The reason I believe newer cars last longer than cars 50 years ago did

General Discussion
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We like to talk about how newer cars just last so much longer than older cars did. We all know when a car 50 years ago reached 100k miles it was used up and worn out.

Well wait just a minute. That is wrong! How could that possibly be wrong?

We you see back then odometer fraud was rampant. Over half the cars sold maybe closer to 75 percent had odometers that were rolled back.

People made much better money back then and bought new cars frequently. They also really piled the miles on them quickly since they drove much more since they could afford family vacations and whatnot.

So its 1980, Bob trades in a a 3 year old car, a 1977 Caprice is with 60k miles on it. Well the Sneaky Pete dealer decide to increase the cars value by having the odometer rolled back to 28k miles! Instant profit.

Now the car is purchased and is reliable but Carl the traveling salesman puts 100k on the car in just 2 years. Now we have a 5 year old car with 160k miles that indicates 28 (128k).

Thanks to Single stage paint that buffs out like new the car really shines. The interiors wore like iron back then so it still looks great, and stylish!

So now the dealer has a car with 128k miles showing, its actually showing 28k miles but due to the age many would suspect its actually more. So the dealer rolls it back to 50k miles. A nice clean low mileage used car!

The next person, Carol buys it and uses the car in duties for their regional manager position at burger chef, on the road constantly, in comfort and style I may add.

Well they pile 100k on in a few short years. The car is becoming a clunker, as soon as it hit “100k”. By now the person is cursing the terrible reliable having to replave wear parts at only 100k miles (actually well over 200k!)

So the Caprice which actually now has over 1/4 million miles on it is traded in again now showing 50k miles on the 5 digit odometer. The dealer knows that that won’t fly, so they bump it up to an 83k mile car.

The next person that buys the car is Paul. He wants a sensible good looking car that has suffered some depreciation.

The 1977 Caprice is clean and looks good and has only 83k miles on it! What a deal.

So Paul drives the car reliably for a few years and it just “turned over” for the “first time”

The car is starting to seem worn out with only 100k miles! Junk! Paul swears off American cars and buys a late 1980s Honda Accord, with a 6 digit odometer I may add. He gets 200k miles of reliable service out of it that he mever could have out of his Caprice that was wore out at “only” 100k miles.

But in all actuality that Caprice now has over 280k on it!

This is the real reason cars wore out at 100k back then, odometer fraud!

Notice Taxi fleets still got 300k on a car back then, hard use! Because they just piled the miles on them with no monkey business on the odometer. They knew at the end of service the cars would go to a junkyard being 500k mile vehicles that were beat so no incentives to fool with the odometer.

It all makes sense when you think about it!

Heres the proof! Guys like “big daddy” were everywhere back in the 80s!

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BS. Prove it.

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More BS nonsense.

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Only to you.

With multiple engine and transmission overhauls.

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I linked an attached video. Very easy to do and everyone “whipped miles” or “busted miles” back then.

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I worked on cars at a garage back then, lots of them, never saw one that was rolled back. Huge difference between ‘could do this illegal thing’ and ‘75% of cars had this done to them”.

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Certainly there is some truth in what is said but a lot depended on where you were and where you came from. I think carol or carole.as I knew her would have been bare foot in the kitchen and pregnant, not a regional manager. She did become a teacher since that was one of the few professional avenues back then. A very nice girl though. Still buying a car at 11%, a house at 9% on $3 an hour was not easy.. but the robber barons had not yet flooded the place with credit cards.

Dad traded the 58 Chevy for a 61 at the Buick/chevy dealer. He was on the road so the 58 had 65,000 but looked good except for the normal sand blasting on the hood. It turned up in the OK used car lot with 26,000 on th3 odometer. The hood was repainted. The banker,dealership owner all went to our church but I saw how the game was played and how the deck was stacked against the wage earner.

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You made great points in your post. “Carol” was a guy in my scenario, i.e. Carol O’Connor, I had a friend who’s fathets name was Varl and was a regional or district manager for Burger Chef so that where i got the name, a play on Carl

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I think another factor is the sheet steel car makers used back then. Until the mid (?) eighties they just used plain steel and in the snow belts the bodies rusted out in just a few years. I grew up in Rochester, NY and remembering rust holes in 5 year old cars.

