Modern cars have been around a long time – at least three decades, since the mid-late 1980s. This was the period when the first electronic fuel injection systems and ECUs (the computer that controls the fuel injection and other functions) were installed in mass-produced cars.
Cars built before the 1980s are not merely old, they are ancient.
Literally, but also in a deeper sense.
A car built in 1979 has more in common, design-wise and functionally, with a car made 70 years prior than a car made just five years later. The ’79 has no computer; it has a mechanical fuel-mixing device called a carburetor – which the first Model T Ford (1908) also had. The car did not self-adjust anything. You – or your mechanic – adjusted everything.
This has its upsides as well as its downsides.
Among the upsides:
* Most major components are mechanical. Kind of like a mousetrap in that you can see how they work (or not) and – if they’re not working – you can take them apart, repair them and put them back together. If done right, which isn’t difficult, they are now good as new. And this can be done many times, over many decades. Usually, with inexpensive hand tools and some patience. It’s a big contrast vs. modern cars, which have numerous non-repairable electrical parts whose workings can’t be directly seen and which you usually just throw away if questionable and replace with a new part.
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* Problems are easier to diagnose – because there are fewer potential things that might be wrong. The ancient car’s entire fuel delivery system, for example, consists of the carburetor and fuel pump. If there’s something not right with the fuel part of the equation for internal combustion to happen (the other two elements being spark and air) and you’ve checked out the carb and fuel pump, you know your problem lies elsewhere.
This simplifies things.
With a modern car, you have the fuel injection system and the computer that runs it and the multiple sensors and associated/extensive wiring (and connections) the computer depends on to run it, plus downstream parts such as oxygen sensors in the exhaust system, all of these parts being inter-related. More potential diagnostic issues to deal with.
This complicates things.
