Electrical or manual, have you noticed how clean everything is in the picture? I'd be surprised if my new car was anything like that when I bought it! Perhaps it's all to do with the magic of chrome: engines seem to be manufactured with very rough finishes these days and make the perfect surface for grime, gunge and spider webs to form, grow and proliferate.
The contemporary designs also suck: you no longer know where the four corners, nose and tail are; there is often a huge gap between hood and windscreen where the wipers are now supposed to live and which then prevents you from parking in avenues because falling blossoms and leaves find their way into said gap and your fingers are always too short or too fat to fish them out when you wash the car. These leaves then have the same function as the finish on the engines and they gather damp and then produce rust! But hey, that keeps the economy moving... whilst killing yours.
Perhaps worse yet, it's increasingly impossible to tell one car from another. At a distance, can anyone place a BMW Series accurately? A Mercedes? Even the SL and SLK are so alike I sometimes walk past them and still wonder... My own Fiesta's shape is echoed in so many different makes that I usually manage to guess wrongly - versions of that horrid, unpainted greyish insert along the lower edge of the rear are now found in many different makes of cars, a perfect, huge money-saver for the builders who no longer bother to paint it and so are able to use it across all colours.
We are all being screwed.
I'd love to see a thread on classics appear! Wish I had access to such image opportunities!.
Rob C
