Thread: Is motoring better today than in bygone eras?

Today's cars are far superior in ride comfort and creature comforts, not to mention safety. Whether they are more enjoyable to drive is hard to say. I was younger then so my expectations from a car were different. Seriously, a Hyundai Excel is probably a lot better car than almost anything on the market in the late Sixties.

Today's roads are better (others will remember crawling up Razorback behind an old Commer).

But there was a lot less traffic and higher speed limits on a lot of roads around Sydney (not in the suburbs but elsewhere). For example, Northern Rd between Penrith and Narellan had a higher speed limit and more places to overtake. Nowadays it is all double white lines and is as frustrating as hell.

We weren't worried about speed cameras. Crikey, I got my licence in 1965 and had never had a speeding ticket (camera) - or any type of ticket - until 2002 or 2003 - and I am not a slow driver. I just happened to be asleep (after a midnight shift) at the time I went past that speed camera on a road I had never travellled before.

Come to think of it, I'm less worried about coppers today than back then. These days OH&S seems to have caught up. I rarely see cops out with lidar/radar. I remember always being on the look out in my mirrors for the lights of a Mini Cooper S (they were different from a normal Mini). If you saw them, you assumed cops. Today, one never sees coppers.

Attitudes have changed, too. Today, I would never warn, by flashing lights or CB, of the presence of an RBT site. I'll warn of speed cameras and cop cars but not RBT. If you drink and drive, you deserve to be caught. I can't remember my attitude to RBT when it started.

I dont know if it is times that has changed or me but I deffinately dont enjoy driving as much as I used to.

My choice of car has changed as well though as has my driving style, where I used to zip around in quick little modified Datto's (1000 coupe, 1200 coupe, 120y wagon and coupe), now it is a Diesel Landrover or an Auto Carolla so even though I wasnt so much hooning back then (not like the tyre friers these days or the V8 heads back then) rather just driving relatively quickly most places I went.

I was also in a car club and had a club racer for a bit as well as being involved a bit with a mates mini sprint so I used to enjoy the driving side of things a lot more.

I still enjoy getting out on the open road but the open road is now so easy to drive that it is boring and tries it's hardest to put you to sleep where to enjoy a drive I think it needs to have some sort of challenge to it, even if it is just a good series of corners in which you have to concentrate to not fall off a cliff like the great ocean road or the like.

I used to drive the Melba Hwy from Mansfield to Melbourne just about every weekend and I do remember being more scared of the Yea coppers than I am now of a speed camera yet I dont really get the chance to speed these days on that road due to the crap drivers that tend to sit 15kmh under the speed limit when you cant over take and then speed up when you can and 300Tdi Disco's dont accelerate up hills all that well.

Times change and so do we as do cars and on that, I think it was much more fun driving a car built in 1965 that you knew that if you crashed you would get hurt......so you drove accordingly, not like todays cars in which people with no skill drive the car well past their skill level if the crap hits the fan and then rely on all the add on safety equipment to save their buts.

I think driving is boring these days in comparison but then again, Im pretty sure we are saving more fuel and lives because of that.

The old Hume Hwy was not much fun before the new one went through, I remeber as a kid being scared out of my whits when semi's would fly past our HR holden with the caravan on the back and the car would drift off the road due to it being so narrow and the trucks were doing 100Mph.

Define "better"!

Motoring today is far safer than it has ever been, mainly as a result of better roads and a new attitude to drink driving, as well as to the general use of seat belts. New car designs may have added to safety but the overall contribution of this is probably negligible because many drivers use increased vehicle capability to push the vehicle further, and the quieter and smoother motoring means more drivers come closer to the limits than ever before. Better brakes mean more drivers trust their brakes to the limit and frequently beyond, and the same for cornering.

But on the other hand, ever more restrictive rules, as with most of society, tend to make for a less satisfying motoring experience. These result from the ever increasing population density, already far too high, especially in the major cities. Even away from the city we see almost all roads, even in many of the remote areas of the country, are fenced, for example.

I don't think that governments are out to make sure nobody enjoys driving, even though they come across that way. It is simply the result of the need for them to be seen to do something about the "terrible road toll" - which in reality is lower than it was forty years ago, even in absolute terms, and vastly lower if you look at deaths per car/kilometre - measured this way it continues to decline although the curve has flattened noticeably in the last ten or so years. As I have commented before, it has been below the suicide rate for years, even without the suspicion that a significant number of road statistics really should be suicide statistics.

John

Originally Posted by p38arover

........Crikey, I got my licence in 1965....

youg fella !


+ there was NO ROAD RAGE THEN (or none that I remember - so maybe that's the key?)

I think I enjoyed driving more when I first got my licence 20 years ago because :

a) The sense of the new-found freedom was still a novelty

b) The $200 cars I owned would break down nearly every time I drove them and this added to the excitement and the adventure

I just want to go back to big engines and cheap petrol .. ooh yeah !

I reckon most new cars are sterile and lack character. Much more fun driving old cars!

I think it was definitely better driving years ago than it is now.

Apart from the fact there were less cars on the road, the coppers were half decent blokes too. If you got pulled up for speeding, they seemed to take a bit of common sense into the equation, unlike nowadays where they're more concerned with statistics & revenue.

I remember getting pulled up a number of times for speeding, & they'd check your licence & rego, ask why you were speeding, & let you off with a warning. You didn't have any of this crap with speed cameras everywhere & everyone driving 20 k's under the speed limit because they were conditioned & too scared to drive any faster. (Unless that's just because people now drive like old women anyway!)

I also disagree with Ron, there are far more coppers on the road (where we are & when we go away) than there used to be. Far more unmarked cops lurking in bushes etc, just waiting to spring unsuspecting motorists.

The sense of freedom on the road isn't as great.

Even 4WD'ing - there's not as many places you can go now, because they've been locked off in the name of "wilderness", or the National Parks have taken over & locked places off.

As far as better vehicles go, that may well be. However, I still prefer driving the SIII, to some fancy vehicle with all the mod cons.