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Old cars sound like fun, until you experience the safety features (seatbelts and crumble zones optional), missing rear visibility with tiny mirrors and the hassle to find matching spare part replicas.
And you think there is not much electronics or fancy extras in them to break, but the older cars where expected to last for 100.000km and maybe 10 years tops before the rust would eat everything up, so a lot of parts where designed cheaper and would fail sooner than today's cars that are expected to last at least twice as long.
Sweet spot is Japanese cars from the '90s and '00s. They are more reliable, more fuel efficient, have safety features and spare parts are often still available. Rust remains a topic but not as much as with older cars.
Yeah. Find a Honda or Toyota from the latter half of the 00's with a reliable service history and they'll last another 10-20 years if you take them to a decent imports mechanic.
Rust is always a problem in some places hahaha
Visibility out of something like a '57 Bel Air is excellent. Back then visibility was something people cared about, and having the pillars be as thin as possible was highly desirable. In comparison, modern cars have horrible visibility with thick pillars, high belt lines, high hoods, and tiny rear windows. Of course, the whole thin pillar thing did come at the cost of a weaker roof, less crash protection, and basically no rollover protection so there does need to be some balance, but with modern cars I hate how I feel dependent on things like backup cameras and blind spot monitors because I can't effectively see out the car.
The 1970s fastbacks had terrible rear visibility because they don't have rear windows:
https://smclassiccars.com/uploads/postfotos/1972-dodge-charger-coupe-red-se-4.jpg
The driver is essentially blind in he 3-5 o'clock visibility range when you have to do a left turn, and the intersection is not at an 90 degrees angle, or you try to merge into the highway. All you can do is floor it and merge in behind some car in front of you that you can see.
Well in the 70's you also have the AMC Pacer which is like driving a fishbowl.
As a styling thing it does go in cycles. Late 30's-40's cars also had high beltlines and small windows. Then the big airy greenhouses in the late 50's-early 60's. Many 80's cars into the 90's tended to have good visibility, though part of that also just came from the squared off styling. The poor visibility of today's cars is partly from safety features, but a lot of is also just styling.
Yeah, if I had a choice for an electric conversion, I think my ideal pick would be a newish car that somehow had its engine ruined way before its time. Like, maybe it was owned by some idiot that never got the oil changed until it burned out completely.
And while newer cars have the annoying tracking crap, that's solvable. If you're paying a mechanic enough money to completely convert a vehicle to electric, it won't be much more work to rip out the tracking tech while they're retrofitting it. You might need to just completely throw out the existing infotainment system, but that would still be a rounding error on a project that large.