Keith Tanner said:
The Germans call them "youngtimers". Cars that don't interest the classic car crowd, but are a few decades old and interesting.
Classic cars are like classic rock. The list was frozen about 30 years ago and hasn't changed yet, because the demographic that uses the term hasn't changed.
I really like this.
I think part of the problem is that what we generally hear described as classic cars are not in any way modern, and haven't been for a long time. Obviously these are guidelines, but my loose definition of a modern car is that it contains all of this:
- Air conditioning
- A crumple zone
- At least one airbag
- A spot to plug in a cell phone to charge (i.e. cigarette lighter)
- Will not leak (badly, anyways)
- Able to take a cross country trip with no planning aside from filling it up and maybe changing the oil
- Does not need me to do anything other than fill the gas tank during said cross country trip
- Fuel injected (see point above)
There are exceptions to this, of course, but in general that is my criteria. I think that generally anything from 1990 forwards fits this bill; you can even go back to some from the mid-late 70's for some of them (thinking Mercs and Volvo's).
In 1990, a 10 year old car was probably really old. And 100k miles? Time to get rid of it, that thing is on its last legs. Today I DD a car that is 19 years old with 290k miles, and if I didn't live in an emissions state I'd not have to do anything to it other than change the oil in the next 6 months. Another example: In 1990, when I was born, my dad owned a 1959 Austin Healey 100-6. That was a 31 year old car, a classic by any definition even in 1982 when he bought it. When he moved from St. Louis to Chicago in 1987, he broke down twice - and this was one in good nick too, he won numerous car shows with it. Today, it is 2020. My daughter was born earlier this year. I'm considering buying dads 1991 E30. About the only definition by which it wouldn't meet most folks' criteria of being modern is that it only has 1 airbag and no OBDII. We're driving it 300 miles at some point in the next month. Our only consideration is, should we change the oil before we go. Is it a classic? Well, probably, but only because of its age and cult following.
What is really interesting is that I think this is changing quickly. We had "classic cars" (vs. antique cars, which I'm arbitrarily calling pre-war) from probably 1946 through the 80's. Roughly 40 years. This wave, we had "modern safe" cars from the early 80's through the early 90's, when we got OBDii which took us to... well, today, but really the change started 10 years ago. Call it 1.5 generations right there, and in 30 years. Next? Electric. 10 years from now I'll be pretty surprised if the average car doesn't get 45 mpg. And self driving will take over from that pretty soon after.