in windows as I drove by.  Never gave me any trouble aside from a puncture on the A303.

Agree with all this.  Son got a 2009 Jazz when he passed his test 5 years ago  and daughter a 2010 Micra two years ago.  Each of these cars, which they still have, are laughably better in every respect than the 1969 Mini 1000 Super Deluxe I got for £200 when I was 16 in 1982.  The jazz has had a tiny rust repair at the back of the sills.  The micra is pristine (except where she drove into my land rover and trailer).  My mini, at roughly the same age at the kids’ cars, mostly had light where the floors should be, required constant maintenance, and didn’t like running in the wet.  Apart from the risk of cat theft on the Jazz and a couple of replacement door mirrors, they just get a periodic oil and filter change and the odd wiper here and there.  This being said, a £200 car in 1982 would have been about £800 in 2019 money, so about half for what we paid for the jazz.

Also agree. 

I have a 2003 Mondeo which, whilst going a bit rusty on the passenger side doors, doesn't look obviously old on a road of newer vehicles. 

I do worry a bit about crash worthiness per Tromb but I spend a lot of time driving down country lanes and farm yards in various parts of Wales and would worry about ruining a newer/nicer car. 

I wonder what the kids at school would think of Tromb's daughter if she turned up in something like the Citroen DS rally he posted a picture of a while back? 

Safety legislation has encouraged convergent evolution.  E.g. the requirement to keep the bonnet away from the engine means they all have a sloped front end.  Hence there's a lot of focus on things like the BMW kidneys to give some sort of marque design language.

 

I do however have a hypothesis that everything has stalled since 1998, because tinternet has preserved everything in aspic - as the world as it was then is available everywhere online, it's become the de facto norm, AND everything that has ever happened is ALSO now everywhere online,  so there's not enough societal pressure to find new fashions or music or art.  It's too easy to rediscover what has happened rather than look to what might happen.

The period where you imagine things have stopped changing is, not coincidentally, the period in which most roffers have been cognisant adults passing through the changes gradually. 

If you can't look at a photograph from (say) 2003 and instantly tell exactly when it was taken I dunno what to tell you. Though admittedly those fashions have come back hard so it may be a bit tougher than it was three years ago. 

Fashion is a separate matter but the difference between a 2003 BMW and a 2024 BMW will not be as big as the difference between a 1975 BMW and a 1995 BMW.  In the late 1980's my parents had two Mercedes one of which was new and one which was ten years old and there was a little similarity in the shape but the interiors were just utterly different including the move from electro-mechanical switches and knobs to fully electronic buttons.

If you can't look at a photograph from (say) 2003 and instantly tell exactly when it was taken I dunno what to tell you.

Well, take music.  Was watching the video for Lazy Line Painter Jane by Belle & Sebastian the other day and thinking that the footage could have been from any time since about 1995.  

And the number 1 albums this year include cuts from Shed Seven, Green Day, Rod Stewart & Jools Holland, Liam Gallagher & John Squire, Elbow, The Libertines, and James.  All of whom had their first hits in the early nineties or earlier.  Plus Beyoncé whose first hit was also in the nineties.  Even Taytay first broke into the UK top ten a sesquidecade ago.

The big acts are established or massively  safe because of the way it’s distributed now. Diffuse. There’s masses of great stuff everywhere but removal of entry barriers means it’s much harder to grow. Imho. So you have a dysfunctional picture. Lots of acts scraping by doing it all themselves. Wallpaper pop and legacy acts making fortunes. It’s kind of socially regressive because small acts need patronage to survive, so family money etc. But maybe it’s always been that way, I dunno. But I’d no sooner pay ££££££ to stand in Hyde Park in July than chew off my own face. Total rip off and spiritually impoverishing.

What Tromb says. I see a lot of fatal crashes and they’ve got be to truly spectacularly bad to be fatal now. New cars are just so well designed and safe - lots of air bags, crumple zones, roll cages, driver aids. Amazing. I’d only have a decent vehicle now. 

Anything pre c.15 years old is a fücking deathtrap in a smash, particularly as most other cars on the road are newer, and better designed for passenger safety.

So that plan has changed. She said she likes the modern Fiat 500, which I'd scoffed at, but that's likely the way we'll go, due to how well they do in a smash.

The 'modern' fiat 500 is a twenty year old design...

Driver restraints and dummy kinematics. The driver door hinges were torn apart and the door opened at the front, which shouldn't happen because the driver could be partly or completely ejected from the vehicle. The dummy’s head barely contacted the frontal airbag before sliding off the left side as the steering column moved 11 cm to the right, leaving the head vulnerable to contact with forward side structure. The side curtain airbag deployed but does not have sufficient forward coverage to protect the head from contact with forward side structure and outside objects.

 

@tromb lovely to see you here. I have similar age daughter and it’s 5* ncap or else (used polos are like very expensive unicorns). I had a rental car explode under me on holiday last year and it scared the daylights out of me; it’s now entirely about the safety of it (guess what, I drive a Volvo). Electric can get to fook, ditto anything so new that all the features are web enabled and require an app. 

What trombo said. I got a chance to learn this when a friend got the entire front half of her 2021 car shorn off by a truck hurtling through a red light, leaving her sitting unhurt in the little central safety cage, as 2020s cars are designed to do.

Am sticking with my old car but driving more defensively ever since. 

 

"The period where you imagine things have stopped changing is, not coincidentally, the period in which most roffers have been cognisant adults passing through the changes gradually. "

I do not agree, objectively the huge fashion changes from the 50s through to the early 90s have slowed down dramatically.  This is mirrored I think with parents and children sharing fashion and cultural tastes to a far greater extent than decades ago.   The blip of children being radically different from their parents in the second half of the 20th century seems to be largely over.

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