His Rav 4 is roughly as fast, maybe a little more so, in both 0-60 and in the quarter mile, as Magnum, PI’s Ferrari 308 GTS:
It occurs to me skimming through this re-animated zombie that the venerable VW Beetle, the first car of many a Boomer, was the quintessential basic car that the OP is talking about. Besides being basic and inexpensive, it was paradoxically also well-built and reliable, and usually cheap and easy to fix when it did break down. The fit and finish was generally excellent at a time of crap domestic cars, the doors so well fit that they were practically airtight, the four-speed transmission with its Porsche heritage smooth as silk.
And basic it was. Not a frill on it. Its fanciest luxury was the newly introduced fuel gauge! And forget A/C – the thing didn’t even have a heater, really, as the air-cooled engine was too small to produce much heat. In cold climates, you could equip it with an optional gas heater, which burned gasoline to produce heat. Those who worried about the safety of such things could console themselves knowing that if they rear-ended anyone, the entire gas tank would explode anyway, as it was conveniently located right at the very front. But though such things must inevitably have happened, we never heard about them, and certainly never worried about them. Safety obsessions were still in the future, and the spunky little car was beloved by millions for many decades.
A while ago I rented a “New Beetle”. It was a sporty little car that was fun to drive, but a true Beetle it was not. It was really just a Beetle-shaped body bolted on to a regular modern VW (a Jetta or something chassis) and was loaded with upscale amenities and fancy electronics, and with a corresponding price tag.
FYI, regarding upthread discussion of the Smart Fortwo requiring premium gasoline, the facts have changed. From 2018 onward, the Smart Fortwo is no longer available with a gasoline engine. They are selling electrics only.
Getting back to the OP, the 1973 VW Type I (a.k.a. the “Bug” or “Beetle”) met that description and it sold for $1,999 brand new. In 2018 dollars, that’s $11,595 for no A/C and no FWD. The cheapest car sold in the US in 2018 is the Nissan Versa, which sells for $12,110. That’s within 5% of the price of the Bug and you get A/C and FWD which is better. Sorry I can’t find a no-frills car for you, but I found you a car which costs almost exactly the same price (adjusted for inflation) as the most famous no-frills car did.
I agree, as long as you qualify it with ‘old’, some classic older sport/‘muscle’ cars are slower 0-60 or quarter mile straight line than the sportier end of ‘normal’ cars now. 8.1 0-60 for that Ferrari, other sources give lower than that (a fanciful head to head of 308 v Kia Sedona minivan found 7.3 for the 308) but anyway nothing to write home about by today’s standards. On a curved track it would be a different story, Ferrari rated .91g lateral acceleration on skid pad per that test which is still good though no longer eye watering nowadays, RAV ~.75g. Some old American muscle cars would blow the RAV away (the rare '69 Camaro ZL-1 was under 12 in quarter mile), but others also wouldn’t and they wouldn’t have the same edge on a curved track.
But fast cars now are seriously fast, even ones that aren’t extremely expensive. A BMW M240i xdrive with Dinan Stage 1 tuner will beat 4 secs 0-60 (4.2 official stock) for less than $60k, which is a long way from exotic pricing in today’s car market, though not ‘basic’ either. Tesla or other electric makers could probably also eventually put a cheap electric in that range, best Model S’s are almost unbeatable by gas cars in a race as short as 0-60 but for now Model 3 is not that fast.
Why is FWD “better”?
Compared the standard of front engine/rear drive it’s mainly the space/weight saving of not putting the driveshaft through the passenger compartment. Handling and traction can be debated. But compared to the no-frills Beetle approach of saving that weight by the putting the engine in back, that was dangerous. Without electronics to help you out, which of course it didn’t have and no car did back then, it oversteers (the more you turn the more it wants to turn) dangerously near the grip limit which can be a pretty normal speed in slippery conditions. And putting on the brakes throws the car’s weight forward losing even more grip on the rear wheels. Porsche has finally made that arrangement more or less foolproof even at high speed with the 911, with electronics, all wheel steering and the all wheel drive version especially. But the Beetle was a pretty unsafe car, even besides its flimsiness. (Ex '67 then '73 Beetle, convertible the second one, driver and lover)
That said FWD and AC together are small parts of why the cheapest cars on sale in the US now are so superior to the Beetle it isn’t funny. Car technology has advanced, obviously.
You’re less likely to lose control of the car with Front Wheel Drive. You’re also less likely to get stuck in the mud.
Oh, and I forgot to mention airbags. The Nissan has 'em and obviously the Bug didn’t. Slam a Nissan Versa and a Bug into a brick wall and the occupant of the Nissan is much more likely to survive with only minor injuries.
