Memes

My experience with such old cars, where their age is starting to make full restoration advisable:

• mechanically reliable and simple to fix (and critical parts are usually available, quality varies)
• everything electrical is shit (and old), you need to go through everything to check the connections, completely rotten through ground wires aren't necessarily visible and will cause endless pain until you find them
• the rust-proofing wasn't great but it was there so usually if they're still alive by now they just need the usual spots where those models rust checked before purchase and/or crash damage thoroughly checked
• crash safety is nonexistent, ABS and ESP aren't that useful if you learned how to drive without, if you rely on ESP, better learn not to
• the fastest affordable cars from the 1980s are slower than family cars from the 2020s, still feels like you're going way faster
• if you buy something predating catalytic converters in your country, be prepared for it to smell atrocious
• carburettors that haven't been tampered with and aren't leaking don't need to be touched unless they malfunction, if they malfunction they usually only need a good scrubbing with diesel then a wash in petrol, replacement of extremely dead gaskets, and the jets usually need a clean, the tiny drill bits for carburettor jets can be used for cleaning if you use the size just below the marked size. Ultrasonic cleaners aren't necessary, replacing all gaskets usually means it's going to leak more than before.
• EFI was shit until the 1990s, avoid it if you can

Same, I just recently had someone offer me a Buick Lasabre for cheap. I was very excited until they said it was a 2003 😑

Reliable sure, but man did the '00 models look gross. Go back 10-20 years from that ugly thing to these beauties and it would have been a deal.

Get one while you still can, they haven't been going down in price for a long time and may in fact already be going up in price. They're pretty iconic, but not as many on the roads these days.

I daily drive one. I love it to bits but it's been through three engines and gearboxes, four coils, two carburettors, and two distributors in the last 70,000kms and I still have a niggling ignition fault and can't get the mixture quite perfect.

As I've been through all these faults I've slowly been doing more and more of the work myself as I don't trust "specialist" shops to put the time and care into my job to do it right, and as a result the car is a lot better now than when I bought it. But its a lot of work.

In short, buy a 40 year old Japanese car, not a British one!

It looks like mine. But mine a little longer in the back. If it’s my car it’s a VW Fox. But there’s three VW models that all pretty much look like that. Mines an 89. Almost 40.