I shall sound like a moaning old git here but I must ask your collective opinion:

I work on cars for a living, old ones, fairly old ones, fairly new ones and new ones. The more I see of newer cars I wonder how or why people can justify spending so much money buying and maintaining them. They mostly appear to be made on the cheap, they suffer [very often from what I see] from electrical, turbo, DPF, DMF, ABS, ESP and any other alphabetical abreviations you can think of problems and a lot more cars now IMO are downright ugly and devoid of any character. None of the above is aimed at a particular manufacturer, but French cars seem the worst in most areas.

As some of you know I drive old Skodas, those with the engine in the back. Points, carbs, tappets, grease nipples ect.... Service every 6,000 miles [my oldest needs service every 3,000 miles] but it all costs peanuts, is easy to do and importantly to me, I enjoy driving and maintaining them.

Is it just me that asks these questions?

Its the same with everything

Old tackle was the best tackle! None of this new jerry tackle stuff!

All about profit nowadays! Rarely you get a good product

Dave, how would you feel after a 250 to 500 mile drive?

1. Cream-crackered.
   
2. Ready to head out and spend 10 hours talking with your mates.
   

I think things started to go downhill since the emmisions chase began,

Reasons why we buy cars have changed, its all about mpg and tax bands now or it is for alot of people

Reliability = quality/complexity

And at the moment we have a lot of very complex low quality components in cars. Many mandated by legislation.

the perverse thing is that a reliable longer lasting car with mediocre MPG is probably more environmentally friendly than a short lived high mpg car.

But the last thing any government wants you to do is stop buying cars.

I think some people live with the idea that there was once a golden age of car reliability.

There never was, and in truth today cars are far more reliable than those from, say, the 60's or 70's.

It isn't just the design and construction of the vehicles themselves, but advances in metallurgy, fuel and lubrication additives, electronics etc. etc.

How often nowadays do you spend weekends doing de-cokes, lapping in valves, changing points, cleaning out blocked carburettor jets and replacing leaking floats?

When was the last time you had a car fail an MOT due to rust? (EVERY Ford built in the 60's and 70's had the top inner wings plated, EVERY Mini had a rotted subframe, even later EVERY Datsun (Nissan) looked like Swiss cheese after 18 months.

Low quality components????? Don't make me laugh.

Lucas electrics were an absolute joke.

My Superb is on variable servicing - works out at approx. every 17,500 miles, compared to probably every 5000 - 6000 miles a few years ago.

It's done 185,000 miles on the original engine, gearbox, clutch etc.

Very very few cars of even 20 years ago would have managed that - most would have been on their second clutch, 3rd complete set of suspension bushes etc.

Oh, and a final point - compare the cost of, say, an Octavia of today with a Sierra of 20 years ago as a factor of average annual income. New cars have never been so cheap, and 2nd hand ones reflect that.

I was just thinking today how you never see numerous over heated cars at the side of the road in traffic jams anymore.

Could just be its got colder I suppose.

I have to disagree with your comment on the opening post, I have two new cars, one which does very high mileage every day the other doesn't, I can't fault any car I have had in the last 12 years.

I travel 40k+ per year, I keep cars three years and apart from one DPF pressure sensor on an Audi A4 B8 (58 reg) I have never broken down or had issues.

I had Peugeot 306 HDI, this had an alternator fail at 120K, then Passat, did not have any issue, Audi A4, only the pressure sensor. Yeti, heated seat pad, apart from that no issues.

I have had a Mitsubishi Grandis, that was pants, new clutch, new turbo pipes, new wiper motor and starter motor and so on.

With regard to older cars being reliable, I used to carry a tool box when I had Mini's and LandRovers lol, in the Yeti I don't even have a spare wheel.

In my opinion you need to look at the way we hear about car problems

Now with the internet etc its too easy to google a car and find all the problems under the sun, even those which could be as improbable as shutting the boot and the front bumper falling off.

I suppose back in the day the cars had similar issues, albeit relative to the time, which were very common and costly. The thing is that the old cars which are still on the road today, i.e. circa 50's, 60's and 70's surely must have been well maintained to last this long! but where are all the others? they are all gone.

i think its just because now the number of new cars on the road is magnitudes higher than the number of old cars on the road. So it is too easy to hear all the dramatised faults and failures of cars, as there is a larger sample group.

