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Comment by edwingustafson | Hacker News Reader

Same is true of cars on the road -- some or all vehicles from past model years would fail to meet this year's automotive regulations.

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Except new cars are universally better than old cars on virtually all fronts. The appropriate analogy would be if we could build 200 mpg cars, right now, today, except they could only be red, and red cars are illegal due to a regulation introduced in 1983 (while everybody agrees that it's great to be rid of gaudy red cars, some people -- mostly unpleasant and tasteless fans of obnoxiously coloured cars -- grumble that the regulation was pushed by the green-paint-industry).

I don't know about universally better... the prices are higher as well.

In 1960 a Ford Falcon ("first Compact Car with mass appeal") cost $1975[1]. In 2016 dollars, that's $15,890[2]. A 2016 Ford Fiesta starts at $14,090 MSRP[3].

I defy you to declare the 1960 Falcon better than the 2016 Fiesta on even a single reasonably objective metric.

1: http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/60scars.html

2: http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=19...

3: https://www.ford.com/cars/fiesta/

EDIT: @marincounty, your comment is dead. And yes, if I actually needed a car to drive around for practical purposes (and not a collectors object) I'd take the Fiesta.

1975 Falcon had 130 hp, Fiesta has 123 hp.

Fair. However, the Fiesta does 0-60 (a little) faster, and has a (slightly) higher top speed, so at the end of the day, it's not doing the Falcon much good?

http://www.automobile-catalog.com/performance/1975/993575/fo...

http://www.parkers.co.uk/cars/reviews/facts-and-figures/ford...

I bet this is because due to better technology, the current Fiesta engine produces a much flatter curve of torque, meaning that it is both easier to drive and it accelerates faster.

And don't even start with the fuel economy or emissions.... (but of course, this also means that current cars would choke on the fuel of 1962, and not just because of lead.)

I'd say it's to do a lot with advances in turbos. Most small engine cars have turbos now that rival anything even a decade a go. This means you can get by with much smaller engines and get similar performance.

True, turbos (even dual compressors as in the case of VAG's TSI) have much impact, but even non-compressed engines (in lower end models) are vastly better-behaved than old car engines.

I once had a Sunbeam Avenger which was horrible in very many ways (not least because of the build quality in English unionized car plants) and an uneven torque curve (with a peak and a not that high peak as such) was one of its problems.

I think it's mostly weight, the newer one seems to be 300kg lighter which is a big deal. But that fact sheet was for the sedan so I don't know if it's apples to apples comparison. The worst modern model is 1.25 Studio (11/12-) 3d @ 16.4 seconds vs. 13 seconds from the 1975 model.

Newest cars are only lighter when compared to recent history. Cars of 1960's were much much lighter than today.

(big-family-sized Cortina DeLuxe of 1962 was 787 kg, present-day supermini Fiesta starts at 1041 kg).

The 1.25 Studio is so slow that it isn't available for sale in the USA--the cheapest $14k model here does 0-60mph in 9 seconds or so.

If you dial back on the compression and timing, modern cars would run just fine on 1962 gasoline--probably better than 1962 cars, since electronic direct fuel injection assures even fuel distribution among the cylinders and cools the air in the cylinder, making it less vulnerable to predetonation.

This may depend on geographical area and standards and so on, but at least here in northern Europe, much of the gasoline was made of Russian crude oil and before modern emission standards, it contained lots of sulphur and other impurities. I believe modern cars would start flagging errors with even 1980's gasoline (again, even assuming that the lead would be taken away and replaced by modern additives).

Against what curb weight, though? f = ma, so a=f/m. Ignoring air resistance of course ( and the Fiesta may win there ).

Someone offered you a mint 1960 ford falcon, with 0 miles, and someone else offered you a new 2016 Ford Fiesta.

You would take the Fiesta?

A few reasonable metrics;

A better looking vechicle(Falcon), with a minimum of plastic. Subjective. Sorry.

Ease of repair. Objective. Win, by a long shot. Engine--easier to repair. Transmission--easier to rebuild. Electrical--bone dead simple. There's a reason you still see them on the road--50 plus years later.

There's objective reasons guys of differing demographics/tastes hunt for old Falcons. They are collector cars. They were simple. They were less complicated. In my eyes, they were miniminslistic cool.

I don't think in 56 years we will have Fiesta clubs, or guys scouring the Internet looking for restorable Fiesta's, or maybe they will? I don't know.

(In terms of emmissions you win hands down. Maybe I missing your point? If that's the case--sorry. If I had a huge garage, and some capital, I would be, right now, buying up collector cars, and keeping them for retirement. The only stumbling block I see is the federal government making older vechicles so hard to smog, they will become impractical to pass emmissions. Even, if that happens, I have a feeling guys will retrofit some of these older desirable classics with electric engines? )

Ha, guess what? I just read that comment and thought "Totally wrong, what a fool!"....

