That might be maximum fear and depression. For confusion, wouldn’t we want a Volvo or Saab?
I think the biggest problem would be getting Gramps to drive what he would consider to be one UGLY-ass car!
What happens when they open up the car and discover that the iPod someone left in the back seat is made in China? 
It’s a well-known fact that in Philadelphia, 1940-model cars were sent forward five, then six decades. Tragically, the receiving point had become a junk yard in 1955.
Gramps would do the logical thing. He’d have the engine replaced with an old Chevy inline 6, replace the transmission with a 3 speed manual and convert it to rear wheel drive. It’d run forever that way.
What do you mean? All the best stuff is made in China. 
Apologizing in advance for the slight hijack here, but so long as we’re on this topic, would the DeLorean in Back to the Future have had any problems running on 1950s gasoline? And what kind of problems would Doc Brown have faced in trying to get it up and running after it’d been sitting in a mine shaft for 70 years?
I am thinking that sending it back to 1942 would cause Gramps some very serious problems with the authorities given that there was a major war going on and they government had very broad powers to seize property and detain people. Even an Impala would look like a Buck Rodgers spaceship compared to anything else around and it wouldn’t take more than a passing glance by anyone with any technical knowledge to know that they were looking at technologies that could be vital to winning the war.
Yep, Gramps would be arrested, detained and told to keep his mouth shut or else while they took the car to a top secret facility and tried to reverse engineer the thing. Better to go back to 1936.
As long as we’re broadening the OP, let’s throw a metric wrench into the works. I send Gramp’s brother a Chevy Volt and his best buddy a Nissan Leaf.
Higher octane gasolines were available in the 1950s than are available now, so the DeLorean wouldn’t have a gas problem.
Probably not much. Since Doc put the car on blocks, he also would have unscrewed the plugs to squirt oil into the cylinders and drained the cooling system. If it mattered, he would have removed the catalytic converter.
Go to YouTube and punch in “first start” (minus the quotes) to see some cars (even abandoned junk) start after decades.
Shit. The speed limit now is 65 mph and I just put new tiers of my truck last year. Had them since 2003.
My PT Cruiser has a feature to read out the diagnostic code on the odometer if you turn the key just right. It reads out a 3-digit numeric code. But that brings up another issue…
Make sure you send back tons and tons and tons of documentation with the car! Your world-class 1942 mechanic won’t be able to do anything unless he sees all the issues brought up in this thread and has some advice as to how to deal with them.
One anecdote I heard was the story about the guy who decided to be cheap or ran out of gas, and filled his car with avgas. It came in 80 and 100 octane; I thnk it was the 80 that would guarantee your engine would be destroyed within a hundred miles due to preignition.
All I gotta do is go out to my yard!
My take is this:
The only fuel he can find that won’t destroy the engine in a few miles due to the low octane rating of the day would be av-gas. But av-gas of the day was heavily leaded. The lead will quickly destroy the catalytic converters & O2 sensors. That’s not a disaster, the engine will keep running. He could simply cut out the cats and replace with exhaust piping. The computer will ignore bad O2 sensors. He’ll get a service engine light, so what.
However! What I think might do him in is that the high-lead fuel will quickly foul the spark plugs. Possible in just a few hundred miles. A lead fouled plug needs to be replaced, it can’t be cleaned. And where will he find modern spark plugs?
But he could add Marvel Mystery Oil to the fuel (it was developed during WW2 to reduce lead fouling of spark plugs). That should get him some more miles before the plugs foul. And maybe he could convince a spark plug manufacturer to custom make a plug that works. WW2 era technology would be capable of it.
Flat tires would be difficult. No machines available to unmount/mount a modern 18" tire. But WW2 era tech could make one.
With some help he could probably keep it running for several thousands, maybe even a few tens of thousands, of miles.
The electronics should be OK for quite a while. I think the engine oil will do it in like Gary said.
I suspect that concerns over the oil are overstated. One big reason for today’s longer intervals are the tighter tolerances with much less blowby from the rings and other components, so you have less fuel and other gunk getting into the oil. Today’s oils are much better, but I bet if you took the best, closest straight weight oil of the day and perhaps diluted it a bit you would be ok.
As for the leaded gas, only the emissions systems and plugs would be significantly affected. I know that as recently as the mid 90s Ford and GM exported lead gas versions of some cars (Crown Vic, Impala, others) to the middle east in lead gas versions. Cut out the catalytic converter, remove the oxygen sensors, have fun.
The electronics would be the biggest problem. Engine failures are pretty rare today, so I would expect you will get 300,000 from the major mechanicals, although you probably won’t be able to find a suitable transmission fluid for that change interval, so after 100,000 miles you might be on a gamble.
I have to believe that if you were determined enough you could find a way to clean the lead from the plugs. Perhaps chemically? Modern plugs don’t wear out like the old ones, so if you could remove the lead I think you could keep them in service.
If you send back a flex-fuel car, they could run an 85/15 mix of denatured alcohol and white gas. That’d take care of the lead and octane problem (a 1940 Ford V-8 had a 6.6:1 compression ratio, one 2012 Impala model has 11.5:1).
except Marvel’s own site says it was formulated to reduce deposits on carburetors.
At any rate, any additive that claims it can be added to any fuel or engine oil to solve a long list of maladies is nothing but horseshit. Just like Seafoam and any other crap that idiots blithely dump into their engine/transmission/fuel tank because the label promises them the world and 72 virgins.
Eh, no. couple reasons:
- those straight-viscosity oils wouldn’t flow or film well enough at low temperatures to accommodate those tighter tolerances in the engine, and
- older oils wouldn’t have the anti-contaminant additives expected by a modern engine.
Except that a huge part of the reason why engines last so long now is that the quality of the oils has improved so much. Even old car engines last much longer today, including low mileage survivors that haven’t had any internal work. A particularly good illustration of this is air-cooled VW’s-- back in the 60’s you would get about 60-80k miles out of a motor between rebuilds (which could take all afternoon!), but these days you can easily squeeze over 200k out of more-or-less identical motors. The effect is somewhat more pronounced with the air-cooled motors because the multi-weight oils are also much better at moving heat around, but in my observation it seems to be the case with older water-cooled engines as well.
A modern engine that’s designed for high quality modern oils is not going to be happy with the stuff that went into cars in the 40’s. I would say the best strategy there would be to run a full synthetic and don’t change it until it starts burning it, at which point it’s going to be the beginning of the end anyways. If you could stash a few gallons of modern synthetic oil in the trunk, you could probably get away with, say, 30,000 mile changes and still have a pretty good chance of making it at least to 100,000, depending on the gas issues.
I stand corrected!
Without doing a lot of calculations I guess that you could squeeze 75 to 100 thousand miles out of the car before it became toast if it was babied. The irony is, that’s longer than a car would be expected expected to last back in those days.
Crappy oil and bad gas are a problem. There might be a need to jerry-rig the ignition timing. The tires will eventually give out but I’ve gotten 80K miles out of a set. (I don’t recommend doing that, it was a lease car.) In that mileage frame, brake fluid, the brakes, the transmission fluid and the differential fluid shouldn’t be a problem. The shocks will still be good.
But then, bad drivers and drunk driving were a real problem. (Darwin) Your car would probably get totaled by one of the 2 ton behemoths on the road. At least, you would survive the crash and could attend the other driver’s funeral.