“They’re also a hoot to drive. Massive torque and RWD is FUN.”
Again, so true. My '04 GTO was certainly quick enough, but in “stoplight to stoplight” driving, nothing beat the high cube engines that were designed to get a car moving at low RPMs. The cars of today have more HP, but the torque (which is what you really feel) doesn’t come in off idle like the large displacement engines of the late 60’s.
And speaking of resto-mods, my '66 GTO project was featured, with 5 other cars, in the 12/94 issue of Car Craft. All 6 were very different. On the 70 mile mileage test loop we squeezed out 20.5 MPG, and this with a 455 engine with 3-2bbl carbs. This was possible because the engine was very efficient at very low RPMs. Didn’t take much to get the car rolling.
I can only imagine what that sucka weighed… The power-to-weight ratio on something like that is bordering on irrational.
I owned a 1980 Coupe deVille with the 6.0L carbureted V8 (last of the big blocks, only year for this engine without V8-6-4). It sported a whopping 145 HP. It did have enough torque to get off the line in reasonable fashion, but you were running out of breath pretty quick.
As for the Castillian’s “styling”… Let’s be fair now.. The Castillian was a third-party retrofit, not a factory released model. Plus, there were far more hideous conversions than the Castillian. Check out the Opera Coupe (insert puking smiley here)
Plastic has been mentioned. When it dies it is really hard to replace without a huge investment in tooling, but a craftsman with hammers and an english wheel can reproduce almost any part that was ever made from stamped sheet metal.
Body-on-frame construction has a lot to do with it too. a 50’s car body could be bent to hell, full of rust holes, and still be sound and driveable, but once you got to unit-body construction it took a lot less to total a car.
I think the comment (about the increased use of plastics) is apt.
Before the 1970’s, most car parts were metal-but early plastic parts deteriorated relatively quickly-I remember seeing the plastic dash on a 1973 Chrysler literally disintegrate-your fingernails could rip out chunks of it. Restoring such a car could be problematic.
I also think that cars from the 1980’s on will be very difficult to restore-because of the non-availability of electronic parts-how would you obtain obsolete Z-80 microprocessors for an Alfa-Romeo 164 these days? (the A-R164 had three).
So it may well turn out that the 1950’s-60’s cars represent the last decades that produced cars that middle-class collectors can restore.
I dunno. I once thought that too, but I think it’s just because electronics weren’t traditionally in a shade-tree mechanic’s skill set, but among the younger generations of amateur mechanics that is definitely not the case. 80’s vintage EFI parts are pretty darn simple as far as electronics go and they usually aren’t that hard to repair or reproduce. I’m certainly no electrical engineer, but I’ve been able to fix a few car computers with just a soldering iron and multimeter (and a different computer to snag parts from). I don’t really see any reason why electronic parts obsolescence should be any more of a problem than mechanical parts. If anything, electronics are better because the actual small components are exponentially cheaper than they were back when the cars were made.
I don’t see today’s cars getting restored (at least to the extent of the muscle cars). For one thing, the '64 - '72 light weight/big cube cars were the first of the genre. Secondly, if I am somewhat typical of a “shade tree” restorer, like many others I cut my teeth on self-taught mechanics, pulling engines with a block and tackle hung on a tree and fixing/modifying anything/everything because there was no money to pay someone to do it. All this with the car two weeks out of the dealer’s showroom. As time went by and it became illegal to modify engine internals, only hard core racers and professional mechanics accumulated this knowledge. Several years ago I re-wired my '56 Chevy. I’d never done it before, but because it was so basic/simple, all I needed to do was take my time. Can’t even imagine re-wiring anything I currently own, notwithstanding my El Camino. Most of today’s hotrodders (at least those with new cars) may install a chip, a cat-back system or a cold air package, but that’s about it. The expertise to completely restore a car will not be as common as time goes by.
WAG: Following the laws of supply and demand, maybe the reason nobody collects 70’s cars is the same reason nobody cares about 70’s comics: there’s too many.
This is the Straight Dope. I love love to see those figures. I am not saying you are wrong but I don’t believe it. You would have to live in a trailer park where the grass never gets cut to find many 70’s cars at all or at least that is true around here. They barely exist mainly because it only takes a little while of neglect + lack of general interest to send them to the great scrap heap in the sky forever. I see more cars from the late 1940’s - early 1960’s than I do from the 70’s and early 80’s.
I think that was the case in the 1990’s, when junkers from the 70’s were still a pretty common sight, and the high quality of late-80’s and 90’s cars made their flaws painfully obvious. But unless they’re trucks, you really don’t see many 70’s cars still on the road these days. Prices on some 70’s cars have recovered considerably (my friend’s $500 Corvette is probably worth around $10k now if it’s still in decent shape), but nothing like the huge resurgance in interest 50’s and 60’s cars saw in the 80’s and 90’s.
I found the discussion of plastics interesting. As I mentioned, I hang out on a Chevy LUV site which is mostly 70’s. The trucks there vary from daily drivers like mine to radical customs, V-8’s. The vinyl covered foam dashboards are a big concern.
A better reason yet is that they’ve become associated with gays, who typically get in early enough on any collectible or trend to stamp it unambigiously as “theirs” until the mass culture manages to de-gay it.
If you look more closely, you’ll see a similar dearth of 1946-1954 automobiles. They weren’t sexy, nor are the majority cars from the Seventies and early Eighties. A 1975 Pacer is interesting, a Lincoln Versailles is not.
Too young to have personal knowledge of this but I imagine that there once was an absence of cars from the Twenties. Not as daring as the early runabouts or as attractive as cars from the Depression era.
My opinion is that the designs of the current era will not be regarded as highly as the those from 1990 to 2000. We’re in another interim period. Aerodynamics and energy conservation should produce some cars of interest in the future though they may not be aesthetically pleasing.
