bravenrace wrote:Chris_V wrote:I always hear this from fanbois...bravenrace wrote: I was a mechanic in the early to mid 80's, so I worked on a bunch of these along with all the other brands. I did more than a dozen cam replacements on these cars with less than 30k on them. By 40k the doors were literally falling off because the hinges failed. Not to mention that the front ends were badly out of alignment in ways that required a frame machine to correct. These were extremely common failures in an extremely low quality car, and only a small sample of everything that went wrong with them. My own sister bought an '81 Aries that I personally maintained. She sold it to a junk yard with 45k miles on it. They were intended and designed to be cheap throw away cars, and they didn't even fulfill that task well. But more importantly, they drove like dreck. At the same time Honda and Toyota were already producing cars that would easily go 150-200k without major repairs. How anyone would choose to drive one of these over even other terrible cars from that era escapes me. They were truly awful cars. YMMMVI always hear this sort of thing from mechanics... of ANY make: "I worked on a lot of them and they were horrible." Well, you worked on broken ones. You obviously didn't work on the tens of thousands of them that gave the owners no problems. Your anecdotal evidence of the broken ones you worked on is countered by the anecdotal evidence of the owners who couldn't kill theirs.
Not a fanboi and never owned a K car. Don't care to, but I'm sick and tired of mechanics of EVERY make calling the cars they work on utter dreck BECAUSE they work on them all the time. OF COURSE YOU DO! YOU'RE A MECHANIC! Even in a general shop, you only work on broken ones 'cause no one's bringing you the ones that are in good shape.
Simply put, you say you worked on them and they sucked and were broken all the time and other actual owners say they were solid and reliable and couldn't be killed. Considering I've seen mechanics of every make constantly deride the cars they work on, making every car avaiaolble utter dreck, depending on which mechanic you're talking to, I tend to ignore mechanics now. If they were all telling the truth, there would be NO decent examples of ANY car available ever. And that flies in the face of personal experience in owning over 120 cars of nearly every manufacturer myself, as well as knowledge of hundreds more various cars owned by family and friends.
Were they all perfect? No. But if they are still around and running and in this case, what appears to be decent condition, then they can't be utter dreck.
