Right at 50 of the big block cars with side pipes and roll bars. Most of the rest had under car exhaust and no roll bar. The vast majority of the 427 cars actually had 428's in them due to a shortage of 427's at the time...

They already make all that crap aftermarket for a lot of popular modern cars.

If you know a good fab man you can have structure built into the cab and doors for crash safety.  It's not as good as having the whole thing designed for impact, but it's an upgrade.

Also, adding four point belts is a must.

Ha! Only of they've tubbed it and put in a reworked engine with mad blower hanging out of the hood. Otherwise keep your old iron parked at the car show with the rest of the old guys drinking coffee

Oh really?  Me too

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I thought I had the best of both worlds when I bought a 2003 mustang cobra (terminator). Often called the last true muscle car. I put on a bigger blower, completely changed the fuel system. Full exhaust ect. It makes 740 rwhp on e85.

Then I bought a CT5-v blackwing. The caddy does everything better. And unless I’m on a prepped track with slicks the caddy will smoke the cobra. Modern engine management and traction control are a game changer

30 years ago I owned an RZ350. It was a fun street bike.

My 1299 makes it look like a slug and it isn't much heavier...

FYI...looking it shows 60lbs difference but the Ducati is making ~200hp with a pipe and tune. I will say the RZ makes some awesome noises!!!!

Wasn’t that more due to the extreme head shake they would get at speed?

Amen to that. The prices are beyond stupid.








https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/470305795563747/?ref=product_details&referral_code=marketplace_top_picks&referral_story_type=top_picks

What kind of a mouth-breathing mental midget has this in his back yard and thinks a sane asking price is 4500?

That bus is in legit "i'll pay you to get this out of here for me before it finishes melting into the dirt" level stuff.

Are you one of those guys who can't comprehend how all the improvements that made 9mm cartridges competent ... can all be applied to .45?

Hint hint, your ricebois are only that fast because they have power adders.

You can do the exact same things with old iron.

I think you're completely missing my point.

Whether or not the industry supports a car or a specific system of a car depends on some key variables:

How many units were sold to begin with?
How many units are still on the road?
What percentage of owners spend money modifying their vehicles?
What percentage of owners drive their vehicles in a way that breaks stuff?
How many people will put in the money and effort to keep these cars alive at the end of their normal service life?

Now let's look at some vehicles:

Toyota sells 400k+ RAV4s a year. It's a quintessential appliance car. But, of those 400k+ units, well under 5% will ever see mods beyond tint, wheels, or maybe audio. Because a lot of these exist, repair parts will likely exist to keep these on the road for 20+ years. Because these are boring appliances, nobody will care enough to restore/resurrect one when it's scrap yard time. If a new phone technology or whatever gets really popular while a lot of these cars are still in service, someone will sell something to make it work for these. Long story short, there aren't many fun parts for these, and repair parts will be around a while, but nobody will give a damn enough to really put any effort into them, so extended industry support is questionable.  

Jeep sells 200k+ Wranglers a year. That's half the volume of the RAV4, but it's a completely different audience. Easily 75%+ of these will see modifications. Lifts, bumpers, rock sliders, cargo management stuff, tunes, you name it, someone has done it to a Wrangler, and a whole bunch of vendors are making money selling and installing these parts. This enthusiasm follows the vehicle for its entire life. The scrap yard threshold is a hell of a lot higher for a Jeep than it is for an appliance like the RAV4. If a Wrangler isn't totaled or rusted out, someone is probably going to keep spending money and wrenching on it, no matter how old it is. As long as enough money is flowing in to make it worth it, vendors are going to keep cranking out components.

Combine these two, and you get a vehicle like GM's full size trucks. GM sells something like 800k trucks a year when you combine the numbers for Silverado and Sierra. In a ~6 year generational cycle, GM is cranking out about 5 MILLION of these things. Of those, a whole bunch get bought up by fleets and families who use them up and throw them away, but a good number don't. Truck enthusiasts buy them, and they lift them, lower them, boost them, stroke them, dress them up to look retro, and all kinds of other things. They get taken racing, rock crawling, mud bogging, beach cruising, and baja driving. Every generation of these is like its own club, and whether you're a Squarebody guy or a GMT800 guy, you can probably get damn near any part of the truck shipped to your door. All of these guys need parts and industry support, and like the Jeep Wrangler, if the money is there, so are the vendors, and so are the parts.

