Originally Posted by Spillage

The Dart has everything on BUS, including the horn... if the computer is busy doing “critical” engine stuff the horn gets pushed back in the queue of stuff to do, so if you jump on the button in an emergency to warn someone, you might be lucky to get a noise out of it 5seconds later... potentially way too late.

Originally Posted by Skeptic68W

Asinine...just asinine.

I feel bad for all the poor people who are going to end up with these modern cars as their daily drivers when they are 15, 20, 25 years old.

Originally Posted by Skeptic68W

Had an interesting experience today. Since I sold my charger I've been looking for a cheap backup vehicle. Went to a local used dealer and drove a couple GMT800 tahoes. One with the 5.3 and the other with the 6 liter. This is the first iteration of the LS engines. I actually had a Camaro with an LS in it about a decade ago, and that this was real quick. The 5.3 and the 6.0 though...honestly kinda gutless turds in my opinion. I got back in my Ram to leave the dealer and matted the throttle on the little side street where I had just done so in the 6.0 Tahoe and honestly the ol' 5.9 felt quite a bit stronger! That being said, my truck hsa 4.10 gears and is well maintained, while there tahoes I'm sure had economy gears and both were kinda rough...but still.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure that 6.0 would eat the 5.9 in an all out drag race, but the power is not immediately available. It's up in the top of the RPM band. The LS heads flow really well, and the intake/cam profiles must be biased a bit towards higher RPM power because the 6.0 barely even chirped the tires from a stop. They really act like opposite engines. The 5.9 has a lot of immediate torque, but runs out of breathe very quickly. The LS is soft downstairs, but really wakes up and starts to pull once the revs start climbing.

I still think the 5.7 vortecs feel stronger than the magnums, but today really did give me back a little bit of appreciation for the small block mopar.

Originally Posted by Skeptic68W

Man, I couldn't agree with you more on your rant there.

Here's how I see things.

I don't want to be like everyone else, living their lives on the treadmill of car payments. If you are married and both you and your wife drive relatively new cars, you could easily be spending $1000+ per month by the time you factor in insurance costs and all that. For the average person making a median income, that's absolutely stupid, and can significantly hurt your ability to achieve financial freedom, retire, or merely have choices. Maybe your wife wants to stay home and raise kids, and that thousand dollars a month is the difference between her being able to or not. I don't want my vehicles to have that kind of power over me. So I buy vehicles and keep them indefinitely, doing what is necessary to keep them not just roadworthy, but nice and enjoyable to use.

If you are not mechanically inclined...too bad. You're screwed anyway. Have fun on the treadmill.

However, if you are a halfway functional mechanic like us, that gives us a choice. I can either buy modern vehicles that I can't fix (or can't fix for long...imagine trying to get some of these esoteric electronics in 20 years), or I can assemble a fleet of older vehicles that I know I can maintain almost indefinitely. For me, this is clearly the better choice. The cars don't cost much on initial purchase because they are 20 years old, parts are cheap, they're easy to fix, and they are new enough to be reliable and reasonable safe (fuel injection, crumple zones, and airbags, etc). The idea of owning a fleet of modern vehicles makes me cringe. I see them as an utter liability if you live like me. Take radar guided cruise control for example. If you have F-U money and can buy a new or nearly new car every few years, you likely love this technology. It makes long freeway trips much more relaxing. However, radar cruise require crash mitigation, and do you really want to be driving around in a 20 or 30 year old vehicle that has the ability to panic brake itself? Everything electronic will eventually start acting up, and the last thing I need is to be cruising along at 80mph on the freeway and suddenly a sensor fails and locks the brakes up causing a major crash. I don't want my car to have that ability.

I had a 2014 Charger for about a year. It was throttle by wire, and that thing almost got my killed once. I was pulling out of an alley onto a busy road and the way the cars were parked you couldn't see traffic coming further than about 15-20 feet. So I start out into the intersection and as soon as I pass the parked car I see an SUV barreling down on my at probably ~50. So naturally I stand on the go pedal and the hemi leaps to life.......but then the ****ing stability control panics and shuts the throttle on me! Just shut it completely. Damn nannies (which aren't even defeatable). Anyway, fortunately it recovered and re-opened the throttle a moment later and I narrowly got out of the way of that SUV. Either way, I was pissed, and there is no way I am giving that much control to a computer again. Charger got sold (not just for this reason).

My plan going forward is this. Any time I need a new vehicle. I will drive down to Texas or Arizona or somewhere where rust isn't an issue and buy what I'm looking for down there. Late 90's to mid 2000's vintage American stuff will make up my entire fleet, with the exception of 1 classic Mopar project I'd like to do with the old man soon.