The Future of the Old Car Hobby?

[Ron Horowitz <RonHorowitz@domain.elided>]

OK, I just gotta get this off my chest.

I've seen a number of posts re a scarey look into the future, custom chip
electronics, the old car restoration hobby, etc.

Seems to me, there has to be "enough" in terms of cars, interest,
knowledge, money, and vendors, or the critical mass goes away. Think of
layers or tiers or strata of cars. There are enough old Mustangs,
Corvettes, and Volkswagens around, they are simple enough, and there's
enough interest (i.e., dollars) to support restorations, vendors of
specialty parts, manuals, etc., at least in the present tense. On probably
a smaller scale, ditto the British sports cars like Healey's, MGB's, &
Jaguars. On an even smaller scale, people are interested in two-liter Alfa
spiders. By the time you get to things like 2600's, there's a tiny number
of cars, projects, & people to amortise the cost of supporting the things,
and the technical difficulty of restoration is higher. The question may
only be which of the old cars will survive, and which won't. The more
common and simpler (therefore cheaper,) and the more desirable, the more
likely to survive. Rarity, complexity, and the lack of swoopy fenders are
probably the death knells.

Car-wise, the body of skilled labor is probably shrinking. In the 50's and
60's, you could still find machinists and the like trained at government
expense to fight WWII, especially in places like Southern California. I
understand a number of the famous body guys of the 50's and 60's were
employed forming body panels for WWII aircraft, and German ex-aircraft
machinsts filled the ranks at organizations like Porsche. On the other
hand, I'm told that today, a young machinist is considered a hot shot if he
can fixture a part and find zero. Likewise, from what I've seen, 98% of the
guys doing crash repairs these days don't know which end of a body hammer
you're supposed to hold onto, or even how to paint.

How many times I've heard guys in their 50's say "we're the last generation
that knows how to do this kind of work" I couldn't say. It's my experience,
though, that the body of machinists who know how to turn cranks instead of
punching numbers and of body guys who swing hammers instead of bolting on
new panels and slathering everything with gallons of Bondo has shrunk to a
trickle.

Likewise, it's not even possible to use the old techniques on some of the
new car components. The new "high strength steel" body panels can't be
worked in the traditional way. Once they get crumpled, you unbolt the old
panels and throw them away. Likewise, from what I gather, leaking plastic
radiators are typically considered non-repairable. As far as I know, Robert
Bosch never released the prints to the old ANALOG computer of the
L-Jetronic, and that was a pretty generic system. As stated elsewhere,
repairing one of the model specific (and maybe even VIN specific?) new
computers is virtually impossible. You could argue the specifics, but the
meta-message is the same.

Think about the new cars. They are getting absurdly complex, the code and
hardware are getting increasingly difficult to crack and hack, and cars are
becoming increasingly restricted by government legislation. Generally, IT'S
AGAINST THE LAW to fit a non-standard fuel injection ECU to a car here in
California, since it's considered a "smog part." Generic type engine
management systems may be available such that you can "roll your own" for
racing, but Big Brother and The Corporate Powers That Be are watching. You
aren't going to be able to "get away" with fitting so much as non-approved
fuzzy dice to the new cars for much longer. (I've been told this is
substantially so in Germany already?)

Imagine how much it costs to restore something like an Alfa 2000 Touring,
i.e., more than the car's worth. Multiply that by two or three, and
_nobody's_ going to be interested in restoring a 2002 Honda 2000 in 2042.

I see a number of trends. As the cost of new cars continues to increase,
the cost and difficulty of repairing used cars continues to increase, and
as the level of government inspection and restriction continues to
increase, so also will the cost of car ownership. Unless there are changes
in these general trends, I suspect we'll reach a point where only the
privelidged and wealthy will be able to afford to drive cars at all, and
some form of public transportation will be supported for the underclasses.

What this implies to all men being created equal, equality of personal
freedoms, the right to freedom of movement, freedom of association,
government "anti-terrorism" and the like, and whether this is a net good or
a net bad is another subject for another day, but I suspect it's all
converging. It's my guess that old car restoration as we've known it will
slowly, quietly fade away with most of the sub-million dollar cars either
being crushed or being placed on static or semi-static display. Likewise,
the car hobby will morph into something new and different, like the guys
hanging all those really ugly fiberglass body kits and wings onto late
model Honda's (a trend I can't really comprehend, but I'm getting older,
and these are kids.)

Your opinions?

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