OK, 1978 wasn’t really a year of many rack and pinion steering cars, if you’re considering American-made cars. About all there were were the Pinto, Bobcat, Mustang II, Fairmont/Zephyr, Chevette, and Omni/Horizon. Everything bigger had recirculating ball steering. Things did change pretty quickly in the '80s, however.
Oh, and a gripe about one of the original pluses of FWD that has been lost: when the Toronado came out, its open, flat floor with no transmission hump was touted as wonderful, as it freed up much interior space. Now, that space is lost to consoles. They don’t have to be there. My '83 Sentra and '88 Festiva didn’t have them!
I worked at BellSouth during the 90s and early 2000s. All of our trucks (vans) came with zero features, no radio and certainly no ac. Then about 1998 all of a sudden all the new vans came equipped with ac, power windows and amtfm radio! (Welcomed since we spent all day in those trucks and its hot in Florida)
Three reason for the change is BellSouth was taking a beating in their used trucks when it came time to sell them. Nobody wanted a truck in Florida without ac.
Yeah, I was gonna say, not really a fair comparison, kinda apples and oranges, plus we have no idea which model year GTO 308 you’re referencing…I’m assuming the 1977 model.
But, the RAV 4 Sport is faster than I expected, although that won’t seriously impede even an older muscle car, provided i’t’s been suitably restored, and obviously it depends on what it is.
When he says “souped up” Camaro, that to me says “resto-mod”, which means the car is NOT factory restored and can be stuffed with all manner of go-fast parts and modern amenities.
And yet virtually all high-end vehicles are rear-wheel-drive (or Rear Wheel Drive, if you prefer), because they perceived to be are more fun to drive. Front-wheel-drive isn’t “better.” It’s just different. It’s a tradeoff for improved packaging, weight and cost savings* versus worse chassis dynamics and performance.
*Though in the case of the Beetle modern front-engined, front-wheel drive vehicles handled better but had worse packaging versus the R/R layout.
There’s bound to be outliers but, on average, FWD cars are safer than RWD cars. They are less likely to fishtail, less likely to oversteer, less likely to get stuck in the mud, and less likely to put you into a ditch. Let me give you an example. Years ago, I test drove a 1995 Dodge Caravan and a 1995 Chevy Astro. The Caravan is FWD, the Astro is RWD. The Caravan easily made it up my unpaved driveway (a quarter mile from the mailbox to the house) but the Astro barely went 10 feet before one of the rear wheels started spinning.* Yes, “better” is subjective but I think most of us can agree that getting up the driveway is better than not getting up the driveway. My business currently owns two Dodge Caravans. I wouldn’t want a Chevy Astro RWD if you gave it to me for free.
Anyway, the OP was asking about cheap and reliable cars, not “high-end vehicles” that are “fun to drive”.
- Maybe Chevy should have put a limited slip differential into the Astro, as discussed in My Cousin Vinny.
The thing that slows down the old muscle cars in showroom stock condition is that their acceleration was traction/suspension limited. Those big block engines on skinny bias ply tires were essentially tools for converting gasoline into rubber smoke and noise.
Put a set of modern wide tires on one, and beef up the suspension to eliminate wheel hop, and it’s an entirely different story. My old '67 Camaro with a performance built 327 would destroy most modern cars in anything up to the quarter mile, which it once ran in 12.2 seconds with the headers uncorked and a set of big fat tires and traction bars in the back.
If you want a cheap, basic, reliable car, get something used. If you are in a non-rusting climate, a 70’s era Datsun 510 is a hoot to drive and bulletproof. Manual everything, rear wheel drive the way God intended. They were heavily used in rally racing for some time because they were so nimble, hard to kill and easy to work on.
If you want something sporty, find an old Datsun 240-z. Manual rack and pinion steering, manual transmission, etc. One of the most fun-to-drive cars ever made. And one good thing about those old cars - they are fun to drive at legal highway speeds. A lot of the new high performance cars are actually lousy to drive around at normal speeds, and if you open them up you will be doing felony-level velocities before you know it.
More and more high end vehicles are all wheel drive. RWD is becoming like manual transmission, something that some high performance car buyers want, and where some of them sneer at the modern alternative (automatic or DCT) but the modern alternative has become clearly superior, for any driver. BMW going to AWD on the new M5 is somewhat of a watershed there. M’s sticking with RWD as the power to weight has gone up and up in every generation are now really traction limited. Yeah the traction control keeps the wheels from spinning (if you don’t turn it off), but by automatically letting up on the throttle.
