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.

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[–] 4 points 1 day ago* (1 child)

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 17.4L V8 Gas Guzzler super-extra-big-block engine bogs an imperceptible amount

The weapons grade CFCs—now banned by the Geneva convention—form icicles on your eyebrows in seconds.

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  • [–] 1 point 21 hours ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    The average new car weighs more than the famously heavy Oldsmobile 98.

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  • [–] 41 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    Older cars could survive a wreck while their occupants didn’t. Newer cars are designed to protect the occupants by destroying themselves.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago

    IDK why (I mean I guess cause he was a good teacher) but our drivers ed teacher taught us about crumple zones and all other sorts of things, there were 8 weeks of classroom instruction in high school whether you were planning on driving or not.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago

    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.

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  • [–] 152 points 4 days ago (5 children)

    Pretty sure this car had more ashtrays than it did safety features too

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days 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...

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  • [–] 60 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    hey if it's in a crash, the CAR's gonna survive. Anyone in it? that's another story...

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  • [–] 10 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    The ashtray is a safety feature.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago

    How else are you expected to ash your cigarette without causing a fire hazard? Crank the window down?? And exactly how am I supposed to accomplish that when I have my hands juggling 4 tasks already, genius?

    My smoking hand is holding my cig and shifting gears, and my driving hand is steering the car and holding my beer upright without spilling. There's kids in the car, so I need to focus on the task of driving for their safety!

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    [–] 14 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    This is super convoluted to some people, but its the easiest way for my weird American brain to convert it on the fly:

    1. 2*°C=ans1
    2. ans1—(0.1*ans1)=ans2
    3. ans2—32=°F

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago

    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

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 92 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 47 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

    You'd end up with the steering column through your chest because crumple zones didn't exist. https://youtu.be/fPF4fBGNK0U

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  • [–] 50 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    I think we are saying the same thing.

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  • [–] 16 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    We are. Sorry. It's early and I misread.

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  • [–] 70 points 4 days ago (2 children)
  • [–] 44 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    Hasn't the weight of cars been increasing? Pick a model and track the curb weight over generations. It seems to be going up.

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  • [–] 19 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 days ago (4 children)

    https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/average-car-weight.html

    Here’s an article about it. Thanks for making me look it up, it has an important little fact at the top, which is the pickups have trended steadily upward over that same period which I didn’t know. However, other vehicle types have trended steadily downwards, and are still below their previous figures.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    It's mostly that the old American land yachts are no longer as big. Look at the fifth generation Lincoln Continental vs any after it. Or the 1960s Cadillac Eldorado, a 2.2 ton 2 door car

    European and Asian cars have been trending up in size meanwhile but there have been instances where a new generation model is lighter than the old one due to the materials used.

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  • [–] 35 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    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.

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    [–] 16 points 3 days ago

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    If you're not even 50 yet and already falling into nostalgia traps seek help.

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  • [–] [S] 17 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    I don't need help. I need a systemic revamp of our political and financial systems, and for terrible things to happen to billionaires.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    Hey man I had a 1967 Plymouth Newport that had to have 454 engine just haul the car around. Fucker was tank on wheels.

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