That brings us back to the Corvette. New, they generally sell less than 30k units a year, and sometimes it's a lot less. For comparison, that's 15% of Jeep Wrangler sales, 8% of RAV4 sales, and 4% of GM full size truck sales. On my local AutoTrader page, there are only 71 used Corvettes for sale within 100 miles of me going back to 1989. Of these 71 cars, only 13 of them have seen 50k+ miles. The bulk of them are C5s and C6s that haven't been driven more than 3k miles per year. These are garage queens. Few have any obvious modifications, and when 54 of the 71 have automatic transmissions, I question how many will make it into the hands of the kind of enthusiast that would want to spend money and make something more of the car. This isn't a recipe to feed and sustain robust industry support for a car. If you find yourself looking for something like, I dunno, an ABS module for a 25 year old example of this low volume car, chances are nobody is going to make or service that unless there's a surprising amount of money in doing so.

I have seen a substantial number of small Asian that can that can do that.

Hell, in the early 70s, the best affordable sports car was the 240Z.

YEA BUT CAN YOUR TURBO HONDA HOP A COKE CAN LIKE MY CHEBBY BBC???

Yeah, you're a boomer. There are boomers by age and there are boomers by style. You are a boomer-style guy. Not a knock. Just a thing.

No they don’t make “all that crap” and some of it they never will.  The market won’t be big enough.

And there it is.

The materials and technology will be the limiting factors of today's cars.

How many people have had a cellphone brick on them? Guess what, the mfg's are in a race to put the biggest touch screen in your car with access to all vehicle functions. Is there even a requirement for them to support for a specific time? Some cars don't have a dip stick anymore, you park on level ground and use the touch screen settings to find the oil level.

Cars are being built to be disposable. Hard parts and mechanisms have been replaced with cheap plastic and electronics. A/C door mixers controlled by little electric motors and breakable plastics vs a sleeved control cable that lasts forever.

The current day engines may last longer mile wise than the old push rod engines of 30 years ago but time will kill the cars.

Yeah, how dare he like anything older than an Iphone 1.

Down with any tradition! Squash it all!

They aren’t fast by today’s standards at all; however, the sound, the smell, and the power band that’s best described as an on/off switch just makes for a really enjoyable experience.

I know that most every modern 4 door sedan will out perform my 82 C10 in just about every way measurable.  I think I would take a lot of them in a straight line to 100 MPH but that is about it.  

This thing doesn't turn, doesn't stop, is loud, not very comfortable, poor on gas, and would crumple like a tin can in an accident.  But damn does it have some style, and none of those modern cars make these kind of high compression big block sounds.  




I don't think old cars are better than modern cars, but I sure do like owning them, working on them, and being around them.  They are just cool.  

Neat relics from a bygone era that are a lot of fun to get out and use!

You don’t have to snivel because you can’t afford both.

450hp 200+mph
625hp
805hp

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so are wakeboards

Classic cars are cool. Don’t own one though.

M1 Garands are also cool. I do own one.

*Last longer without any maintenance.


Do your maintenance on an older car and upgrade the materials on it and it will absolutely outlast the modern stuff. They had to build them with more longevity in the structures and materials in the past because they didn't have access to the data and computing power that would allow them to build something so crappy and get away with it.

In other words, they'd have made the cars back than just as crappy for their time as they do now, but they weren't able to.

I hear of modern engines where they don't even give you enough meat in the cylinders, on the deck, or on the head to be able to resurface them once.  Use till done, throw away.

Vs

.100 or more able to be taken off all those surfaces in the slant 6 in my car out back, and you may not even have to resurface / hone on a rebuild if you take good care of it.  It can outlive my grandkids.

