Things that surprise you re: todays motoring.

[2011G6E]

Just having a chat with an old friend tonight, who I hadn't seen since the early nineties. Lives went seperate ways, he moved away for work, that sort of thing. We'd been mates in high school from '78 to 1980 when we both left in grade 10 (as most people did back then to work), and had both been car mad. The subject turned to modern motoring and the things that still surprise you, given the way things used to be. He drives an SS Commodore ute, but his last car was, I think he said, a Typhoon F6 (?).
When we were at school and driving around in the early eighties, everyone used to, of course, wonder about the future of motoring...what would cars be like in twenty years time? The line from the excellent Australian movie "Running On Empty" sprung to mind, where the main character is being a bit philosophical to his girlfriend about why they like hotted up cars so much. He said that in the future cars like that would be gone, and we'd probably all be running around in electric wheelchairs or something.

So I was wondering: what things surprise you about motoring today...things you thought would be common now, but which haven't happened...yet?
Here's my list:

* Speed limiters. They've been talked about for many many years, even back when I started driving in 1982, but then they were called "governors". With all the electronics in new cars, I'm honestly surprised they aren't a standard part of the system.
* Banning cars from the road once they are five/ten years old...this has been brought up every five years or so since the late eighties, usually by one of the big auto makers, the last time I believe by Mazda, purely for safety reasons of course...not to boost sales...no, that's not the reason at all...
* Horsepower. Honestly, back in the 80's, we all thought that post-2000 motoring would be boring as batshite and not be able to pull the skin off a rice pudding, with everyone restricted to little gutless but extremely efficient econoboxes or electric cars as fuel was supposed to be running out, or gone, by then. I even have a popular motoring book by Peter Wherrit written in the late seventies which has a final chapter on the future of motoring, and how "oil will be virtually all gone by the late nineties or just after 2000"...and that we'd all better get used to driving something very different, or possibly the age of the private car would be long gone by then and public transport would be the commonest way to get around. If you told an 18 year old me in 1983 that in 2011 I'd be driving a large rear wheel drive Australian sedan with a 270hp four liter six cylinder engine and six speed automatic box, I'd have laughed a you. More so if you said it would return high thirties in the miles per gallon on the highway driven even reasonably carefully. My '82 Celica, a two liter five speed manual, honestly uses more fuel on the highway than our G6E...
* Policing: Speed cameras. We never saw that one coming. Still, I can vaguely remember in the early seventies my old man complaining about the cop sitting at the table with a huge amphometer on it just outside Childers when we used to drive up to grandmas place in Bundaberg, so even handheld radar seemed novel and futuristic when it came out.
* Electric cars. They're more trouble than they're worth, even now. There used to be the odd oddball pop up in magazines with old cars that they'd rigged up with a dozen or so car batteries and a big electric motor, and how they could only go 100km on a charge, and even now they're still a puzzle. Batteries and storing electricity is, and always has been, a Very Big Problem...it's best to create it on demand, which is why coal fired power stations are still the best way to generate power (beside nuclear)...you can't efficiently store a lot of electricity for later on. We honestly thought however that some breakthrough would have been made by 2000 that made electric cars cheap and at least as convenient as petrol cars.

Who's got anything else?

[dylancox]

* Price of petrol is not well above $2 a litre, as 'experts' were saying 6 years ago.
* There is still a Ford Falcon with an inline-6, despite all FoMoCo USA's attempts to kill it.
* Factory-spec Falcon that will crack 0-100 in less than 5 seconds. That was euro supercar performance not too long ago.
* Despite the advances in car safety and handling, the open road limit is still 100/110?

[Scott]

......that the basics of passenger motoring have not been improved upon for more than 100 years - four wheels and a round steering wheel.

Sometimes you just get it right eh?

[mik]

a couple of things, who would have thought after the super car scare all those years ago, we would have our big sporty family sedans that would be making 400/500 hp and doing the qaurter mile in 12/13 seconds and weighing in about half a ton heavier than than a 70`s factory hotrod.

who would have thought the same heavy safety and electronic laden cars of today would be getting about twice the miles per gallon of the lighter simpler factory hotrods of the 70`s, ............pretty amazing really.

