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fyi- the mid 80's mid and full size GM cars with fwd and 3.8 v6's were rock solid and most went well over 200k with no issues
No they weren't. Those cars were crapola. The cars fell apart before they got half that many miles. you are talking about the Celebrity, Century and Cutlass. They were junk.
I've also heard that big 70s Fords were well-built but difficult to work on with all the smog controls. A lot of them had power everything waiting to go bad, though. Here in SE MI there are still a lot of 77-90 RWD GMs. The full sizes were sturdy for the most part but I've read there were bad years for the mid sizes (Consumer Guide said '81 V6s were terrible).
It's interesting hearing about the anecdotal experience that some of you have had with a few cars ...
But my first little two-man auto shop in the 60's and 70's worked on one heck of a lot more cars than any of you ever owned. I dealt with hundreds of cars and owners, not just a dozen cars ....
When I look at the old records/client lists of the needed repairs that we performed on a daily basis for years in the 1960's-1970's ... I know that the cars were neither durable or reliable. And we were just a small shop with a modest clientele; I think of my many competitors who were running 8-10-15 techs in much larger operations, and keeping them very busy providing the same services that we were doing. The automotive machine shop I used for years to do our cylinder heads was a 10 man shop and typically had a 3-4 day turn around time because they were so busy, and all they did was the bench work. I later bought my own Sunnen equipment to do heads because it paid for itself and I could control the turn-around time in my own shop .... my partner could book a couple of valve jobs per week. We had a Sun distributor test machine, too ... which paid for itself ... because the components of the distributors (bushings, advance mechanisms, cams ...) could and would wear out to a point where replacement distributors were a part of some tune-ups. I'm sure that a lot of you folks never tested nor knew that these were worn out in your cars, causing a loss of performance and efficiency ... I first saw these issues on fleet vehicles with my Sun Scope, and could tell that the distributors were worn pretty badly. The dedicated test stand could help us repair and adjust these units on the bench .... My partner also did a lot of carb kit overhauls ... one, two, and four barrel carbs. His claim to fame was being able to do a 2-bbl Ford carb in an hour or so total time, not including the soaking time in the carb cleaner. He did a lot of Quadra-Jet and Holley carb overhauls, too ....
We used to have two rack jobbers that would call on our shop every week. They kept our tune-up parts cabinets stocked with points, plugs, rotors, caps, condensors, ignition coils, ign wire sets, and about 100' of belt merchandiser racks, along with wiper blade inventory, oil/air/fuel filters. We bought oil and anti-freeze by the drum and dispensed that with those old quart and gallon bottom draining cans ... again, keep in mind that we were a little two-man shop operation, but our routine sales volume was enough to keep this much stuff in stock and the inventory turned every week. Considering that my partner did most of our domestic car work while I concentrated on Euro cars ... that was a substantial sales volume for us in domestic cars needing those tune-up parts because I bought the Euro tune-up items strictly on an "as needed" basis from our suppliers.
Another perspective ... my business partner was an off-road enthusiast. He had quite a clientele built up in Ford Bronco's and IHC Scouts. I watched him cut away the rusty wheel wells and install many sets of the large wheel trim packages on these vehicles ... and they were rarely more than a couple of years old and that was in our dry Colorado climate.
From a personal standpoint, I owned a 1964 Ford Custom 500, one of a pair bought new by my folks when my Mom was an office manager for a carpet company in San Diego and she was buying their fleet vehicles every two years. There was a reason why they bought a new fleet of sales and service vehicles every two years ... at typically 40-50,000 miles, that was the economic service life of the fleet and it was less expensive to buy new than to put repairs in to the vehicles with unexpected downtime and related repair costs (they bought everything on a BID basis, so some years were Chevy's, some years ... Fords, I recall one year they bought Corvairs and the van version of those and had nothing but troubles as a fleet, sold those off the next year and got full size Chevy vans and a couple of Cadillacs). Anyway, my 289 powered 1964 needed a valve job ... burned out an exhaust valve ... at just over 50,000 miles in 1967 ... inconveniently for me, while on a trip to the West Coast from Boulder ... the car had started to run rough on my leg from Tuscon to San Diego. In 1968, with just a few more miles, the auto trans started flaring on the 1-2 shift and that required a full overhaul, too. Judging from the volume of business that was in the door of the trans shop in Denver when I had the trans work done, they weren't hurting for a steady supply of work to keep their 12 man shop busy full time ... and that was working mostly on cars of the 1960's. At that point in time, the value of most cars from the 1950's had dropped so low that they weren't justified doing several hundred dollar trans overhauls to keep those cars on the road when the tranny's failed. Overall, as a market segment ... the cars of the late 1940's and then the 1950's disappeared off the roads pretty quickly by the mid 1960's, all headed to the boneyards and most crushed because they had more value as scrap steel than as donor cars. A few popular model cars stayed around a little bit longer ... some finned Cadillacs, some Buicks (don't know why, but the porthole fender trim made them desirable), some woody wagons, and the 1957 Chevy's (styling?). But many cars simply were taken off the road ... Dodges, Chryslers, DeSoto's, Ramblers, Chevy's, Pontiacs, Fords, Lincolns, and a host of others simply not worth the time/trouble/expense to keep on the road any longer ... especially in light of the improved performance, handling/braking, and convenience items of the newer cars of the 1960's era.
