Let's face it. Today's cars are damn good automobiles. One could almost imagine a Hyundai Accent beating Jim Clark's time around Watkins Glen in his Lotus of 40 years ago.  A stretch? Maybe. But the point is that today's cars, regardless of manufacturer, are reliable, comfortable, fairly powerful with more than adequate brakes and just don't break they way cars used to break in the past. When I was growing up, a car with 50,000 miles on it was a clunker ready for the boneyard.  100,000 miles on a car was virtually unheard of.

Today, prestige cars with over 100,000 miles sell for 5 figures.

Some of you know I owned an MGB for 20 odd years and odd years they were. I have a zillion stories about that car and everyone of them has to do with a time when if failed, for one reason or another, in its principle mission of providing transportation from Point A to Point B. And yet, I would not trade ONE of the those stories for a more reliable car. That car had PERSONALITY. It would let you down at the most inopportune moment and then win your heart back the next day with a moonlight ride under the stars on a balmy summer night. It was quixotic. It was undependable. I once had a mechanic tell me "These cars are squirrely." He was so right.

When I owned that car, I performed every mechanical function known to man, from rebuilding the engine to adjusting the rear brakes. I changed motor mounts, fuel pumps, steeering racks and lever shocks. I rewired around faulty circuits and replaced the floors with marine grade plywood when I was in danger of having my seat fall through the floorboards and drag my lily white ass on the asphalt. I cursed that car, but I loved it at the same time. Today's cars, despite their goodness, just do not inspire the level or emotional involvement that the cars of yesterday did.

When you have had the brakes fail on your XK-E coming out of the Santa Clara mountains on a 4 mile downgrade to the Pacific Ocean, you have established a connection with that car that you can never forget. 4 miles is a LOOOOONNNNGG time to be downshifting and using the e-brake and scrubbing off speed in the corners. Especially when your then wife is screaming the whole way down.  When you have been in Cape Cod traffic on a glorious 4th of July in the MG when the clutch slave cylinder suddenly decides it has given its all and you're 3 hours from home, you establish an emotional bond with that vehicle as you learn to match engine and transmission speeds so precisely that your passenger looks at you with awe and says "How is it possible to do that?" When your daughter is driving over from Mobile to New Orleans and calls from the road because she stopped to put the top up for a cloud burst and the ignition switch choose that precise moment to fail so she got stuck under a bridge overhead and had to get pushed to the nearest exit by a black trucker in a Pererbilt who called the hotel where you are anxiously awaiting her arrival on his CB radio to let you know she is safe and sound at a red neck bar an hour east of town - THAT is when you connnect with a car. Just as later in the day, you notice that the cooling fan is not coming on because the framus that sticks into the radiator to tell it to operate has gone funny in traffic and so you borrow a barbie pin from your daughter, strip the plastic ends off with your teeth and jump the circuit with it so the damn thing doesn't explode in traffic when you are 2200 miles from home.

Old cars are a pain in the ass.  And therein lies their beauty and their charm. Today's cars are damn near perfect. But perfection has its price.