I laughed out loud several times at this. It's kind of sad that a lot of younger folks won't have this kind of experience. Muscling a 1973 Ford F150 around with no power steering, I learned many, many things about driving. Having to do hill starts with a 3-on-the-tree, I learned many, many more. A recalcitrant, finicky, or otherwise nearly broken car is a source of much distress, but also character building. And ofte…
Ha, yeah, with new cars there’s no reason to try to talk things out and reason with them because there’s no sense they are just being stubborn.
I am rather glad that modern cars late 90's are so depressingly reliable and lacking in "character" and just works when I turn the key and all they needs is fuel, oil change, filters and fluids at intervals. I would choose an Audi/BMW if I wanted that sort trepidation in my life.
i have a subaru that im not sure will start (something is draining the battery), or when it starts that i will have enough oil.
In high school, my friends and I managed to resuscitate a 914 that had been stowed away in a garage for over a decade. We towed it to the top of a hill with a pickup truck and attempted a clutch start after we'd picked up some speed. None of us (especially me in the driver's seat) expected this to work, but amazingly it fired right up. One of my friends managed to jog alongside and jump into the car as I tried to kee…
lol, your memory jogged my memory of me and my neighbor, me 14, he 16, finding an almost-completely disassembled moped in the woods behind my house. It had been completely stripped--out of spite, it would appear, since everything not firmly attached to the steel frame, including all of the plastic shell parts, lights, switches, etc, had been strewn all around. Of the few things attached to the frame, it was lucky the engine, gas tank, and rear wheel, remained. We lugged this 200+ pound pile of junk a few hundred yards through the woods into my garage. Just replaced the spark plug cable, and it fricking started up! We then proceeded to replace the front wheel with a BMX bike tire, fashioned a makeshift seat out of a banana bicycle seat with some angle-iron, and I rode that heap of junk, wires flailing off the frame, for over a year. I got pulled over by the police for not having lights. Problem was, in the mess of wiring that did exist, I was randomly splicing into whatever, including a feed that apparently hadn't gone through a voltage regular, and would burn out the tail lights if I hit the brakes at too high of an RPM. After the police incident, my dad wouldn't let me ride it on the street anymore, and then eventually he took it to the junk yard one day when I was at school.
Depth of knowledge is impossible to assess for anyone that doesn't have similar depth in the same subject matter. The author could be bullshitting (he's not) but how would anyone who's not driven vehicles that are decades beyond their design life know?
how would anyone who's not driven vehicles that are decades beyond their design life know I think you just need to have driven a car from that era to understand this post and believe it -- the car doesn't neccessarily need to be that old. I had a '77 Civic in 1982 and it had many of these same "features" as his Porsche - any key (or screwdriver) could open the door or turn the ignition, it had a manual choke lever in…
No clutch interlock can be useful. Had a friend growing up who’s dad would use the starter and first gear to move his Datsun out of traffic when it stopped running.
My father had one of these just sort of gathering dust in the garage when I was growing up, utterly shocked when I turned 16 and he handed me the keys. I still like to casually drop "oh yeah, I used to have a Porsche back when I was 16." Although I must say it was in immeasurably better shape than this one :D I still dream of finding an old 914 and giving it an electric conversion… I'd have to do something about that…
Is the electric conversion still a thing? I want an eclectic car with no monitors, no software updates, no surveillance (none of the new electric car offers that - they are calling home for updates and god knows why way too often, and they have bigger monitors than my 14" work laptop).
The inverter/regen braking, and charger units do have some firmware, but once everything is wired up and working, should work indefinitely without future OTA updates. If the national charging standard changes at some point in the future (or gets exported to another area (europe) that uses a different standard) you'll need to swap out the charger.
Companies like EV West in California and Swindon in the UK offer bolt-in kits for 1960s cars, in particular the VW Beetle and the original Cooper Mini
Long term, as engine parts become harder to source, especially for low volume european cars, Electric Conversion is rapidly becoming the accepted way to keep these classics on the road for another 100 years.
> Depress the clutch as you would in any car, and pull the knob from its secure location out of first gear. Now you will become adrift in the zone known to early Porsche owners as “Neverland” and your quest will be to find second gear. Prepare yourself for a ten-second-or-so adventure. Do not go straight forward with the shift knob, as you will only find Reverse waiting there to mock you with a shriek of high-speed g…
What a blast from the past. I learnt to drive using a VW Golf, and I've always thought this shift pattern is just standard on German cars with manual transmission (at least in the 90s). One thing I don't see mentioned is that you first have to press down onto the knob, then shift forward, in order to shift the transmission into R. Simply pushing the knob forward won't go from N to R.
I had a '92 Nissan Sentra as my first car in the early 2000's, a hand-me-down from my older brother - it also had this dog-leg shift pattern. Looks like it wasn't just German cars that had this transmission.
Definitely burned out a clutch early from learning to drive and learning to drive stick at the same time, but damn do I miss it sometimes.
20 years ago I lived in an area considered not very safe; the guy in the apartment below was a cop and thieves broke into his car twice and in his house once. I had an older car, so I always left it unlocked, including the trunk: no problem. I also had a motorcycle that I left with the key in the ignition a few times, so various neighbors brought me the key a few times until they learned to leave it there. These were probably the only vehicles in the entire block of flats that were not touched by thieves - maybe they checked the trunk of the car a few times, found nothing interesting and left. The car was not worth stealing, the bike was not easy to ride.
This is one of my favorite styles of writing. I have absolutely no clue what this person is talking about and have no interest in cars, yet I read every single word. I love when people have such a deep knowledge of something that they can write an essay as unique and thoughtful as this. It reminds me of Kitchen Confidential, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman!, or any rant about British politics by David Mitchell.
On the flip side, I know a ton about cars and actually own a german sports car of roughly this vintage and this rings incredibly true (and also hilarious). My car can't be locked due to fear of it never opening again, starting the engine requires a delicate balance of the right amount of throttle and prayers the battery has enough charge, and selecting first is a preposterous mixture of a delicate ballet and sledgeha…
Easily my favorite essay of the year. Unique, informative and casual in the way sitting around a table listening to an engaging guest tell tales and the visualization works immediately. Count me among the fans of this piece and author.