But back to RWD/FWD. I still maintain the handling advantages there are subjective and case dependent and no not ‘subjective’ like ‘whether you want to get up the driveway’. Also realistically a lot, most in many areas, of personal vehicles now are AWD/4WD and seeing how poorly most FWD sedans compare to them in snow makes it harder to think of traction as a supposed FWD advantage. The advantage of FWD over RWD is mainly the efficiency of not having to have a long driveshaft. That’s the advantage that’s not a matter of opinion or case by case.
Anyway again the Beetle is not a dangerously poorly handling car, which it absolutely is I say from much experience, because it has RWD because because of the weight distribution with engine in back.
As the driver of a very basic car (1999 Hyundai Accent, manual windows, locks, transmission, no AC), I will say: manual windows or no AC is fine (in climates that don’t get crazy hot), but the combination is a pain in the ass. On warm days, I need to open multiple windows to get a cross-breeze, which means leaning way the hell over.
On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for cheap and simple mechanical systems. I have fixed a dead manual window, and a dead automatic one. The manual one cost like $10 for the part that had broken. The automatic one had a shitty plastic clip that broke and you couldn’t get a replacement without buying the entire $200+ motor and assembly. I instead jerry rigged the shit out of it with zip ties.
For a performance car, the big advantage to rear wheel drive is the ability to modulate understeer/oversteer with throttle, which is just a hoot to do. That said, modern sport AWD systems can move power to individual wheels which is even better, and the best AWD systems are clearly superior to just about anything else except for weight and cost.
The other problem with FWD is torque steer - especially important in some of the newer high performance FWD cars. But new cars have come a long way in engineering torque steer out of the system. Older or less sophisticated FWD systems will nearly rip the steering wheel out of your hands if they have too much power applied quickly. That constant tugging when applying power is pretty annoying.
Bolding mine. The options/colors offered on most cars are what dealers think will sell easily, knowing that buyer’s will likely “settle” for features and colors they don’t want if the price comes down a bit and they don’t have to wait. I sincerely doubt many people would order a beige Camry, though they’ll obviously settle for them in droves.
If we did like store-front dealerships in other countries, where they only have one or two examples of each model and you order your car to spec and wait a month or so, we’d see a broader spectrum of options and colors on the used market; if you had to wait for a new car no matter what, you’d get what you want. I think we’d see more colors, and we’d see fewer features.
I think it goes without saying ‘want’ means under the conditions offered, price and delivery time. But IMO not ‘rah rah markets’ to think dealers get it basically right what colors for example most people want or else another dealer could do better paying more attention to that. I think this kind of thing about car makers/dealers not offering stuff people want is true, but only for a very limited number of people is it more than a very small variation on what they’d ideally want, or else it would change.
And the US car market is very competitive. The other side of the coin to complaint about how it works is a tendency to lower list prices (for the same cars converting currency and correcting for transport and taxes) and bigger discounts off MSRP’s than most other markets. And customers trading off a lower price v not exactly what they’d pick from the ‘build you own’ application on the web is a customer decision.
Anyway here (though I’ve gone off about higher end cars) we’re supposedly talking run of the mill cars. I bought a Honda CR-V (‘small’ SUV) for my daughter recently. Realistically that’s just about an exactly average car in the US market now (little FWD sedans are not average cars). Honda has basically one option package at each trim level (like an EX v an EX-L etc). And the one-off options are mainly things you could add to the car later if you really wanted them. Several dealers had all the colors of any interest to her. So why custom order unless we could get the car cheaper that way? But it would probably be at least a little more expensive. OTOH toying around with buying a Porsche, the possible option combinations must be in the 100’s at least even at a given trim level, even excluding totally trivial ones. Cars in dealer stock are usually not insignificantly different that what I’d want, and one would buy a car like that to indulge oneself, IOW get what you want. Then again AFAIK it’s fairly common nowadays for people to order cars like that ‘build you own’ apps, and if you pay more as a result, again, the idea of the car in the first place isn’t to be economical. So it also depends on the car brand I think.
This is the real answer. Pick the car you want, and then go to the manufacturer’s “commercial” section. It may not be cheaper, but you can build exactly what you want.
https://www.ford.com/commercial-trucks/stripped-chassis/?gnav=header-all-vehicles
From the quoted article:
That seems incredibly shirt-sighted. The primary reason people in my area have started out in droves to buy three-wheelers is because they count as motorcycles for carpool lane purposes. They can be driven on the local toll roads for free with only one person in them.
I presumably don’t need to ask where the OP lives, but I have yet to visit or live in a place where, in a car I would presumably be driving alone most of the time, I wouldn’t need working power windows or AC, if not both. Even without AC it obviously improves ventilation tremendously to be able to open all four windows from the driver’s seat. I once had a long hot-weather commute in a basic car, and being able to open only the driver window while moving truly sucks.