Old cars and safety

 A couple of weeks ago, a man named Robert Pease was killed driving his 1969 VW Beetle. He was on his way home from the funeral of a friend and colleague of his, and he went off the road at a tight corner and was killed.

The irony is that Pease had written a book on safe driving and was famous within his circle of analog electronics design professionals for, among other things, his loyalty to the old Volkswagen in which he was finally killed.

 From Wikipedia:

Death

Pease was killed in the crash of his 1969 Volkswagen Beetle, on 18 June 2011. He was leaving a gathering in memory of Jim Williams, who was another well-known analog circuit designer, a technical author, and a renowned staff engineer working at Linear Technology. Pease was 70 years old, and was survived by his wife, two sons, and three grand-children.

The sudden passing of Bob Pease triggered a small flood of remembrances and tributes from fellow technical writers, practicing engineers, and electronics hardware hacking enthusiasts.

Were the old cars that great or that bad?

 I like old cars. I like fixing up old cars, driving them, the looks you get, and if you are at all a do-it yourselfer the economics of driving them. That said I don't own one right now. I drive a mid-2000s American fullsize car which I just paid off the loan on.

 I don't have a good place to store or work on old cars right now. I work a fair number of hours and I have other priorities, and I am content with the late model (to me) car I drive. Aside from routine maintenance I am at the mercy of car mechanics, which I am not happy with, but since the new cars don't  need that much work I can live with it.

 Some people think everything was way better in the old days. Some aspects of the old cars were definitely better, but in a lot of ways, the new ones have them beat all to hell. The new cars, when they break, are tougher to fix physically, and usually it's a matter of parts replacement. Very little fitting and setup are needed, and if you can't get THE part, you are in big trouble.

 The mechanics of Cuba famously keep the 1950s cars running there. There is no way they could do that with the modern ones. But the Cubans don't drive a lot, because they can't get much gas, and the cars are full of what we used to hear my dad call Negro League engineering. If you had to pay American labor rates to have that done not only would it be cheaper to buy a new Ferrari, but the car would not be satisfactory to any decent car person. A friend of mine, a German, was in Cuba years ago and he told me how they manage to keep old Chevies running with Lada carburetors and diesel truck valves and fuel lines from crashed MiGs. I hate to think what they do now that the Russians are gone.

 What most people do not realize is that a very substantial part of the cost of new cars is regulatory compliance. The new emissions standards are unbelievably tough and meeting them costs a LOT of money. Same with the air bags and ABS and TPS and whatnot everyone HAS to have by federal law..

 You can buy a new car in some foreign countries for half of the US price. It has no compliance costs for emissions or safety because those markets don't have any such rules.

Unquestionably, this can be taken to extremes, such as the Eastern European markets where 70s Fiats are still in production with untempered, unlaminated glass and so forth. But the safety and environmental law changes we have had since the 80s have only a marginal effect on safety at probably a 30% cost increase to the overall car.

 Another unintended consequence of making everyone have ABS and air bags and the rest of the crap we have to have is that now everyone drives as though they are invincibly protected, that is to say, like a jackass. In the old cars you KNEW you could get hurt and badly, and most people drove more sanely.

Google makes it hard to find this blog

 I tried searching for ten minutes on Google and could not find this blog. I wonder if it is a case of selective representation of Politically Incorrect bloggers or just the time factor involved.

 The phrase that pays is "Sqiled Tarreganot".

The last real American car

 Earlier I mentioned my high opinion of the Ford Crown Vic and Lincoln Mercury Gran marquis and Town Car. These were what is called the "Panther platform" and in my opinion, in their final form,  probably the best cars ever made in the United States for their intended purpose, safe reliable long lived transportation.

 One reason Ford made these so well is the position the Town Car occupied in New York life. Cabs in New York are artificially scarce due to their medallion law, so "town car services" are heavily used by affluent Manhattanites and in particular  the Wall Street crowd. The Lincoln Town Car is in fact the only vehicle used, and its performance directly affects what Wall Street thinks of the Ford Motor Company. They therefore put a maximum effort in making these cars as reliable as is feasible.

Are the last ones better than certain earlier models? Overall, I'd say yes. I think that given regular maintenance, the Modular engine is every bit as reliable as the pushrod 5 liter and 351, although those engines are cheaper to rebuild certainly. The later electronic engine control systems, once a liability on Ford products, are now good enough that the road race crowd is adapting Ford EDIS electronic ignition to a lot of other engines, and the mileage and driveability are at an all time high. Of course, the great 9 inch rear end is history, but the current one isn't a bad one, and the E4OD transmission is proving a really good one as well.

 The line was discontinued for two reasons: creeping federal standards and the perception, as Liza said, that they are old man cars. Do the federal standards for CAFE make a damn bit of sense? No. Of course not.

