Submitted 2 months ago by Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net to [deleted]
https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/c46e49f8-875a-47d6-8518-d83b5fdbb889.png
It’s 1992. Your mom just took you through the Dairy Queen drive in after supper. It was 30C today, and it’s going to be 35C tomorrow. You’re going to go swimming at the local outdoor pool with your mom, little brother, auntie and favourite cousin, tomorrow though. Mom will probably put on that Blue Rodeo tape on the way back. It’s not your favorite, but you find yourself waiting for the song hooks.
Life is simple and life is good.
You could drunk drive into a brick wall at forty-five miles an hour and the only damage would be yourself smeared all over the inside of it.
I had an old Malibu, and I was backing into an alley and a telephone pole was somehow out of my vision. I hit it full force with the rear bumper. Got out and the chrome was still perfect, and no dent in the bumper…but wow what a jolt.
You’re probably really lucky that you were reversing and had the entire seat to cushion you.
The emissions acts really forced a lot of painful innovation. Engines like the Cadillac HT 4000 went to aluminum blocks, or we utterly throttled by shitty computers and carbourator tuning.
Sure. 350 cid engine, small 2bbl carb.
The Corvette made 190hp at one point.
I’d like to take a moment to dispel some of the claims being made in this comment thread.
Modern cars are significantly more reliable than older cars by virtually every measurable metric. They are unquestionably more difficult to work on, but they also break down far less often.
The safety features on modern vehicles are light-years ahead of anything available in the '80s or '90s. Emissions are also dramatically lower than they were back then.
A lot of people in the comments have already pointed this out.
That said, older cars were undeniably easier to work on in many respects.
Older cars could survive a wreck while their occupants didn’t. Newer cars are designed to protect the occupants by destroying themselves.
It’s a real Facebook Boomer meme to show a picture of a fifty year old car that’s been in a crash with a modern car with the caption “see what we lost they dont make them like they used to?” but totally ignoring that the people in the BeigeWagon were turned into lasagna while the passengers of the Wokemobile will complete their journey with bruises and a taxi.
Older cars also looked nicer. Yes our cars are better, and I will probably never own a classic car. The Chevrolet Bel Air looks way better than any car built in the last 10 years, and it’s a metal death trap.
Hasn’t the weight of cars been increasing? Pick a model and track the curb weight over generations. It seems to be going up.
Except for EVs (which are heavy af because of the batteries) curb weight is down significantly from the 70s to today. It has been steadily trending upwards, but slowly, since around 2012. It’s hard to make a car as heavy as they used to be back when everything was steel and weld joints. Engines were bigger back then too — because they were less efficient.
Thanks for the input. Is there a model of car we can use to show this trend? I tried doing it with a VW Golf, but that just showed the upward trend.
Seriously. This is a 10th generation Oldsmobile 98, with a 4,000 pounds curb weight. That puts it in the same range as smaller crossover SUVs these days.
It’s 1992. Your mom takes you to Dairy Queen in her oldsmobile. She lights up a cigarette. She asks if you want one. You say no. She says stop acting like such a pussy. You take the cigarette. She lights it for you.
She throws her empty bud can out the window and hands you two dollars to get a blizzard
You walk into the Dairy Queen. A group of teenagers are smoking in a booth. One of them ashes their cigarette into a Dairy Queen-branded ashtray on the table.
Smoke up, Johnny!
1984 LTD Crown Victoria, White with red velour interior. I closed that door (which looks a lot like this door) on my hand and it locked. Mom had already gone inside and there i was screaming bloody murder in the front yard. She eventually came out and unlocked the door and got me out. Somehow it didn’t break my hand, probly because children are made of rubber or something. Theres no point to this other than sharing my unlocked PTSD that this image unlocked.
It’s 1992. Your mom just took you through the Dairy Queen drive in after supper. It was 30C today, and it’s going to be 35C tomorrow, but you’re an American child in 1992 and have no idea what that means in Freedom Units.
This is super convoluted to some people, but its the easiest way for my weird American brain to convert it on the fly:
The conversion most sources give you is:
(9/5)*°C—32=°F
But I find it easier to break it down into those 3 simple steps. If you’re the kind of person who calculates 20% of X in two steps [20%*X=(0.1X)*2], you might also like my weird method of converting °C to °F.
My method:
Water freezes at 0°C (about 30°F) and boils at 100°C (about 210°F).
100°F is about half way between those two numbers on the Fahrenheit scale, but closer to the lower one.
On the Celsius scale I would describe 40°C the same way.
