5 ms·

This glances at it a bit. http://jalopnik.com/5551040/why-old-cars-suck http://jalopnik.com/5551040/why-old-cars-suck Spark control was much more primitive, c

This glances at it a bit. http://jalopnik.com/5551040/why-old-cars-suck http://jalopnik.com/5551040/why-old-cars-suck Spark control was much more primitive, carbureted engines just were not good candidates for all the complexity of hoses and such, gas of varying quality would clog catalytic converters... the technologies were just in an intermediate state. There were all "add parts" improvements. Japanese cars could be better but frequently were even much more complex. They might meet EPA off the lot, new, but after five years... I had a 1979 Buick Regal (normally aspirated, 3.8 L V6 ) that was getting like 8 MPG when I sold it in 1993 or so. No mechanic in three states could find anything wrong.

jacobolus 11y ago
I guess I’m not understanding your original point... it seems like cars have gotten much better than they used to be. Are you saying in a counterfactual world without the EPA, they would be even better still? Or are you saying that those improvements were inevitable and cars would be equally good but cheaper without the EPA regulations? Or are you saying that regulations are better now than they were in the 80s? Or ... It seems to me that an alternate explanation could be that it took auto makers 10–20 years to figure out how to build good compliant cars, with their first tries sucking, but once the regulatory regime had been stable for a while they figured out how to make big improvements. In a counterfactual world without those requirements they might be much more polluting today. [I dunno, I’m not at all an expert in this subject, I’m just speculating.] At any rate, as someone who grew up in the 90s in southern CA, I’m very thankful that emissions of cars made in the 80s/90s were much better than cars 20 years prior; cleaner cars were a big part of the radical drop in air pollution throughout the area.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  It's the "it took 10-20 years" thing. Really, the advance of digital technology made it all work out in the end - trying to do all that stuff in the mechanical domain was charming but it took more talent than was readily available and raised the price of cars. Digital just means a different class of engineer could address the problem and the replicability of digital helped. A generation had to exit the workforce and be replaced for it to actually work. My more central point is that they didn't have to be polluting at all, using older technology. Properly tuned engines didn't pollute much. Most if not all issues addressed were really down to proper maintenance. The "people who aren't there" in the modern software that runs cars do that for you now. As hard as it may be to believe, people were more or less expected to do their own maintenance on cars. Of course they didn't. But that is just how I was raised. Again, we use cars to rejigger location in real estate. It's the use of a technology to solve something that is ultimately a governance problem. I suspect land rent taxes would be more efficient.

jacobolus 11y ago

I guess I’m not understanding your original point... it seems like cars have gotten much better than they used to be. Are you saying in a counterfactual world without the EPA, they would be even better still? Or are you saying that those improvements were inevitable and cars would be equally good but cheaper without the EPA regulations? Or are you saying that regulations are better now than they were in the 80s? Or ... It seems to me that an alternate explanation could be that it took auto makers 10–20 years to figure out how to build good compliant cars, with their first tries sucking, but once the regulatory regime had been stable for a while they figured out how to make big improvements. In a counterfactual world without those requirements they might be much more polluting today. [I dunno, I’m not at all an expert in this subject, I’m just speculating.] At any rate, as someone who grew up in the 90s in southern CA, I’m very thankful that emissions of cars made in the 80s/90s were much better than cars 20 years prior; cleaner cars were a big part of the radical drop in air pollution throughout the area.

ArkyBeagle 11y ago
It's the "it took 10-20 years" thing. Really, the advance of digital technology made it all work out in the end - trying to do all that stuff in the mechanical domain was charming but it took more talent than was readily available and raised the price of cars. Digital just means a different class of engineer could address the problem and the replicability of digital helped. A generation had to exit the workforce and be replaced for it to actually work. My more central point is that they didn't have to be polluting at all, using older technology. Properly tuned engines didn't pollute much. Most if not all issues addressed were really down to proper maintenance. The "people who aren't there" in the modern software that runs cars do that for you now. As hard as it may be to believe, people were more or less expected to do their own maintenance on cars. Of course they didn't. But that is just how I was raised. Again, we use cars to rejigger location in real estate. It's the use of a technology to solve something that is ultimately a governance problem. I suspect land rent taxes would be more efficient.