 Liza's first big wreck, which shattered her pelvis and upper leg and cost her major gynecological and bowel surgery, resulted in a mid-six-figure hospital bill. I believe that if she had been driving a Crown Vic, she would not have been nearly as badly injured. How much in a lifetime of driving 40 mpg econoboxes will someone save over driving a 20-22 mpg full size car? Not enough to pay that hospital bill, I'd bet.

 Would she be alive today if she had been driving the Grand Marq this weekend? I don't know, but she would have had a better chance certainly. What price that?

 Little cars are cute and easy to park. I drive a full size car both for my own safety and to make a statement. I am not driving a S-box because some liberal or mulatto communist president who flies on a customized 747 everywhere he goes and is then driven around in a 14,000 pound armored car thinks it would be a good idea. 

Decisions have consequences for trendy women (and all others).

 I learned yesterday that a female friend, whom I'll call Liza, was killed over the weekend in a car crash  in Ohio. Apparently she was driving a little tiny car on an offramp from I-77 and got into a head on collision with a pickup truck. Apparently she was not drunk and there is no evidence the other driver was either AFAIK. The pickup driver was only moderately injured and appears to be a white man who has no history of this sort of thing.

What is relevant is that Liza DID have a history of car crashes. She was never drunk or on substances as far as I know.  She was just not someone who took driving safety all that serious, even after one good wreck-also in a tiny car-put in a hospital for a month and destroyed her pelvis so badly they took out her uterus and a foot of bowel.


Liza was a girl I met when working at a poo-poo butt call center job several years ago. She and I hit it off as friends but there never was any romance involved. I was somewhat physically attracted to her , but her history of divorces made me wary, and I never pushed the relationship in that direction. She was by her own admission "a flawed girl" (we were both in our early forties then, she was a little older) but she was intelligent enough, she was clean and neat, and she was Politically Incorrect in an impish way. She told me that she'd been fairly promiscuous once but never, never with blacks, "spicanos", or other nonwhites. She told me how revolted she was to see white women with mulatto children in the hospital or doctors' offices.


What was interesting is that she was way overqualified for the job we were doing. She had a masters' degree in a health care field and was qualified in a couple of below-doctor-level health care billets and could have been making a lot more money, in field. She said she couldn't take the stress and was doing something easier for a while. I was serious enough that I paid ten bucks to the state to verify her qualifications as genuine, that her claims were not a figment of her imagination. I even called a doctor she mentioned she'd worked for for "an employment reference". He had nothing but the highest recommendation for her professionally and said he'd like to have her back.

 She had gone broke-not bankrupt, broke-and was digging her way out by working the call center job and doing an eBay business on her time off. I really liked Liza as a person despite her failings in the driving as well as marriage and sexual behavior departments. She had issues physically stemming from a bad car crash which cropped up from time to time.

 After about a year on the job, she told me she needed to buy another car. She showed me an ad for a Ford/L-M dealer and was looking at the smallest car they had. I noticed that they had brand new Mercury Grand Marquises-V-6 strippers but with automatic and air-for what even then was an unbelievably low price, just slightly over the econobox. I pointed out that the Gran Marq was probably, along with the Ford Crown Vic and the Town Car the best car Ford made and maybe the best made by any domestic manufacturer, and also a lot safer than the little s___box she wanted.

 She looked at me as though I had suggested she jump into a cesspool. "That's a damn old man car!"
I pointed out that the cops drove nothing but Ford Crown Vics, essentially the identical car. She was having nothing to do with the old man car and that was that. She bought the little S-box and that was that. The fact that she had nearly died in one of those six or seven years ago just didn't register at all.

 Apparently, she had a wreck in that particular car a year later and it was insurance totalled, and the car she was killed in was the insurance replacement for that wrecked one. She apparently wasn't hurt badly in that crash.

 A little after that, I happened to meet her older sister-they were almost identical in appearance-and she told me Liza had had at least three other wrecks starting with the mint green '66 Mustang their dad fixed up for her as a high school graduation present. Everyone in the family assumed she would be killed in a car wreck someday, she said.

 As she wanted, there was no funeral and she was cremated today. The family is going to scatter her ashes and her belongings will be given to charity, except each family member will keep one item if they so desire. I got a call from her sister yesterday and she offered to let me have something if i wanted it. I asked her to send me the little ceramic Kermit the Frog pencil holder she had on her desk at work if she came across it.

Robert Frenz and free speech. Interesting free speech.

 I really enjoy reading the comments of Robert Frenz and others, particularly "Maguire", even though he's been dead maybe ten years now. He offered an interesting perspective on a great number of the things that interest me and his experiences were somewhat like mine, save that Frenx was on a higher level than mine. Frenz was a college professor level math and chemistry man and although I have a college degree, it's in trivial stuff.

 I hope to relate some of my experiences and perhaps expand on some thoings the words of Frenz have to tell us now that he's gone.