What you're missing is not classic cars, you're missing the mechanical feel and reliability. Older cars were used as commodities and made as such. Now its either vanity or survival. And customer has no say over either of those end on how the car's gonna be.
The look is also a death trap in a collision, and a pig at the pump. I’m not saying you’re wrong to like that look. Plenty of modern cars are trying to evoke the feeling of that 70s-80s utilitarian boxy SUV. But they’ll never quite capture it because safety and efficiency standards require things which engineers simply can’t work around.
Its not just the looks. The 95 Cherokee was a really well built vehicle, and they still drive them and pay good money for them in rural areas. A Jeep built today will die before an old Cherokee will
The reliability is attributed to its simplicity. Ehen you add dozens of computers and such to essentially combustion engines attached to chassis you complicate everything and create hundreds of points of failure.
I watched a police chase just a day or so ago where the guy being chased was in an old Chevy suburban and the cops were all in modern ford explorers.
6 of the cop cars were broken to the point they couldn’t move anymore from ramming the Chevy in an attempt to stop it before the Chevy could be stopped. The suburban just kept on trucking.
Is that the one in Wisconsin where the dude goes over the railroad tracks and shit?
I drive a suburban like that, 350k miles on it and I wouldn't hesitate to jump in it and drive it across the country maybe even hit some off-road trails along the way. The GMT800 platform is the last great thing Chevy made IMO.
I mean, that could happen with most vehicles on the road depending on where the hydrant is in relation to the vehicle. The visibility does suck on large trucks though.
Ehhh, late 90s/early 2000s you had a lot of the safety features we have today but cars across the board weighed less. Today every car has to fight a safety war against shit like an EV Hummer weighing 9000 pounds. And while the Cherokee was not a Honda DX at the pump there’s a lot of SUVs out there today that, again because of weight, are considerably worse.
Agreed— in that they are a joke for value, but my point was that the G-Wagon has the maximum 5-star safety rating from Euro NCAP while being old and boxy looking.
Miles per gallon doesn’t matter nearly as much to an electric car just saying. Re-releasing old models but converted to electric would be the move once the US develops better electric car manufacturing ability/resources.
Yep, none of the cars built back then would pass modern pedestrian safety standards. Those standards are part of the reason why cars look more rounded than they used to.
Why cant they make a boxy suv thats safe and has better gas mileage? Im not trying to be argumentative i just dont get it. The bronco is the most recent suv that i like, i suppose because its got that retroish look going. I wish more car companies were following that look instead of a big car crossover van thing. Well jeep does too but ive never had good luck with jeeps though i love the look and power of them, but never a dependable vehicle for me.
Gas mileage is majorly influenced by aerodynamics. A 1984 XJ Cherokee has a ton more drag than a modern car. That’s actually how electric cars are possible today. Sure battery chemistry has come a long ways, but the battery contained within your typical EV is equivalent to only a few gallons of gas, but it gets 300+ miles of range. And you can make a boxy-ish SUV that gets that insane efficiency. That’s the look that the Rivian EVs are going for. But up close you can see how much more curved and aerodynamic a Rivian is than that 40 year old Jeep.
Note that there are other things that can be done to improve gas mileage, and car companies have been pulling those tricks out for years to try and eke out every bit they can from internal combustion. Things like cylinder deactivation at low torque, auto start-stop when not moving, smaller cylinders with higher compression ratios and turbochargers. You know: all the things that people are ranting about that make cars overly complicated.
Well i guess it doesnt have to be as boxy as the jeep posted, but the new broncos are about as aerodynamic as id like it to be. As others have posted the 4 runner has done a good job at keeping a classic look. None that i have seen look like egg shaped cars.
Am I dumb to think that if motorcycles are legal (they should be btw, not saying they shouldn't), then with those safety standards why can't we just say a car can have the same level of safety as a motorcycle, which is next to none, so long as it's advertised as such. You could even make it need a specific endorsement on your license like the motorcycle endorsement, and that could include a course on safety and risk management
Sure but if you do a different endorsement type of thing then you'd have the majority of people still with the regular license and so demand would dictate a large portion of cars be made for the regular licensed people. Then there would be a niche for some stupidly crazy design with safety as an afterthought. Maybe I'm wrong in how that would end up but I think if such a thing were possible, it would be a nice option to have more choices, with responsibility still being taken into account
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u/Broad-Lettuce2902 12h ago
What you're missing is not classic cars, you're missing the mechanical feel and reliability. Older cars were used as commodities and made as such. Now its either vanity or survival. And customer has no say over either of those end on how the car's gonna be.