"Today's new cars suffer from initial quality failures at a higher rate than most people think because it may not affect them - ask a Subaru owner how their battery's been holding up lately or how many millions of new cars owners had recalls recently because of airbag failures."
You're right - my 1972 Demon 340 never had an airbag recall. Its ABS was dead reliable, too.
What? Oh.
Modern automobiles are superior in every way to the old stuff when comparing the systems (engine, suspension, driveline, brakes, bearings, alignment, comfort, heat/cooling) that they both shared. When is the last time that you had to have your front-end aligned on your modern car, for example?
But I drove a million safe miles without ABS, 27 airbags, engine check lights (I looked at the gauges, duh - oh yeah, we had gauges, at least in my Chrysler products) and a plethora of interconnected systems. I question the value of many - not all - of them.
Common sense is still a valuable thing - which is why I have not and will not go beyond TMCC with my control system. It may not do all that everyone wants to do, but it does so for me. It has been very reliable. What you don't have (Legacy; ABS; smoking crew members) cannot fail.
Guys - are you seriously taking my analogy and turning it into a debate about whether an old car lasts longer than a new car?
If you read the post and my reply to it, I said: "assuming my children find any value in any of this stuff, I think I'd want to give them the locomotives that provided us with the most fun memories or that have the most fun features. Similarly, if I had a Lincoln town car that still ran great and a Boss 429 with rust and in need of a rear end and transmission, I think I'd sell the Lincoln and give my children the Boss 429."
Meaning, to me, I value the joy toy trains bring to our lives. And that joy has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the train that brought the most joy outlasts one of our other toy trains.
As far as automobiles go, the new technology gives us peace of mind. For those of you old enough to have owned cars in the sixties and older, in other words, the distributor cap days, drum bakes and so on. Tune ups and shoe replacements occurred much more often than they do today. The average life span of a car was 50,000 miles. Without undercoating, the body would rust out. 10,000 miles on a set of tires was good. Oil changes were more frequent. Clear coating was unheard of.
Compare our cars of today and you can see that an automobile is one less thing to worry about. We just get in, turn the key and go for 150,000 miles or more. I worked with a guy many years ago that had an early Honda Civic. He claimed he never changed the oil and had well over 150,000 miles on it !!!
A car is one thing, but a toy train that we purchase to take our minds off of the troubles of the world, is another. I for one, don't want to spend upwards of a thousand dollars for a locomotive only to have it go in for service as soon as I receive it. This is another reason I have turned to Post-War Lionel.