Then the makers started using galvanized sheet steel and it made a big difference. My 1st new car was a 1988 Olds 2dr Ciera and made with G steel. When I donated it 19 years later it had very little body rust. My 1999 Monte Carlo, the same thing.

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In some areas I believe it was at least 50 percent and wouldn’t be suprised if it wasn’t 75 percent.

I think sometimes we find ourselves living in a fools paradise as we look back on how “honest” it was even though it was better back then!

I dont understand how you could not have been in the business back then and not know that rollingback odometers or disconnecting the cable was common.

I rented a uhaul one time and had to run about 1200 miles round trip over a weekend. I went to disconnect the VSS off the transmission and found Uhaul had armored it with a shield! Instead I had to cut the wire further up except tp find it had already been cut and spliced back together crudely. It made it easier for. Me to disconnect it is all.

20 miles rent was alot cheaper than 1200 miles

This was a younger and much less mature Rick. I would never do that now. The owner of that Uhaul location was a real rip and liked to take a tone with me, however i realize i really wasn’t doing much to get even with him, I just cheated uhaul out of money.

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It seems that everyone wants to take a tone with you . Maybe the problem is not them but you .

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Too many negatives in there, I think. No car I worked on, or, more importantly, none that any of my coworkers fixed, was ever shown to have a rolled back odometer. Did it happen? I’m sure it did. But your 50-75% estimate is amazing nonsense.

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Around here, later on, they just turned all the odometers back to zero so you had no idea of the previous mileage. Don’t remember why if it was a new legal issue or just consumer pressure, but that became the norm, taking mileage out of the picture.

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1970 Chevy built in Detroit is much worse then a 2023 car made in Japan.

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No, they make more now when adjusted for inflation.

Because cars rusted out much faster than they do today.

Also incorrect, people drive more than they did in the 1960s.It peaked in 2004 but still higher than 1970 - the earliest data I could find.

Living in Ohio, cars were scrapped with good running engines because they were rust-buckets. Often with about 100K on the odo. Lots of good used engines, transmissions and rear axles but no rust free body panels.

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+1
While the difference isn’t “yuge”, the total average annual miles driven in The US in 2022 was definitely larger than in 1971.

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This chart shows 1980 to 2022
 before everyone started going back to the office
 Jumped 4500 miles a year from '80 to '04!

Chart

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I’m not going to argue but when I hear average I think of that old joke in management class. Henry had his feet in the refrigerator and his head in the oven but on the average he was quite comfortable.

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Absolutely not 75%.

That’s not remotely correct. People are driving more these days

Even on cars that old there were still countermeasures in place for odometer tampering. Some had blue bars that would appear, some odometers had digits that wouldn’t line up evenly as a tell-tale. At any rate, usually the wear on the carpet/floor mat and/or pedals will be a giveaway.

No way the labyrinth of vacuum hoses common on cars of that vintage would still be intact. Seats would be showing significant wear not in keeping with a 83k mile car.

Watch your step, the BS is pretty deep around here.

Fleets cars get regular service and get repaired. Any car can last that long if you’re willing to keep fixing it. But no, very few cabs back then made it to 200k, and even fewer made 300k. With that said it wasn’t uncommon for cabs to have police spec suspension/brakes back then either, but they usually didn’t get the cop-spec engine as the operating costs were higher. A Caprice classic might have the 9C1 suspension/brakes, but would only have the the 3.8L or 4.3L V6 under the hood.

While I don’t doubt the odometer fraud happened more frequently back then, it’s utterly ridiculous to claim that somewhere in the neighborhood of 75% of American made cars had their odometer’s rolled back. And that’s the reason why malaise-era American cars were/are thought to be unreliable, poorly made, inefficient-yet-still-somehow underpowered vehicles. It wasn’t some mass odometer tampering conspiracy. They really were just that bad. Part of it was corporate leadership, part of it was government mandates the U.S. automakers weren’t prepared to deal with, and part of it was the workforce who were on strike about as often as they were on the assembly lines. It’s not a coincidence that the Japanese makes came in and ate our proverbial lunch in the 70’s and early 80’s.

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Rick does not let facts get in his way .

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