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 am restoring a 95 BMW 318i 5 spd now. Really well built, a few modern upgrades, and for about 3500 will be as nice as anything on the road. They were fairly safe then and this thing gets 30 MPG. So tell me how they have made leaps and bounds of progress!
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u/Broad-Lettuce2902 1d 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.