MOT station trying it on?

Indeed. The biggest hurdle to running an old banger on a shoestring in 10 years time will be the multiplexed electrics.

OTOH, there will be a lot of choice; the key will be to only run something until it fails, then scrap it and get another.

Chris

Is that an environmentally friendly approach or would it be better to have more basic, repairable cars ?

Andy C

As Adrian has intimated, it's largely an environmental requirement rather than an option.

Cars of 20 or more years ago were more basic, and hence repairable. Trouble is, they had to be easy to repair because they broke more frequently!

I'm old enough to remember with astonishment reading in the motoring press that a car somewhere in the world had run 100,000 miles on the same engine. To achieve that, it had been serviced every 3,000 miles. We were conditioned to expect top end overhauls every 30,000 miles, and a complete rebuild at 60,000.

We now expect our cars to last more than 100,000 miles without problems, and service intervals of up to 20,000 miles.

The price we pay is reduced repairability of older cars. IMHO, this is a price acceptable by the average buyer of new cars, and it is those people who ultimately decide the manufacturer's strategy.

Of course, it may not be better for the type of owner who contributes to u.r.c.m!

Chris

Blimey, when was that, back in the forties?

I'd have thought those figures would be pessimistic by the late sixties. Worst I can remember was a succession of Vauxhall Vivas, all of which seemed to need major work at around 70,000. But of course it was more common to clock cars in those days, so quite possible that they'd all done double that mileage.

Back in the 1970s I used to drive fleet vehicles, the most popular being the Ford Escort 1.1 and 1.3 estate cars which are usually sold on to auction at around 99,000 miles, I agree we did occasionally have major engine and gear box failures, but for some reason they seemed mostly to occur more with certain drivers than with others!

Nope '60s. Of course, many cars then were powered by the BMC A series engine designed in the forties...

What do you think was the average service interval in the late sixties? Or even early seventies. It was certainly 3,000 miles for the cars I was running then.

The iconic sixties car, the Mini, would be hard pushed to do 60,000 without a reasonably full engine overhaul.

BTW, the service interval for the first car I owned was given by the Castrol service chart for it as 300 miles. No, I didn't miss a zero off! Oh, and it had 27 grease nipples :-)

A Viva HB was the worst car I ever owned, but not the worst I've ever driven.

Chris

And very good it was too. My father in law gave me a 1.3 litre Marina estate that he'd seriously abused by towing a very heavy trailer up and down the country. I ran it up to 140,000 before it died, then he admitted to at least another 40,000 unrecorded miles while the speedo cable had been broken.

That's as maybe, but 30,000 between top end overhauls? And a complete rebuild every 60,000? As I said, even the Viva exceeded those figures and was my example of a car with a duff engine.

I never had one of them...

Hehe. Go on, what was it then? You can't leave us guessing.

Apart from the engines, I still feel that they were really rather good. Didn't rust as badly as their contemporaries; handled well; wonderfully light steering; good sized boots; simple to work on; "coke bottle" styling; lovely painted woodgrain effect glove-box on the top-spec ones...

Funnily enough, the very worst car I have ever driven was a 1.3 Marina. To be fair, it was an automatic...

Yep, a decoke at 30K was pretty much expected in the sixties.

My sympathies :-)

It was a 1954 Austin A40 Somerset. Oil and filter changes were scheduled for

I thought mine inferior in almost every way to the equivalent Escort.

The engine was woefully weedy, the gearchange was notchy, the brakes were very over-sensitive, and my reasonably well-cared for one blew its head gasket before it had done 40,000.

Chris

Funnily enough, the very worst car I have ever driven was a 1.3 Marina. To be fair, it was an automatic...

Yep, a decoke at 30K was pretty much expected in the sixties.

My sympathies :-)

It was a 1954 Austin A40 Somerset. Oil and filter changes were scheduled for

I thought mine inferior in almost every way to the equivalent Escort.

The engine was woefully weedy, the gearchange was notchy, the brakes were very over-sensitive, and my reasonably well-cared for one blew its head gasket before it had done 40,000.

Chris

I didn't say it was any good - just very reluctant to die. It did finally expire when the diff gave out. It started making loud clonking and grinding noises when my wife was about 40 miles from home. She got as far as my workplace, collected me and we limped homewards. By the last mile, the engine speed was increasing as we got progressively slower until there was no drive at all and we freewheeled to a stop

My HB was the SL90, with a massive 10BHP more than the base model which may have made a difference.

Must have been something seriously amiss then, as the Viva's gearchange was usually so slick you could flick the short gearlever between the gears almost like an electrical switch. I must have had about 5 of them, including vans, and they were all excellent in that respect.

I think that Viva gearlevers were all steel, so in comparison to the escort they would have felt harsher since the escort had a big lump of rubber in the middle. Viva boxes suffered from layshaft bearing problems, larglely because people put ep oil in rather than the straight stuff they needed. I rebuilt quite a few for that exact problem. I also raced an HB for a year (1984) in a contact formula, it was competitive with most of the other cars and easily fixed. I has breathed on the engine a bit, but nothing really fancy.

Mrcheerful

Those only had 5-digit odometers, didn't they?

The engine in my Herald has done 85,000 since I rebuilt it. After sitting unused for ten years, it started first turn of the key and is showing 160 psi on all four cylinders. My 1975 DS has done around

Ian

Heh - mine still is!

Yup, that's the one!

Though the same engine continued to be produced for years after that, with improved manufacturing and lubricants allowing longer engine life, and no significant electronics needed until the injected engines of the mid-90s.

On Wed, 10 Sep 2008 08:34:33 -0700 (PDT), I waved a wand and this message magically appears in front of Ian:

My '96 Audi with its 2.6 V6 has done 252,000 miles and hasn't needed a rebuild yet.

In message , Chris Whelan writes

Wasn't there a yank tank that had a sealed bonnet and a 100,000 service interval?

Even 101 years ago Rolls Royce were setting the standard for reliability...

"In 1907 a Silver Ghost traveled fifteen thousand miles nonstop between Glasgow and London, nearly doubling the then world reliability record. In commemoration of this historic drive, the same car -- now with a recorded mileage of over half a million miles"

I'm sure London is less than 15000 miles from Glasgow... ;-)

What do you mean, "even"? Are Rolls Royce cars "setting the standard for reliability" today? Did you know that they could never get their version of the Citroen brake valve to stop leaking, so had to resort to a disposable nappy in the underpan which was changed at each service.

Ian