Old Cars

Podcast Episode: 0264
Why do we keep old cars on the road?

     ​What if the vehicles you see as relics are actually the backbone of a thriving automotive industry? Discover how the enduring legacy of older vehicles and how they shape the intricacies and evolution of the automotive industry.  Navigating the future of the old car ​industry brings its own set of challenges,

especially with the rise of electric vehicles and the changing tides brought on by the pandemic. Uncover how these shifts impact the availability of affordable vehicles and the habits of consumers, who now lean more towards public transit and ridesharing. Despite these shifts, the need to maintain the old car market remains vital for those relying on affordable vehicles and the small repair shops and manufacturers that support them. ​

​       Well, we've all had one in our life, unless we're one of those lucky people that get brand new stuff just handed to us all the time. We've all experienced this, at least in our younger years. The old cars yeah, we've all seen them and we've all experienced them. We've driven around in these bland, boring old school cars, something that could be, you know, two or three years old, something that's handed down from family members, kind of rusty, kind of beat up and kind of needs a lot of TLC. The old cars on the road. But you have to remember, not all of us are fortunate enough to move up from that original old car and at the keep with these old, derelict vehicles. But why are they still here and what type of market do they actually hold together in the world? They play a vital role in the automobile industry. Even if the major automotive companies aren't making money directly off of them, they're still keeping their name out there and showcasing to people that these products are worth it when you buy them brand new. Old cars on the road Really, why, after 10 years, do we need to keep them around? There is a reason for it and AutoLooks is going to take a look at that today on this podcast.
 
       Welcome back to the AutoLooks Podcast. I'm your host, as always, and the doctor to the automotive industry, Mr. Everett Jay, coming to you from our host website at AutoLooks.net. If you haven't been there, stop by, check it out. Read some of the reviews, check out some of the ratings. Go to the Corporate Links website page. Big or small, we have them all car companies from around the globe all available on one centralized location, the AutoLooks.net website. Go to the Corporate Links website page. Like I said, that's where you'll find all the major automobile companies from around the globe, right there, AutoLooks.net. So, like you said in the beginning, old cars on the road. They play a vital role in the entire glue that holds the automobile industry together. One of the biggest parts that holds together is, in fact, just what we talked about Parts. 

      Automobile manufacturers today don't build a lot of their own select parts in-house. Most of them are subcontracted out to parts manufacturers Companies like Magna International, Linamar and Dana Some of the biggest names you can ever hear out there. You may hear stuff in the aftermarket industry like Edelbrock as well. All these companies exist to service vehicles that are either in production or vehicles after production. Now, a company like Magna goes after all brand-new vehicles, but they build the original parts for them. Now, when a vehicle goes out of production, manufacturers have to build at least a five-year supply of parts, unless the company really goes bankrupt and nobody's paying them. You know, like buying a Fisker right now, one of those Fisker Oceans yeah, those might be a little bit hard to come by for parts. Those manufacturers did build a lot of access parts, but not to the same scale as some other vehicles, like my Tacoma sitting out in the driveway. The new generation is out right now, but my vehicle that went out of production less than two years ago. There are still manufacturers building brand new parts for that truck knowing the amount of them on the road still and they have to be serviced.
 
     That's why if you buy a vehicle from a car company that went extinct like buying a Saab it'd be very hard to come by some of the vehicles. Hell, even my Suzuki out in the garage is a 2007 and still kicking. I get it, you know it's well over a decade old, but Suzuki is a big global car company that still exists today. It's hard to come by parts in North America, but that old vehicle is still kicking around. Trust me, if Suzuki came back to North America, I would definitely buy one as my work vehicle Going back and forth to work.
 
      Small, reliable and very dependable vehicles Don't get me started on like Korean products, that's a different story. But that little Suzuki is still holding on. I can still buy parts online, have them shipped to myself in only a few days. My mechanic can fix a lot of the parts on that car. That car almost 20 years old and I can still get parts for it. I can keep it on the road. With over 200,000 kilometers on it, it's still going.
 
      You've probably heard about all these people that buy vehicles. You know the Tacoma that did a million miles and the person that put over half a million miles on their Hyundai Elantra. These people put tons and tons of stuff into their vehicles. Without a ton of these vehicles still kicking around on the road and tons of parts being out there, we can't keep them around. All these little shops like the shop that I bring my vehicles to my old Suzuki, my old Borrego, my crappy little Rio. Now my new vehicles are under warranty. I have to bring them the dealer and get their parts fixed and ensure that everything's all right. I don't void my warranty blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know that crap. But my other vehicles don't have the warranty and I bought them used. I bring them to get fixed at a mechanic I trust and know. And that's the thing. Mechanics like that.
 
