The important information on your gauge cluster is likely just a 6 inch wide speedometer with a highly visible needle, the visual information in a rear view camera screen is an entire roadway squished into the same space. A highly visible needle can be seen with blurry vision, not so much a detailed and small video.

This has been my experience with my Falcon. After I do a week of “car maintenance extravaganza” I can go months without opening the hood, and a year before I have to fix anything more than tightening a screw. It’s not modern Toyota reliable, but my neighbor’s Volvo XC90 was in the shop more often than I have to crawl…

I go to a decent mechanic, but I even avoid them because I know that I will always take the time to make sure something is right. My best example of this is when I replaced my clutch, and the pilot bearing in the new clutch kit was a needle type, but the one I pulled out was a bronze bushing. I thought to myself “I…

Yeah your problem isn’t just old car, it’s Jaguar. Not famous for reliability even new. If you have an old car that was reasonably reliable when new, it’s possible to have it maintained well enough that it’s still very reliable, you just can’t let things slide when they do come up because that’s how you end up with a…

In terms of songs about cars this gets an honorary mention for being the oldest one I can think of:

I can’t think of any poems off the top of my head, the closest I can think of is Cake:

I don’t think I’ve ever smelled brake fluid that smelled vinegar-y. It smells like artificial strawberry to me. It’s also important to identify by feel because it’s slippery on your fingers and is one of the more caustic automotive fluids I can think of.

Apparently not having active avoidance systems gives the car an automatic zero, which is stupid. I want to know how safe the car is if I crash, not how safe I could be if I didn’t crash.

The inflation of star values over time really annoys me. I want to be able to easily compare the safety of a new car versus one ten years old, not have 5 stars mean completely different things. It’s like trying to read a graph where the Y axis scale continuously changes from left to right.

Commenting to emphasize that I agree with you beyond a simple “star.”

I’m going to pedant you right back as an illustrator with many friends in graphic design. “Graphic artist” doesn’t refer to someone who creates artistic images, it’s just a mostly obsolete term for a position that encompassed commercial illustration and graphic design. A graphic artist was never someone who developed…

Thanks for the huge rabbit hole I just went down.

Worse is that even houses are built to be disposable now. It’s genuinely upsetting to me.

A lot of mining equipment is already electric because it don’t produce fumes that have to be cleared from the mine.

I feel really genuinely bad for you. This especially did it:

I generally couldn’t care less about cars like this, but damn those were so cool.

Even funnier is that what you’re interpreting as headlight glow is actually the rear end of the truck. That’s not on you, it’s on whoever mocked up that image and didn’t think about putting too much glow at the wrong end of an ambiguous shape.

If someone is wanting to buy an 80s Pathfinder I don’t think the “you could buy something newer” argument matters. The buyer probably wants it because it’s old.

You guys out East should get your governments to stop salting the living shit out of your roads and you could enjoy old cars too. As a bonus you wouldn’t have your waterways polluted with tens of thousands of tons of salt every winter. I swear it must be some sort of conspiracy to get people to buy cars more often or…

Gotta admit I’m weirdly worked up about this. I’ll miss seeing you around here even though I still follow you elsewhere. I’ve been reading Jalopnik daily for over 10 years now, but so many of my favorite writers have left recently (for reasons I understand) that it’s starting to feel a bit like a ghost town (and not…