And now Skoda are at it.

[Andy in Germany]

Your descriptive time line brings back memories not all good lol . Late 80s and 90s was spent many a time in the garage with my Dad and fixing my car and sometimes my sisters.

I'll not ask what was wrong with your sisters.

 

[MrGrumpy]

I'll not ask what was wrong with your sisters.

Yep should have finished off with my Sisters Fiat!! Rust and electrical basket case . Engine quite solid though !

 

[Pale Rider]

Yep should have finished off with my Sisters Fiat!! Rust and electrical basket case . Engine quite solid though !

'My sister's Fiat' would have been even clearer.

Italian cars of the period were famously structurally unsound.

I recall putting a Lancia on a wheel free ramp with the driver's door open.

Once on the ground, the door wouldn't shut because the shell had twisted.

 

[I like Skol]

F.I.A.T..... Fix It Again Tomorrow

 

[Drago]

Flee In Absolute Terror.

There's a whole thread in the making with that!

 

[Jameshow]

Several electrical designs cause trouble on modern cars

I'll not ask what was wrong with your sisters.

My dad was often doing that.... You call that a skirt...!!! was one I remember, as was - 2am Is not 11pm....!

 

[Jameshow]

F.I.A.T..... Fix I Again Tomorrow

Ford - fix or repair daily!

 

[Jameshow]

Several electrical designs cause trouble on modern cars

Yes, rust hasn't been eliminated entirely, ,but (largely) gone are the days of MOT failures from rust. I had to replace both the sills on my 1980 car in 1989/90. My other cars of that era were similarly bad at that age.
Most cars got scrapped at that point in time.

Modern cars typically are still in excellent condition well beyond that age, without needing any welding, but cosmetic rust issues do arise from time to time.

The comment about design life being shorter now - I can see a conflict for manufacturers, because short longevity will correlate with (or cause) poor reliability. If a car becomes a lemon, it might harm the manufacturers reputation.

Toyota traditionally top reliability scores and presumably value that reputation and work hard to maintain it.

Rust often shows it's been damaged and repaired...

 

[Gunk]

'My sister's Fiat' would have been even clearer.

Italian cars of the period were famously structurally unsound.

I recall putting a Lancia on a wheel free ramp with the driver's door open.

Once on the ground, the door wouldn't shut because the shell had twisted.

Early 911’s used to rust so badly that the doors didn’t shut

 

[lazybloke]

Rust often shows it's been damaged and repaired...

Back then, a rustLESS car was a sign of repair. Rust was the norm!

 

[cyberknight]

cant be bothered to trawl through all 9 pages
e bike subs mentioned, power meters are now being fitted to some "normal" bikes and you have to pay extra to use them .

 

[Dogtrousers]

Back as far as the 80's, some of the computer GIANTS, the likes of NCR and IBM, used to install their mainframe computers with the extra memory and processors already installed. When a customer wanted to upgrade, an engineer just came along and turned it on.

I remember watching an engineer do just that in the early 80s. He removed a board from an IBM minicomputer (mini - hah! It was the size of a large wardrobe) fiddled with some DIP switches or something, put it back, and bingo our machine was super-powered.

 

[MrGrumpy]

I remember watching an engineer do just that in the early 80s. He removed a board from an IBM minicomputer (mini - hah! It was the size of a large wardrobe) fiddled with some DIP switches or something, put it back, and bingo our machine was super-powered.

Reminds of our very old machines that ran on dolly logic ! They were just coming to their end of life in our machines , just as I started my apprenticeship

 

[raleighnut]

Reminds of our very old machines that ran on dolly logic ! They were just coming to their end of life in our machines , just as I started my apprenticeship

My Fathers 1st job when he came out of the RAF cos I'd inconveniently appeared was soldering up the valve sockets on very early computers at English Electric in Whetstone. I was born in 1962 so this would have been 63

 

[Sharky]

My Fathers 1st job when he came out of the RAF cos I'd inconveniently appeared was soldering up the valve sockets on very early computers at English Electric in Whetstone. I was born in 1962 so this would have been 63

My first IT job was at a site where they were running a LeoIII (English Electric), programming in CLEO, converting to an ICT computer in COBOL. This would have been late 1968.