ETA...I love the sticker on the quarter panel !!!

I just run over giant chunks of steel that a 4x4 was tall enough to miss. It was big enough the car was lifted off the road. Even though it fucked up the left rear quarter, I'm glad it didn't punch a hole in my brand new T56 Magnum.... It did take out my oil pan but luckily I had reinforced it with 3/16" plate and angle. It just bent the shit out of the pan...



Yes, that is a BO105 in the background....
It's 500+ pounds lighter than the Red Bull aerobatic bird with the same horsepower. It is fun as hell (it's a friends).

Id like an older cummins.  early to mid 90's but i have no desire to own a "classic" car.

my dad and brother always had them, spend more time fucking with them than enjoying them..  or they just collect dust and look pretty.

blah

It's a matter of taste. Disposable plastic and  electronics laden often shaped like a jelly bean faster safer car. Or fire and thunder 10 mpg dangerous can be squirrelly  v8 hp car. Yea any soccer mom or skinny Jean dude will probably crash it.  Any idiot can drive new cars.
I'd rather drive my 440 charger but I also like 1950s float planes and nurses.

Cool truck! Why does that rear bumper look massive AF on there?

My dad had one of those with the red velour interior. I can still smell the "Old Chevy" interior...

My Dad sold his 2022 GMC Sierra diesel because the dealership couldn't fix a recurring CEL and secondary coolant pump failure. He bought a 1980-something C-10 that was a frame-off resto.

This right here.

New cars are much better in almost every aspect. Except often boring and tame.

Had a Hellcat Charger for years. Awesome vehicle. Took it on long trips. 24 mpg. Very fast (not the fastest thing I owned) but even that was tame compared to older muscle.

Did plenty of drag racing and street racing with my father growing up and into my earlier years. For me it's  no comparison in terms of feeling and experience you get with the big carburetor, loud, rough old muscle even though lots of the modern stuff is faster.

Back when 80's cars were racing 60's and 70's cars, they were fast. I also never met or knew a one of them who hadn't modified their cars at that point.

How many people do you know daily driving a low 8's car... ? And how far are they daily driving it in the rain?

LOL I get comments on that all the time!  I think because it is a stepside and the bumper is wide enough for a fleetside so it looks kind of odd.  People constantly tell me to take it off but I actually like it and it gets a whole bunch of weight behind the axle, she needs all the help with traction she can get!

Mine was a result of being a jackass

I'm glad for it though, had no idea there was that much bondo on that panel

I'd be willing to bet that OP has zero respect for its parents 🙄😐

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OP is mad.

I can understand needing to rationalize having no cool cars.

But everyone else who is happy while you are not =/= delusional.

They probably said that about the AMC pacer too.

They do though, sorry.

Not a fair comparison.  Put the Vette on modern radials.  

GT500 will be back. Can already get a Super Snake, and Ford is selling 800hp blower kits.

Muscle cars have one thing the OP will NEVER have:




COOL

It's a split window... look up the restored prices. Then just import a Brazilian one.

There's more to the story.

I've got a 306 that I slapped together in my garage using spare parts for around $3k that pushes a 65 Mustang 12 flat on pump gas and 10.80's on nitrous. It has head gaskets that were likely made in the mid 90's that I found laying around in the back of a shop, compression ratio is something like 7:1 and one of the cylinders is scored. Been making passes on it weekly for about a year shifting at 7k rpm.

It's a very literal pile of shit but will still destroy anything new in the 1/4 that doesn't cost $70k+ and garner waaaay more attention while doing it. People go ape over this thing everytime I bring it out.

You can fart at a big block Chevy and make 5-600hp and matching lbft

Old junk is badass.

I have seen the utterly out of touch six figure prices.  They are even more retarded, and when the bubble bursts on the price of those, I'll laugh at them.

Cooler cars, better music, hotter chicks

Big difference between a "street car" and a "daily driver". I doubt many low 8 second cars are daily drivers but I'm sure they're a few. Larry Larson had a "street car" in the 6s ~15 years ago.