And then I did some research, turns out you're right! Just checking average salary in the UK vs a comparable car (Cortina > Sierra > Mondeo) shows that a 1962 Cortina was about 50% of average UK salary, whereas a Sierra went up to about 70%, and a Mondeo today is around 85%!

Car brands tend to go up market over time. I think the idea is people who buy an accord and like it tend to have more money in a few years. So they can up sell without making it obvious. Until they introduce a civic the new low end car. Civic has even grown to the point where Honda has toyed with a few new lower end cars. I think the Fit is their cheapest model right now.

I'm getting a 1962 Cortina at £573[1], with average wage £799[2] (71.5%), and a 1982 Sierra at £4515[1], with average wage (in 1980) £6000[3] (75%)?

1: http://www.rac.co.uk/drive/car-reviews/ford/cortina/207784

2: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/jan/13/past.comment

3: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/recession/4323171/UK-rece...

That doesn't sound right. What sources did you use?

(Edit: mseebach apparently googled the same sources I did, but faster.)

From what I could find, in 1962 the Cortina was selling at £573 [0] and the average salary was £799 [1]. That's 71 %.

In 2014, the average salary of all employees was £27271 [2] and the Ford Mondeo started at £20795. That's 76 %.

So the ratio is not that much different. And the Ford Mondeo of 2014 is an incredibly much better car.

A lowly 2014 Fiesta at about £10000 would have been a completely unbelievable car in 1962. And not a smaller car. In fact, latest Fiesta has exactly the same wheelbase (2489 mm) as the 1962 large family car Cortina, the Fiesta is 140 mm wider, 300 kg heavier (and so much safer), and the start-of-list engine model in Fiesta has 59 kW which is slightly more than the 58 kW of the tuned-up top model Cortina GT.

[0] http://www.rac.co.uk/drive/car-reviews/ford/cortina/207784

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/jan/13/past.comment

[2] http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2868911/Best...

[3] http://www.carbuyer.co.uk/news/91004/new-ford-mondeo-2015-pr...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Cortina

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Fiesta

I got the earnings data from the FT.com site - had it a few years ago, and then copied into a text file that I refer to often (typically when referring to music technology cost vs average earnings, as I teach music technology, and it puts it in context). It gave 1960 average wage as £1042.

I know that cars have got a lot better (I've been a hobby mechanic for 30 years, and I've built a WRC class winning car, so I know my way around an engine bay, and spend a lot less time fixing mundane things that would regularly go wrong on cars of the 70s and 80s) - that wasn't the point that I was making, it was solely on cost for an equivalent car, and something that I was surprised by - I had expected the cost to be much less in relative terms today, not being the same or going the other way (whichever figure you believe, the point largely stands, I think). The reason I was surprised in part is because I had assumed a similar effect as in music technology, which has decreased in price immensely since the 1960s; you can own technology today for a few pounds which would have been "multi house" price in the 1960s, and of course there are lots of technologies and processes which simply didn't exist - in much the same way as today's cars are incomparably better than those of the years gone by.

Yes, a Fiesta is an equivalent in some dimensions of a Cortina, but it's not an equivalent in terms of intended market; the Cortina was the mass market family car of its era, hence the comparison with the Sierra and Mondeo.

> Except new cars are universally better than old cars on virtually all fronts.

More like "expensive new cars are universally better than expensive old cars". When it comes to the cheapest of the cheap Chinese junk, I find them worse than old cheap cars produced by reputable manufacturers.

Oh yeah, and this is true if "all fronts" doesn't include design. Most modern cars are fugly.

One quick way to get a feel for quality difference is to look at warranties, and how they've gone from "powertrain only" (if they were offered at all) to "bumper to bumper", and also how they've gotten longer over time (several companies offer 100k powertrain warranties and 60k bumper to bumper warranties, which would have been absurd in the old days).

If most modern cars are fugly, then 90% of everything made by American manufacturers from 1973-2008 is eye bleach material.

You're referring to cars, or in general?

Cars are vastly different though. A building will persist for decades (sometimes hundreds of years!) and house dozens to thousands of people at once. They also use up vastly more energy and take up many orders of magnitude more space.

An unsightly or unsafe car is easy to remove whereas doing the same with a building is (usually) cost prohibitive. We're all stuck with whatever ends up being built at a given spot for a long time.

Many countries have legally required mandatory periodic tests of vehicles. If your car doesn't pass, you can't drive it.

There are usually 'grandfather' clauses to allow these to keep driving with some level of testing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause

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