     The vehicle went to only new vehicles. People are only allowed to purchase vehicles from dealers and get them serviced at dealers. All these little shops would be out of business. If you're only allowed to keep vehicles for so long, you would kill your parts industry. You can keep the aftermarket industry going with people developing parts for the aftermarket industry, but brand-new part manufacturers companies like magna wouldn't be making as much money off of your pre-existing vehicle the parts for these classic and older vehicles if there were tons of them out there. 

​       Like, let's go back to my college days, early 2000s okay, yeah, I'm dating myself here the Pontiac Sunfire and Chevrolet Cavalier. By the time I went to college, the Cavalier or the Sunfire was slowly being pushed out and the Cobalt for Chevrolet was coming in. Pontiac had their G5, because they were going to the G names G5, G6, G8, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But finding parts for those Cavaliers was super freaking easy when I bought my crappy little Re as my first vehicle. I had a chance between that and a z24 cavalier. Now everybody customizes cavaliers, it's all been done before. But I also knew that parts were super easy to come by. Well, that could have saved me a lot of money and a lot of headaches way back then. Because, trust me, replace the motor in that thing, I, replace the starter in that thing, replace the front band in that thing all within the first year of ownership. So yeah, whereas the cavalier even if I had to do that, the price wouldn't have been as much as my Rios held the starter, to buy it and replace it was like 600 bucks in an economy car that costs less than eight thousand dollars.
 
      Brand new now, tiny little economy cars like that, when they make it into the aftermarket industry, the old car used car dealerships sell for pennies on the dollar. When you really think about them, they don't hold their value very well Because when the warranty runs up, those dealers know that those vehicles aren't going to last forever, something like my truck being two years old. Even when I bought it the price was still high. One, it's a truck and two, it's a desirable truck. So, they know keeping that truck on the road can make them money for more than just one reason.
 
      I bought it from a dealer, but not a dealer for a Toyota, it's actually from a dealer that's a Toyota counterpart, Subaru of all things. When I talked to them about that, they seem to think I have like a third head growing or something, because they're all like uh, what do you mean? I'm like a lot of your parts are interchangeable. I get it. The Tacoma's completely different than anything else that Subaru makes. There are some interchangeable parts, but not a lot, because there's is more of a collaboration, less of a marriage. But these older cars some of them, you know a lot of people always like to say, oh, they don't last like they used to do. 

       I don't know about you, but if you actually go back and check throughout time, people weren't buying vehicles in the 1950s and still driving them by the late 70s. A lot of the 1950s vehicles were off the roads. By the late 70s People had upgraded and gotten new ones. Vehicles back then you could say there was a used car market for it. But the used car market and the purchase after the fact. You were lucky if you got 15 years of the damn things. These days you got vehicles like my Suzuki still kicking around for close to 20 years on the road.
 
      Parts are made a little bit more different. There's a lot of people who could fix them, a lot of people can get these parts and a lot of people can keep these vehicles on the road and with the blowout, thanks to Fast and Furious and North America Marketplace and some other places, the aftermarket industry has made it more available for some of these vehicles to get parts Like. Sometimes, when you're looking for parts for your vehicle, it's actually better to look for aftermarket parts. I actually worked for a company once. They had a GMC Sierra and they needed to change the exhaust on it. The dealer told them how much and their mechanic told them how much you know for straight full replacement of the exhaust. They actually went to an aftermarket exhaust so one of those big burly you know, almost like a Borla, because it was cheaper than buying the actual product to keep this truck on the road. Now you're thinking this is a company, why don't they just scrap it and get a new one? Well, they didn't like to do that because they knew these trucks had tons of life left in them.
 
       What I learned when I went to school because you know I went to school, Georgian College, automotive Product Design I learned a lot while I was there and one of my amazing professors taught me one thing about the automobile industry because he himself had worked for the parts industry. He's the one that basically told me when a vehicle goes out of production, there has to be five years’ worth of parts for those vehicles built up. By that time the vehicle goes out of production. Like I said, even take a look at DeLorean. When they shut down the plant, they had enough vehicles to build another 1,800 cars. They built that much up by the time the company, when he even went bankrupt, they sold tons and tons of parts left hell.
 
      In my hometown there's a parts company not been bought out by a company from Quebec because the guy who created his daughter was a sellout not getting into that story. But my dad went there in the late 90s to go find parts for his mustang. 70 Mustang like this thing is by this time is over 25 years old and he was still able to purchase brand new parts for a car from 1970 off the shelf from an aftermarket part dealer. Even to this day I could buy new parts for my 70 mustang and this thing's getting close to 50 years old and I could still buy new parts for it. But thanks to these manufacturers and the desirability of some of these vehicles, parts are still existent. Now it doesn't work in every single case. Keeping a tucker on the road is a pain in the ass because they only built 50 of them. Only 47 of them are still in full existence and unless you own about two or three of them or know how to remanufacture parts, something breaks. You're screwed.
 