FWIW, I've driven (and worked on) enough bespoke cars of the 30's-40's-50's to know what they were all about. Despite high quality materials and the best engineering of their era, they still drove like old tanks compared to everyday cars of the 1960's. They may have been works of art in many aspects, but reliable/durable ... they were not.
I'd also mention that I saw a lot of domestic crap cars through the 1970's-1980's. A glimpse taken at the high end of price points of domestic cars from that era ... let's look at Cadillac V-8's, for example. How many of those had serious motor problems, if not running issues? Even for the ones without fancy gimmicks for fuel economy in cruise, I've had many where the combustion chambers were carboned up because the fuel systems (and ignition systems, for that matter) didn't deliver fuel efficiently ... can't tell you how many times I was at used car dealers and they asked me to look at those big motors that had serious knocking sounds. I used to take the cars out back where they couldn't see/hear what was going on ... and pour water through the intake manifold at a high idle. "Steam cleaned" the piston tops and the heads that way ... it was the most god-awful racket and noise, with the fear that I might be doing serious damage to the motor as it belched huge clouds of crap out the exhaust. With a little more run time after that, they all settled in to normal running sounds without the clanking and banging fo the carbon'ed pistons hitting the cylinder heads. I know those dealers stole those cars from the owners who thought that the motors in their cars were done .... You gotta' put this in perspective, I was an import repair shop specializing in MB and BMW's by then, and yet I saw a lot of these problem domestic cars in my travels to take care of my client dealerships. I have no doubt I would have seen many more of these types of problems with domestic cars if I'd been working on them for my regular trade vehicles. IF you look at the more common, lower and middle price point domestic cars of that era ... few were anything to get excited about, and most were off the road pretty quickly due to maintenance and durability issues ... and that doesn't include such stellar examples of automotive quality such as Corvairs or cars of that level, or some of the Chevy lower end models. How about Ford Falcons? seen any of these on the road lately? or the Plymouth's and Dodge lower end lines? pretty much forgettable cars, weren't they? and I think that many of the posters on this forum have forgotten them .... to cherry pick one or two of their favorites which were unusual examples of their types. Yes, I've seen an odd one or two of various cars that have survived reasonably well ... but they are very much the exception to the norm, not the norm ... otherwise, we'd be seeing so many more of those cars still on the road as they'd be worth driving, and they're not. "K" cars? all those lower end GM vehicles that were simply different trim lines under different badges? same for the lower and mid end Ford/Mercury/Lincoln models? pretty much all off the road today, aren't they? Watching a B-J auction ... the relatively common models aren't there, it's the limited production models, mostly the high-power stuff of domestic production that still has any value ... and those cars don't look like daily drivers to me anymore unless somebody has a lot of dough to burn. My Dad's Packards of the late 1940's-early 1950's? nowhere to be seen, except for a rare later Carib ... and noteworthy only because it's a survivor, not because it was a great car.
My 1970 Cadillac Coupe De Ville had about 200k on it when it was wrecked by my nephew and I don't think it ever had a repair other than oil lube and tires. I ca't recall it being tuned up int he last 100k miles. And, it saved my nephew's life. the other car didn't do so well. Two drunks down 50 million to go. And, it ran like a scalded dog. And you could get totally horizontal in the back seat.
Cars today are clearly better, but in all my years I only had one bad American car (1986 Escort wagon). The 70's big cars (74 AND 77 LTD's and a 70 Ford XL) and my 82 Club Wagon with a 460 were the best. Never, ever needed a ring job, or a rebuild, or any major repairs on any of the American cars I have owned. The 86 Escort took some extra TLC to keep it going until 1997, but none of the work needed was major. My mother's 91 Taurus did need some major work a time or two, so I'd say American quality was down mid 80's to mid 90's.
