When we traded in our 58 Chevy for a 61 at the Chev/Buick dealer, the car ended up on the used car lot with 26,000 miles on it. It started out well north of 60,000. All they did was paint the hood that had the normal 58 Chevy sand blasting.
I don’t know if my Lincoln would have been anymore expensive to work on than a Ford, I never paid anyone for the work. I do know the parts that were not Ford parts were very expensive. I priced a new tail light lens at a Lincoln dealer and they wanted $80 for it. A Ford or Chevy would probably have been around $20. I think they must have used special plastic.
I had an uncle who started buying a new Cadillac every year beginning in 1960 when he switched from Buick. The Cadillacs of the 60’s kept their value so well that it only cost him a few hundred bucks to make the trade. The cars themselves were virtually trouble free.
I grew up in Minneapolis. During the 60s the majority of the used cars had their odometers rolled back to zero. Often came with a 30 day ‘warranty’ that was practically useless.
Yup!
Just more evidence that The Good Old Days weren’t necessarily good. Luckily, we now have regulations that prohibit odometer rollbacks. Not that it doesn’t happen anymore, but offenders are given pretty severe penalties when they are caught.
I really don’t know anymore what the law is in Minnesota but when you sell a car, you don’t have to
report the actual mileage on the title, just check the box that says that the mileage is not accurate. I think you can roll them back to zero as a “repair” of the odometer, or replace it or the chip, and as long as you don’t check the box as accurate mileage, can’t be held liable.
Just for interest, my Rivieras had an extra digit so unless you rolled up to 1 million miles, it would still reflect the actual miles. It would have been fun to see what would happen at 1 million, if it would turn over to zeros or just go nuts. Closest I came was when it turned over to 500,000.0 one night. I stopped the car and took a pic of the dash. Unfortunately it was on my old flip phone and even the IT guy at work couldn’t get it out. It really looked neat. Nothing like it on my current phone except when I hit jackpots. Triple-triple-triple, ding ding ding, call attendant. Been a year for that too.
The Toyota Corolla and Matrix odometers from the early 2000’s would stop at 299,999 miles or km.
Not such a problem for the US cars, but there are a lot of complaints and confusion from Canadian owners.
Reaching 299,999 km (~one light second) is not such a rarity.
How would that help in really cold and wet weather when you are trying to warm up the inside of a vehicle and have a bunch of kids getting on with snowy boots and the windows are steaming up so you need to run the heat to the defroster vents on high speed?
The cabin filter would have been $25 or so, the labor to replace it $91.20. I imagine she bought the filter for $10 online, so she saved $15 or so by bringing one in herself instead of buying it from us.
As far as the $91 labor, we just work on the cars, we don’t build them. Personally, I find it poor design to build a car that requires removing part of the console trim, peeling back the carpet, and removing the gas pedal assembly in order to replace the cabin filter.
But then again if fixing cars was simple and easy I wouldn’t have a job.
I started buying Studebakers and then Plymouths because they were so much cheaper used than Fords and Chevies back in the day, I then discovered that I liked them better too so it was a win/win for me. When I bought my 56 Desoto in 1962 it was about 1/2 the price of a 56 Ford or Chevy and it was a magnificent car. Once you found your way around Studebaker or Chrysler products I thought they were easier to work on because of better engineering.
For example, My 56 Studebaker Commander had the fuel pump diaphragm rupture on the way to a picnic with my family in the car. I was able to pull into a Western Auto and but a fuel pump repair kit ( a diaphragm and spring)
With only a screwdriver right on the car, all I had to do was unscrew the top of the pump.
When the alternator quit working on my 66 Valiant all it took was a Phillips head screwdriver and 5 minutes to replace the two 25 cent brushes, again, right on the car. On that same slant six you could change the starter with a box wrench because it was right out in the open on top of the engine.
I also liked the Chrysler emergency brake on the driveshaft , it made rear brake jobs much easier.
Our mechanic would do an oil change on a Lexus among other services, We wouldn’t do the 70mi round trip to the Tacoma dealer if we could get the same service done at our trusted shop.; Or if we did own a Mercedes or Bmw there’s a couple specialists locally that have solid reputations with loyal customers. My brother won’t look at a car if his favorite shop won’t work on it. Even with a dealer in the same town.
I did not know the year when I drove it, we had 6 suburbans in the fleet and only one of them had that system. I hated all of them. The roof was so low and the floor so high that my knees were up in the air, and I was sitting on my tailbone.None had power or even manually raise-able seats and even if they did, I would not have been able to look out the wiper arc.
Every one of them had ABS failure issues that would prevent you from stopping at low speed on a dry road. None got a repair that lasted more than 6 months. We also had some Impalas in the fleet and they used them to demonstrate how the ABS worked at the start of the school year and they would have to make 3 or 4 hard stops to get the ABS working right. They would mumble something about having to burn the crud off the pads until I said I would make sure I did that every time before I had to make a panic stop.
Then they stopped the demonstrations.
Sometimes a new wheel speed sensor would solve the problem, but I don’t think one of our suburbans made it a year without having the ABS controller rebuilt or replaced. Our shop mechanics didn’t do that , they were sent our.
Since there was no large national outcry about this, I think the amount of road salt on our roads must have something to do with it.
Our Chevy and GMC van chassis school buses also had the problem, but not the Fords. I also had friends wit GM pickups that did this.
The failure happened on dry roads and at 10 mph or less and you would step on the brake and instead of stopping you would hear and feel the ABS buzzing ant the vechicle. It caused several accidents, none of them serious, but they could have been serious if they involved a pedestrian.
My father worked in a big dealership in the 1960s. He often told me the following:
He said once a month a guy would come by to roll back odometers. The dealer would pay him $5 per car. The dealer would give him instructions on all the cars to roll-back and by how much. He never let anyone see how he did it and it only took him a few minutes per car.
When we traded in our 58 Chevy for a 61 at the Chev/Buick dealer, the car ended up on the used car lot with 26,000 miles on it. It started out well north of 60,000. All they did was paint the hood that had the normal 58 Chevy sand blasting.
did you ever go back this dealer? i don’t know how you would ever expect to get honest or reliable service from them - let alone a car in good working order - if they do stuff like this
Just more evidence that The Good Old Days weren’t necessarily good.
No kidding. The older I get – I’m in my early 30s now – and the more I hear about the kind of shady crap that was done “back in the day”…and not just with cars, but life in general…the more I’m glad to be the age I am now. Our society has a lot of problems, sure, but it seems to be that people nowadays are less likely to just sweep stuff under the rug as ‘that’s the way it goes’…
