It is not a joke.
Modern cars are junk.
20, 30, 40 miles to the gallon? Great. Good luck surviving an accident, wrapped in plastic and pot metal.
Try no car payments for 30 years. Less than $200 maintenance annually (generous average).
Insurance of less than $100 every 6 months.
The ignition has been just fine for 200,000 miles. No way am I going to change that.
In fact, I knew a guy that had two, a '68 and a '69, and he changed one to electronic and said he wished he never had done so.
Every modern car I see can have over $1000 damage from a shopping cart in a parking lot.
The only unreliable part on the vehicle is the hydraulic part of the brakes. The whole rig has been replaced multipke times, and has failed once again.
The e-brake still works great after 50 years and almost no adjustments.
Common sense should be that the system that has functioned trouble free for 50 years is definitely much more safe and sane than trying to repair a setup that has failed catastrophically multiple times in less than 30.
I dont know about you, but I would much rather have a cable brake that actuates all four wheels, or even air brakes, than a problematic, difficult, failure without warning, hydraulic system that hardly functions at all, and sometimes not at all.
Perhaps, like in most things, Ford screwed up. I had a Ford once. (1963 Galaxie 500 XL convertible) It was a vehicular Vietnam. It was an unwinnable battle to keep it on the road, unless it was on the back of a truck. Ford has definitely earned all the names that the letters in the moniker stand for.
GM screwed up too.
They kept making the cars we all made fun of, and ditched the ones that were actually worth having.
As for ‘just take it to the shop’, well, that is why I work on it myself. Every time I go to ‘the shop’ I wind up paying for nothing, as the issue never gets fixed, and ehstever work that does get done I must redo myself for it to be done right.
It actually started with this very car, back when the carburetor was giving me a fit. I took it in, and the guy there said that it needed a new carb and that it would be two weeks and $400.
I told him to stop work. Not knowing anything more than the fact that a better carb than stock could be had for half that and be delivered overnight, I went and got my car back.
I learned how to rebuild a two bbl carburetor, and the same carb that ‘needs to be replaced’ is still on the vehicle 25+ years later.
So, I am hoping to find a fail safe braking system of some sort, because even if the hydraulic junk can be repaired, I will never trust it again. It took almost a year for the nightmares to stop the last time they quit working. Whoever thought of hydraulic brakes needs to be forced to drive a car with failing hydraulic brakes down a very steep incline, while someone with working cable brakes taunts them.