100°F ≈ 40°C
This is a mild tangent but I learned how to convert celsius to fahrenheit because of a Codename: Kids Next Store episode that I watched once wherein a character says “30c, 30 celsius that’s like 80 degrees fahrenheit”. Which is honestly not the weirdest thing to learn from but it is my number one.
but it is my number one.
You mean your numbuh one.
Hey man I had a 1967 Plymouth Newport that had to have 454 engine just haul the car around. Fucker was tank on wheels.
That would have been a 440 engine. General Motors made the 454.
I used to have a 69 Newport. Loved that car.
Oh thanks been long time since had that car. Was a kid 3rd car ever owned. Was a beast and loved it.
If you’re not even 50 yet and already falling into nostalgia traps seek help.
I don’t need help. I need a systemic revamp of our political and financial systems, and for terrible things to happen to billionaires.
You will most likely need help making those things happen.
Suckers to the side
I know you hate
my 98!!!
YOU GONNA GET YOURS!
This guy gets it
And it smelled like 20-year-old cigarette smoke
Modern cars smell like Axe body spray, weed, and social anxiety.
Two outta three ain’t bad, I don’t think I’ve purchased Axe since 2007. The car I drive now was only made one year later lol, and I didn’t get it until a decade after that. I guess I’ve never had a modern car.
If you lose the detachable ashtray, you have to just use the ashtray hole and blow it out every once in a while.
Looks like the door to the Cadillac sitting in my dad’s garage. Things heavy af
You’re in the middle of death valley in a heat wave.
It’s hotter than Venus outside.
Your mom turns the AC on low.
The weapons grade CFCs—now banned by the Geneva convention—form icicles on your eyebrows in seconds.
One of the weird problems car guys ran into in the 1990’s was cars with non-functional R12 A/C. If you had one that had lost it’s gas, that was it unless you could find someone’s forgotten stash of white cylinders or wanted to circulate high pressure propane in front of and around an internal combustion engine.
Nowadays it’s easy enough to change it over to R134a.
And it probably still works
They sell “fucking cars” now?
What do think self-driving is all about?
If you closed that shit hard enough the ground would shake.
I drive electric.
The average new car weighs more than the famously heavy Oldsmobile 98.
My step-uncle had one of these. He almost never pulled it out and certainly would not have let icecream anywhere near the thing.
My buddy got one of these handed down to him and this is no lie.
Cars are super fat anymore so I’ll bet my VWs golfs door weighs at least as much.
For reference in 1996 I was hit in my 88 Jetta by an 83 Caprice classic stationwagon, she was going 55 I was doing 45 and she hit me head on. I could open the door to my car she had to be cut out.
My parents wrote both VW in Germany and VW USA thanking them for building a good car and got a shit ton of swag
I’ve literally taken apart my Golf’s doors a half dozen times (Various electrical issues and part replacements). Mk5 mind you not mk1/2 like your Jetta probably was, but they are shockingly light. Like 1mm thin sheet metal molded into a reinforcing shape, the latch motor is by far the heaviest thing in there.
No intrusion bars? Those have a good bit of weight to them due to the strength requirements.
My 2019 Golf weighs 2800 pounds according to the States of Florida, it weighs 3240 pounds on the scale at the drag strip.
A '94 caprice weighs about 4000 pounds and it is a BoF car.
The 1992 Oldsmobile Cutlass cruiser had a curb weight of almost 4,500 lb. Compare that to my Subaru WRX, which is fairly heavy for a modern car and has a curb weight of less than 3,500 lb…
Do the red and white courtesy lights work when you open the door? The mirror control, joystick, was cool too.
shittydwarf@piefed.ca 2 months ago
Pretty sure this car had more ashtrays than it did safety features too
Sergio@piefed.social 2 months ago
hey if it’s in a crash, the CAR’s gonna survive. Anyone in it? that’s another story…
infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
Chunky marinara
SpruceBringsteen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
And it will crash because it handles like a boat
Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
It definitely had some in the doors.
LogicalDrivel@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
The tar helped hold things together in a crash.
The_Lurker@lemmy.world 2 months ago
My Olds 98 had bench seats and separate lap and shoulder belts. The steel bumpers extended 3 feet under the car. It was 2 1/2 tons of steel. The steering wheel would not collapse under an impact. The car could survive Armageddon. It could plow through lesser cars (because the brakes were bad). But I would end up impaled on the steering column.
Fit 8 comfortably tho. 7 miles to the gallon…