     But now, thanks to 3D printers, you can keep these old vehicles on the road even longer. I've been informed by a few of our quality fans in the past. If you go and check our help tab on the AutoLooks.net website, you'll find some links to 3D printing companies and these companies will actually build parts for your automobile. So, if you're having trouble finding these parts somewhere, if you can get a schematic of it from the original companies, or even just find one online, a basic blueprint that somebody be able to build a 3D model off of, you could send it to these companies that could build you a full working 3D print metal. Okay, you can actually build decent quality parts to keep your old car on the road, and with companies like that, they're keeping the price lower and with the price low people can keep these vehicles even longer. 

      So, the greatest thing about keeping old cars on the road is if they were built in mass quantities, like we're talking. You know keeping things. We should blame the Cavalier. In my early college days, they built tons of them. Now they weren't the world's greatest car. They didn't last forever, but because they built such a mass quantity of them there's so many out there and there had to be so many parts built for those vehicles that finding either quality brand new parts from manufacturers or finding quality used parts from even scrap yards or a company like Kenny U-Pull, where you can pull your own parts off of these scrap cars in the yard, they're keeping these old cars alive. My Suzuki a 2007 Suzuki SX4, is still kicking around in my garage because of this industry, and this industry employs tons of people. When I was in college back in the early 2000s, one out of every eight jobs in the province of Ontario at that point in time, over 11 million people. One out of every eight jobs in the province were tied to the automotive industry. Whether it be manufacturing, part manufacturing, designs, aftermarket industry, decals, painting, upholstery, any part of the automobile industry, there was tons and tons of them around. With that, we were able to keep our vehicles on the road. 

      If you want to take a look at, you know, keeping old cars on the road in a great marketplace, Cuba. Now I've been there three times in my life. You know it's a one area twice and another area once. And a great thing is when they put the embargo back in the 50s on Cuba, when cashier took it over and basically kicked the Americans out, said you know, we're not your fun zone, get the fuck out of here. Okay, this is our country. You want to come here? Fine, but we own this place, not you guys.
 
      They put the trade embargo on them. They weren't able to get vehicles and we get it. By the late 60s and into the 70s they started making trade deals with Russia, getting Ladas and that in. Now they got deals with Korean and Japanese manufacturers that ship vehicles in. Okay, so when I go on vacation there, I could drive a brand-new Suzuki Jimny, but you'll still see some of these older vehicles on the road because back then it was so much easier to fix vehicles than now with a lot of these new computer-based technologies and older vehicles can be held on to even longer. Their parts may not last as long as some of the parts manufactured today, but with so many of these vehicles around on the roads, an economy that's not buying them and destroying them, these vehicles can stay on the road even longer.
 
     Now, finding parts for it. There's no major aftermarket industry. So, if you have one and it breaks down, you got to fix it. Find a way to fix it yourself, or you got to find another one somewhere in the island. Tear it apart and rebuild. Keeps the vehicles going. But they also live in a marketplace where you don't have to really worry about rust, unlike, you know, my home country. 

​      Keeping parts in the marketplace is one way to keep the older cars on the road, but older cars also play a vital role in getting new people into the automotive market. I get it. There's a lot of places in the world you don't want to get more and more people into the marketplace. You're listening to this episode from New York City, Los Angeles, hell, even Mexico City or Tokyo there's tons and tons of people. You don't want to add more and more and more cars to that. You want to get more people to take public transportation and we're all for that. But the used car industry also helped play a vital role for people in my situation my home city.
 
     When I was growing up, unless I had a license and drove anywhere, the bus was horrible, or I even lived too far. Where my kids are, where we live now, they could take the bus into town, but there are only select times it could take. It takes forever to get into town. For us it's more convenient to own vehicles to drive in and around town. To myself it's convenient. My in-laws live in a big city. They can walk to get groceries; they can walk to go get stuff at the drugstore. They can walk. They can keep themselves active a lot more than I can. But I need these.
 
     And when we first started out in our life, we had to purchase a lot of these older vehicles. I get it. I bought my Rio it really wasn't old and paid about five thousand dollars for it. So, we'll be paying it off over a year. Blah, blah, blah.
 
     Okay, but after that, when I wanted to park this car and keep it. I needed to get something else and I couldn't afford anything else. I couldn't make payments on a full brand-new vehicle. Look back at it now. I might have been able to do it, but the point in time I didn't really think about it. So, I started buying used vehicles, getting them for cheaper, buying these, you know, twelve-hundred-dollar cars, buying them, doing some body work to it and keeping them on the road.
 
     Hell. I watched my family do that. My dad did that. You know, most of my life. He didn't get his first new vehicle of my life, like he got one before I was born. But his first brand new vehicle of my life didn't come out until pretty much my son was in the picture. So, a long time out he kept purchasing used vehicles, bringing them to the shops. So now he's keeping the shops employed, keeping the part manufacturers employed. His vehicle uses a little bit more gas because it's older, so he's using a little bit more gas, keeps the fuel stations going. Then we have to put more fluids into it to keep these systems running.
 