Cars from the 1920s were driven from Oklahoma's dust bowl to California, loaded down with the whole family and all its belongings, coaxed along by a driver with a set of crescent wrenches, a pry bar and a hammer.
When the first imported cars began showing up in the 50s, VWs and Volvos seemed to be very reliable, but Renaults and Austins were POS, compared to the American makes of the day. An odometer of 50K was considered very high mileage for American cars, and I knew very few people who ever watched one reach all zeroes again.
Historicaly, British cars were terrible. British drivers considered a car to be a toy, to take the family on picnics on the weekend, requiring a valve job every Monday as routine maintenance. A 5-digit odometer on a British car was hopelessly ambitious, and as far as I know, still is.
My dad's 1938 Pontiac lasted until the 50's, but as far as I know, still had the original tires on it.
I suppose the short answer is that American cars today are a great deal more reliable then they were in the distant past, but so are all other cars. American cars somewhere in the middle, with a few foreign names significantly better, but quite a few Yugos and Anadols and Vauxhalls trailing far behind.
It's interesting hearing about the anecdotal experience that some of you have had with a few cars ...
But my first little two-man auto shop in the 60's and 70's worked on one heck of a lot more cars than any of you ever owned. I dealt with hundreds of cars and owners, not just a dozen cars ....
Ah, the voice of experience.
I started to post something similar to those lines after reading your first post.
Sunspirit, it's interesting how the '60s cars many people owned contradict your claims. And I don't mean just a dozen. Family members, friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, etc.
It's also interesting that your claims of Cadillacs contradict those who own them. As for the carbon build-up, many times that is the fault of the owner (many short trips in which the engine isn't allowed to fully warm up). Many owners of Cadillacs were housewives who drove them one mile to the supermarket and back and rarely or never drove their car on the freeway to allow the engine to fully warm up and prevent carbon build-up. Some of them also drove slow, like never going over 40 mph.
Okay, your 289 needed a valve job at just over 50,000 miles... do you realize how many 289 engines ran for 100,000 to 200,000 without requiring a valve job? Many. Even today, I still see cars at car shows with the original, unrebuilt engine. Like a '70 Dodge Charger with a 383 and A/C. A sign on the engine compartment said "400,000+ miles, engine not rebuilt." And a '68 Chrysler 300... again, over 400,000 miles with the original engine.
And about the Falcon, if you mean '60s and '70s Falcons, you do realize those cars are now 35-45+ years old? Do you really expect to see a lot of cars that age on the street? How many 1920s cars were driving around in the '50s? Very, very few.
Incidentally, my '66 Plymouth Fury VIP (383) is 45 years old this year... original engine and transmission and still has plenty of power. And believe me, there are many more examples like that out there.
BTW, my dad also owned a shop in the '50s and into the '60s and he also dealt with hundreds of cars and owners.
When the first imported cars began showing up in the 50s, VWs and Volvos seemed to be very reliable, but Renaults and Austins were POS, compared to the American makes of the day. An odometer of 50K was considered very high mileage for American cars, and I knew very few people who ever watched one reach all zeroes again.
When I got my '66 Dodge Dart GT in 1979, it had already reach all zeros again... it had 109,000 miles. I could not afford a new car so I had no choice but to buy a used one. But that was okay, since I knew it still had a lot of life left in it. I ran it up to 170,000 miles with the original engine. Rebuilt at that mileage (in 1990) only because it was burning oil. It eventually reached 235,000 miles; I was not driving by then, my brother and dad was. Another driver crashed into the side and the insurance would not pay to repair it (it already paid once before when it was rear-ended when parked). I think 170,000 miles and 24 years with the original engine is excellent service and you really can't ask for much more than that.
My brother's '66 Plymouth Fury III also had 109,000 miles on it when obtained. And was at about 170,000 miles when the engine was rebuilt for the same reason (burning oil).
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My dad's 1938 Pontiac lasted until the 50's, but as far as I know, still had the original tires on it.
Wow, that is amazing that the tires lasted that long. They probably didn't have too many miles on them (?).
The GM 3800 motors were indestructable. I had an '89 Bonneville that had 240,000 miles on it when I finally sold it. My current '94 Olds 88 is approaching 300,000. I do all my own repairs though. I have had some problems, but nothing out of the ordinary that every manufacturer on earth hasn't had to deal with at some point.
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