The Good Old days
Steve, a couple days or a week ago, and today, Roberta, are pining for the fjords good old days of “non electrocnic cars”.
Having messed with both, I can safely say they’re both nutty as fruitcakes.
Oh, ther’es something about a cool old engine with actual points in there clacking away, but if you do any serious driving, you go electronic, every time. And carburetors? Strictly for suckers.
The real bottomline is, that shit is on cars because it’s more reliable. period. No argument is even possible, because that is a fact.
There are failures of electronics, that is the nature of that beast. But taken as a whole, a properly designed system, like anything from the big three, or the Bosch and other stuff used in europe, will just run. FOr ages. And not stop. There is precious little that will happen to an electronic ignition, and the coil tower types are undoubtedly the most reliable, with few exceptions.
Oh, if you drive six miles to work each day, and you don’t mind being under the hood of your car at least once a month, you can take a carbureted car and point type ignition a long way. They do run. And they are relatively simple to repair, if you have a clue what you’re doing. And it’s not difficult to obtain that clue. But if you want to get in your car and drive, you go electronic engine management system (EMS) all the way. Because it runs.
The other thing it does, is make sure all the shit works together. A carbureted car needs to be adjusted with variations in gas, variations in altitude. Anyone who has ever driven a carbureted car (or, for that matter, motorcycle) into the mountains understands this simple fact. Even dramatic changes in atmospheric pressure can affect the way a carb works, which is why in later years, carbureted vehicles had all kinds of added on vacuum driven components whose purpose was predominantly to compensate for all the potential variables that could affect the car. And most of this shit failed at the first sign of a vacuum leak. Point ignitions were subject to the most devilish types of failures, and anyone who has ever stood alongside the road in a pouring rain trying to understand why their ignition just all of a sudden failed to ignite will go electronic the moment it is feasable.
I recently sold my 62 Land Rover. She was a hoot, a great old broad who took me a lot of places I’d never be able to get any other way. And it was the most horrid pain in the ass I ever experienced, from a maintenance standpoint. The ignition was primitive at best, and if a cockroach crawled up into the wiring and peed on it, it would shut the engine down for days. The suspension was utterly nonexistent. The brakes- don’t get me started. The gearbox didn’t have a single helical gear and the noise it made going down the road was indescribable. And oh, by the way, a “conventional” electronic ignition is as subject to EMP as an electronic setup, the only thing immune is a fully mechanical diesel. The first eight cars I owned had carburetors and point ignition, and I did every single piece of maintenance on all of them
I have noticed that the amount of time people spend pining for the good old days is generally inversely proportional to the amount of time they had to spend hammering those old beasts together.