[2011G6E]

Yep, fuel economy is what amazes me the most I suppose. As I said, I'm in a position where I can directly compare the twoeras, one of the cars being from the same year I started driving.
My 1982 Celica has had minimal mods...still has the factory carb and iron exhaust manifold and drinking straw exhaust, but has had the air pump (California-spec motor) disabled as it was causing problems, and some of the anti-pollution piping appears to have fallen off since I got it, and a Ram-Flo sports air cleaner has been fitted, but that's it, otherwise it's pretty much factory...with the factory 66kw. It has a five speed manual, air con, and no power steering.
On the highway it gets (pardon me, but I still think in MPG), about 30 to 32 mpg at best with the air con going...it doesn't seem to get a lot more in winter when I run it without the air con.
Last decent trip we made on the highway with the G6E the fuel readout was showing us returning about 7.6ltr/100km, or 37mpg!! It sits down around there all the time, only changing when we go up a hill, but just cruising along comfortably and quietly, cruise control, climate control going, returning better economy than a four cylinder of my youth.

Power is probably the second big surprise. In an '82 Wheels magazine, and looking through the power figures of cars in the back, nearly all the four cylinders are down around 50 to 70kw, sixes were mostly around 100kw, and V8's weren't much better.
The main story in this magazine is a comparison between the Commodore SS Group Three, and the last 351, the XE-ESP. The power outputs are staggering...for all the wrong reasons. The Commodore puts 180kw from it's modified 5 liter, and the Ford puts out 149kw from it's 5.8...
Now, some people say "Oh but they measured the power differently back then, with all accessories like alternator, full exhaust, and air cleaner on the engine!"...well I'm sorry, but that's how you buy a vehicle...you don't get a bare engine on a stand with open pipes, no accessories bolted on, and no air cleaner. It's much more real world. Saying power figures should be measured any other way is just lying to your customers and yourself. Go to a dyno day today and you drive your street car up onto a dyno and run it...you don't sit there and unbolt your exhaust, take off your air cleaner, and take off your fan belts...at least you don't if you want to be considered in the "best street horsepower" part of it.

Third would be the size of "normal" wheels today. Our G6E has had the turbo wheels put on it, 19"! We are still amazed at the size of these things, as when I started driving, the most popular size of wheel was the 13" rim fitted, usually, with 205/65-13 tyres of some type of another. They were on everything from old Holdens to Toranas to Cortinas (both our Cortinas had them, Goodyear NCT's). 14's were on Falcons and Commodores, 15's were pretty rare-ish, but they were around. Then we saw an advert for the new Porsche 959 Supercar...16" wheels! Wow!!

[ChrisCE]

Weren't we supossed to all be flying to work in our hover cars by now??

[Brazen]

I remember being told that oil and petrol would be run-out by the 1990s too.

As a kid we were told flying cars will be here by the late 1980s.

I thought speed limits would be a lot higher than now, in reality travel speeds have decreased due to stricter enforcement and lowering of limits on many roads.

I think the 110 limit was introduced in the 1960s just think of what the roads and cars and licensing system were like back then! Surely we should be up to 200kmh by now??

[duaned]

I thought we would be having drag races with the Jetsons by now!

[Nikked]

The falcon is still being built...

[Nikked]

In all seriousness, its a laugh to look at old concept cars...

even this, this is what Ford thought we would be driving in 2010.

[Geez Louise]

I thought by now we would have cars that you just sit in and they drive themselves or indeed as mentioned...Hover cars.

Cars that are powered by water only too! That was a common theory when I was growing up and talking about the future. Cars that wouldn't need petrol or oil to run....just water.

[jpd80]

10-12 years ago, FoA's projections were that fuel prices would be double what they are
and that they would need to build cars with magnesium chassis and aluminium skin
s to reduce weight and engine capacity needed. Unfortunately the plant they were
counting on went bust while it was being built just west of Rockhampton...

[Ford_The_Win]

According to Back to the Future, we're supposed to be driving around in flying cars in less than fours years time. Don't think that's gonna happen somehow. To reverse the topic a little bit, I'm suprised that anybody survived the 70s and 80s given what the cars were like and the lack of drink driving regulations.

[Geez Louise]

Originally Posted by Ford_The_Win

According to Back to the Future, we're supposed to be driving around in flying cars in less than fours years time. Don't think that's gonna happen somehow. To reverse the topic a little bit, I'm suprised that anybody survived the 70s and 80s given what the cars were like and the lack of drink driving regulations.

There were less cars on the road back then though and the cars, although short of todays safety features (airbags etc) weren't as fast as today's models either...

[Stefan]

Great thread...

[Geez Louise]

Your laughing because you thought you would own a ~XA2-ZKL1 Space hover coupe by now hey Stefan?

[HVAC PRO]

Originally Posted by duaned

I thought we would be having drag races with the Jetsons by now!

image

i know as i kid i thought for sure when I'm in my thirties we will have flying cars...what happened to this idea

http://youtu.be/VCCIGHTjd7g

but could you imagine what would be involved in engineering and designing some type of "sky highway" and i could guarantee you there would be speed cameras up there too...