Modern VS Classic
17th August 2009
I haven’t updated this site for a while. I apologise profusely for any avid reader (if this site has any? Maybe? Maybe not…) for the lack of updates.
As I mentioned in my previous blog, I bought a new (ish) car. A very rare 1987 Mazda RX-7 FC. It’s quite fast and handles brilliantly. Being an older car, the handling has a lot of feel. There’s no traction control or any electronic moderation from the ECU. The car does what you tell it to do, end of story. And being rear wheel drive, lightweight, low slung and with a fair amount of power, you can ask quite a lot from it and it’ll happily respond.
However, as with all classic sports cars, there are one or two issues. Firstly, it’s 22 years old. It’s more than capable of delivering the goods it has always been capable of, but at the cost of some TLC and maintenance. Something will break every now and then. It drinks quite a lot of oil. You have to keep it in top condition, else it’s age will catch up with it. A bit like humans really. You can either age like Mr Miyagi or Hulk Hogan, or you can age by going senile and unable to move without a zimmer frame.
The second problem is the lack of creature comforts, and this is where my blog’s topic comes in. Modern VS Classic. Modern sports cars have had to respond to ever-increasing consumer demands. In the past if a car had full leather interior, or a CD player, it was something special. Now we want those as standard, and will happily pay extra for things like Climate Control, a premium sound system with a 6 disk CD changer, Sat Nav, Cruise Control, automatic headlights, automatic wipers, and even heated sports seats for the winter. Porsche’s 911 sports car for example went from having sports car essentials only to becoming something of a Gin Palace. In fact, modern day Porsche has a reputation for quality built mostly by all the things their cars come with these days, more so than for their exceptional performance.
My car on the other hand is a typical 1980’s sports car. The seats are somewhere between cloth and suede. There’s no air con, let alone climate control. There’s not even power steering. It does have a CD player and sat nav, but only because the previous owner and I had them installed as aftermarket premium products. As a result this car ONLY does fast.
However, both generations are a compromise. My car will hit 60mph in 6 seconds (albeit thanks to some minor enhancements). That’s quick by today’s standards, let alone for the 1980’s. In fact in the 70’s that was what you’d expect from cars like the Lamborghini Miura, and today any car faster than that is considered to be a high performance car. Even some powerful Mercs fail to reach that. And it’s all because of weight. In the 1980’s 200bhp was quite a lot of power. You had a fast car if you had 200bhp. Nowadays you’ll see that in a decent car like a BMW. In fact there are Mercs that have more power than that but are slower cars than my RX-7 thanks to being built like a portable lounge.
So which is best? Well if it’s performance you want, buy classic. Even the mid-range cars back then (Porsche 944, Mazda RX-7, Nissan 300zx etc) are fast cars, let alone if you pick up an old 911, BMW M5, Jaguar XJS etc. However the best all-rounders are the new ones. New technology means that cars are better off with the same amount of power. They have better fuel economy for starters. You usually get six gears instead of a maximum of five. You get more luxuries as standard. But as for performance, you either have the same as a 1980’s sports car, or you pay a lot more money for something a bit quicker.
And when you consider you can get a good 1980’s sports car for no more than a few grand these days, it really is swings and roundabouts.
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