What im trying to say is if a Switch which is has a 1 in 1000 chance of failing, if you have 1,000,000 cars fitted with that switch, its sensible to predict 1000 cars will have this failure, but if you only have 1000 cars fitted with it, its 1 failure. that one failure could be put down to the rarity of the situation. The probabilty of a failure is the same, but we hear about it more often purely down to the fact that there is a greater volume of failures.

I dont think any car now is truly any more reliable today than it was 10 - 20 years ago all what has changed is where and how we judge "reliable"

Cars are much better now than they were. Emissions is the only downside. Cousin spent the last week chasing EGR and DPF faults on his CDTI Astra. Car doesn't pootle much either. If cars didn't have so strict emissions to meet they could be better.

Reliability aside, should I be unfortunate enough to be involved in an accident, I'd much rather it be in a car that's been designed to score well in the regularly revised Euro NCAP tests.

That in itself is justification to me for getting a more modern car for day to day use on the motorway.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD

DPF issues, I tend to use BP ultimate or Shell super diesel and the regens are few and far between, if run the Yeti on tesco own brand diesel Yeti regens every three to five thousand miles, cleaner fuel in the tank obviously results in cleaner burn and therefore less DPF issues. IMO

But we're fixing things on cars these days that would have rarely failed 20 years ago. Flywheels are a good example, they now turn a £300 clutch job into a £800 job, and should ever your inlet manifold break on your VAG 2 litre diesel, it's time for a new engine. There's also the well documented pressure sensor fault on the ESP systems, I've seen the same fault across three different manufacturers (more if you count each of the VW brands as a different manufacturer), costs to fix have ranged from £1200 for the part down to £140 for a repair kit. For a manufacturer to make available such a keenly priced repair kit shows how common the problem is.

We all like this technology and the benefits that it gives us, the problem is that it is given to us on a budget and as such is not designed to last.

The manufacturers can put all the safety systems in the world on a car, but unless they can make them all drive themselves they cannot take into account the largest factor in car safety, which is the driver.

Don't knock it Dave, as long as the cars keep breaking we'll have a job.

I'll keep driving my 22 year old car, one that I can stick a cam belt on for less than £15.

I do see both sides driving both an 81 porker 924 2 litre, and then the mongrel, which although 12 years old now, is still a major technological leap ahead of the porsche.

I'm obviously not as old as some of you guys, I grew up with fuel injected cars and transistorised igniton systems so I understand them... You can take your dodgy old carbs and clockwork ignitions with all their moving parts and inherent reliability issues..... Whereas my dad old the other hand doesnt really get the whole concept of fuel injection but he knows about the old school gear..

I can see a lot of merit in what dave is saying though, there is a level at which cars become too complicated for their own good, ecu this, convience unit that.. It's all a load of rubbish most of it, it's a vein attempt by the manufacturers to get folks to take the car to dealer only services, it will all go full circle in the end and go back to simpler days when they out price themselves.

I must admit a prefer the raw simplicity of some older cars, I like my felicia's.. Fantastic car, well engineered, raw, simple, reliable... no electric gizmo's to fail with it's windey window handles and no power steering sensors to fall over.

Tech is killing driving. It seems to be killing cars too. When was the last time you saw a T-reg Vauxhall Astra or Ford Focus? How long since you last saw a 52 plate Mondeo? These manufacturers sold these cars by the millions but so few of them seem to have survived.

The Passat is technologically lightyears ahead of my Polo and Golf. Those were cars built for the purpose of driving and nothing else. I know which motors will still be running in ten years time and it won't be the ones with DPF, ASR, ABS, climate, electronic seats, DMF, electronic handbrakes, lane departure systems and all the stacks of rubbish people have substituted driving skill for.

Edited 25 June, 201312 yr by sparks03

I must admit a prefer the raw simplicity of some older cars, I like my felicia's.. Fantastic car, well engineered, raw, simple, reliable... no electric gizmo's to fail with it's windey window handles and no power steering sensors to fall over.

My brother had a 1.9 Diesel Felicia. Great car for what it was ... but it's easy to be a bit misty eyed over the simplicity of it but it certainly wasn't a car that was 'built to last'. Two particular problems (but not the problems that saw the death of it)

1) The gear leaver was floppier than a spaniels ears and we never managed to source the relevant kit needed to fix it. You had to make use of your memory to know which gear you were currently in. There are many threads on this forum devoted to this issue.

