It’s funny how we wander back in our minds recalling the “The Great Good ‘ol Days.” We’re talking the 50s and 60s, and if you owned a car back then, how wonderful was to hit the open road and ride along without a care in the world. Then somebody like us interrupts your dream and reminds you of what owning and maintaining a car back then was really like.
Just to set the delta, most customers today never even open the hood of their vehicle anymore. Forty or fifty ago years, that just wasn’t possible: You had to check your oil, battery, antifreeze levels, or break down on the side of the road somewhere. Back then, we, like a lot teenagers, worked in gas stations. For 23 cents per gallon, we would check under the hood, wash the windshield, and set your tires' pressures for you. On the topic of break downs on the side of the highway, you may have noticed how rare that is these days. Back in the day, you saw vehicles with steam rolling out from under the hood, flat tires and even broken driveshaft u-joints sitting with the drivers stuck waiting for a tow truck. You hardly see that today.
By comparison to today, back then tires lasted between 10,000 and 15,000 miles. Oil was changed, for those who cared about their vehicles, every 2,500 hundred miles. Wheels' bearings repacked at 10,000 miles, ignition parts (spark plugs, points, condenser, disc.cap, wires) were all replaced by 7,500 miles...And the list goes on and on. Yes, gas was cheap, but remember vehicles were only seven to ten miles to the gallon back then.
So yes, we fondly remember the good ‘ol days, but somehow we tend to forget what came with them.
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