2) The door locks were appallingly engineered. A little pin/lever snaps because it was made of the wrong grade material - and the the lock is useless. Over the 18 months he was running it I bought him three new locks from eBay.

I was just thinking today how you never see numerous over heated cars at the side of the road in traffic jams anymore.

Could just be its got colder I suppose.

To be fair the last three M6 south bound traffic jams I've sat in I've seen an old Beetle pulled up in the hard shoulder with the engine cover open each time. Whether that was preventative precaution or genuine break down I don't know

My brother had a 1.9 Diesel Felicia. Great car for what it was ... but it's easy to be a bit misty eyed over the simplicity of it but it certainly wasn't a car that was 'built to last'. Two particular problems (but not the problems that saw the death of it)

1) The gear leaver was floppier than a spaniels ears and we never managed to source the relevant kit needed to fix it. You had to make use of your memory to know which gear you were currently in. There are many threads on this forum devoted to this issue.

2) The door locks were appallingly engineered. A little pin/lever snaps because it was made of the wrong grade material - and the the lock is useless. Over the 18 months he was running it I bought him three new locks from eBay.

rubbish, you weren't trying hard enough,

1) smash the bushes out and drill a large hole in the centre of a round foot off an ikea bookshelf and shove it in the thing with a nut and bolt.. Job done

2) never heard of a hasp and padlock?

rubbish, you weren't trying hard enough,

1) smash the bushes out and drill a large hole in the centre of a round foot off an ikea bookshelf and shove it in the thing with a nut and bolt.. Job done

And having to source parts from Ikea shows better production standards of older cars? Interesting fix though, I didn't find that one when I was searching for it in the Felicia forum. Found plenty of pointers to the relevant VAG product number for a repair kit, never saw any come up for sale on eBay though :-/

2) never heard of a hasp and padlock?

Same question!

You've come across as very defensive there. I'm not attacking you I actually really liked that Felicia, but those two issues in particular let the car down badly - on the flip side the standard of the bodywork was excellent (indicating better rust protection) compared to Fords my brother and dad have both owned previously of the same age.

My first car was an old mkII ford cortina. I now have a new (ish) Skoda. which would I rather have and drive, simple..... the skoda. I used to maintain my cars because I had to, now I don't and I guess it's part of the culture of todays society that they want something that's reliable that they don't have to mess with and because a good portion of society have more disposable income they are prepared to pay for it.

I sit on the fence on this discussion. I have old Skoda's and new Skoda's and also drive a lot of modern cars. If you asked me which I enjoyed driving and was actually excited about, it'd have to be the older cars. They have more character, and are more honest. I've even found myself driving our wreck of a Felicia over the vRS because its more entertaining.

That said, on a long journey I love to get in the Octavia, travel at *decent* speeds, arrive well rested and in good time. Furthermore, the reason I've kept on the Octavia is because I work away and its nice to know there is always one car at home that the missus can get into and drive to the other end of the country at the drop of a hat.

If I had my way, I'd like modern cars to get smaller, lighter, and more back to basics but with modern engine technologies. Imagine say, a Felicia available with a 1.2 tsi.

Double post.

Edited 26 June, 201312 yr by skodanorman

But back in the day you could "tinker" with your engine ie:points,plugs,tune/clean up your carb and grease your balljoints etc

These are all the things i used to enjoy doing to keep your car running as it should.You could even "get home" if you had ign trouble or a broken fanbelt with the good old methods used then.

But what about now?

Can,t touch anything on them and i don,t want to sit there with a laptop which you plug into your car and look at a load of gobildy **** which no one understands and can,t adjust or if you change something on it and you haven,t saved the original you are totally f**ked as you have rendered your car useless.

Also if a drive belt breaks on my Octy you can,t do anything about getting yourself home with these new toothed belts that go around a thousand pulleys and drive multiple things.Tights won,t solve that

Sorry thats a bit of a rant there i guess i,m old school now.

Modern cars are more efficient than the old but it was cheaper when i could service my old cars, ie my Mk2 Escort was dead simple to service and only an hour . I do miss working on my cars.