      So, all these aftermarket manufacturers like how many times when you buy a brand-new vehicle have you ever been told oh, you know you can go out and get a fuel additive to keep your engine good and clean. No, they'll just do it for you. They don't tell you to go out and get that. They have their own stuff in the back. They top up the oil with their stuff from the manufacturer, not the aftermarket industry. So old cars on the road really keep the aftermarket industry open. It's a steady repair cost and upkeep. Yes, your repair costs and your upkeep are a lot more than a brand-new vehicle, but your upfront cost is a lot less for some of the vehicles I own. We're going to go back and look at the first vehicle I bought.
 
      When I finally got my Rio Park, my wife and I had a new vehicle, our Suzuki, when my son was born and then I wanted to get my Rio off the road. I needed something, but we couldn't afford a brand-new vehicle. Sure, the Suzuki was paid off, but we didn't make tons of money. We had a house to pay for, we had daycare. I had to buy a beat up, old, crappy car. So, I paid $400 for this. Ford Taurus Cost me another $600 to get it on the road. So here we are $1,000 in. I screwed it up, tried to do a tune up on it, cracked one of the freaking spark plugs, had to get the headers fixed. There's $1,200 gone.
 
     I had the vehicle for three years Within the three years of ownership due to repairs, any upkeep and a little bit of extra gas, because it cost a little bit more to operate because of its V6 and its age. Compared to my Suzuki it cost a bit more, but over those three years the car really only cost me about $5,000. I have had other used vehicles. I had a CX-9 that started getting into electrical problems by the time. I got rid of that vehicle after 30 years because we got hit and I had to give it up. I could have put half the money down for a brand new one.
 
     Now all those aftermarket part manufacturers and all the repair shops made good money off of me while I held on to that old vehicle. But I couldn't afford to spend $40,000 on a vehicle at that point in time. I was able to afford $6,000 to $8,000 on a vehicle. At that point in time, I was able to afford $6,000 to $8,000 on a vehicle and I could afford to do maintenance on a vehicle upwards of maybe $1,500 a year. So those are the things you have to look at. How much is it going to cost? How much is it going to cost to upkeep? But all that upkeep keeps this industry alive. 

      ​The higher accessibility of aftermarket parts, fluids all thanks to online ordering Like companies like Rock Auto, really make it easy for you to keep a lot of these vehicles intact. If I can do these things in my own garage, which I'm mechanically inclined and do quite a bit of work on that Suzuki to keep it on the road, I can buy the parts online and the parts are cheap. I can buy the brand new. I can buy them used. I can go out to a wrecking yard and pull them off myself. I can keep these vehicles. There are so many options. A lot now. Today, compared to back in the 90s, there's actually a lot less used car dealers than you used to find.
 
      Used to find all those little shady guys that would just paint over all the rest and kind of top it up, just so you would take it for a small test drive. It feels okay, okay. Second, you get it off the parking lot. Two days down the road the engine blows up on you, right, remember those old shady guys, but those ones kept a lot of people on the road. Even though they caused so many problems, they still kept people on the road and with a problematic car, some people would buy them. They'd have to pay to fix them because they spent so much money on them to keep them on the road, which kept the shops and the part manufacturers alive. The other people that couldn't afford it would scrap the thing.
 
      Keeping the wrecking yards alive, keeping the aftermarket parts industry alive Like finding parts in my Suzuki, sometimes even my Rio is getting harder and harder Finding places like LPQ or even Universal Parts. I can get parts from crash vehicles for my vehicle. I can keep them on the road and as we keep these industries alive, we can keep our vehicles alive. Now, our future really doesn't have a bright ending to us right now because the electric vehicle industry you have to remember if the vehicle sits for so long, you destroy the battery and if nobody's building batteries or conversion kits for it, essentially the car is scrap and we have to start looking at that in the industry. The aftermarket industry really has to start taking a look at batteries Because in the future, to keep a Tesla Model S from today alive 20 years down the road. We're going to have to have a brand-new industry to keep these ones alive. Wrecking yards are going to have new environmental controls for batteries as well.
 
      Because batteries catch fire and it takes forever to put them out. You basically got to submerge them for sometimes a week on end to put out the fire, so that can become more of a hassle. People don't want to deal with them, but you can take them. You could grind them down, turn them around black mask, turn them back into brand new batteries. But what do you do with the car after you rip the battery out my car? I just go to, you know, Canadian Tire, buy a new battery and get my car and back on the road.
 
      But the electric car industry could be a problem and that's the issue. We're now dealing with more autonomous technology. We're now dealing with more ride shares, so that industry is slowly dying out. If we start pulling more away from the automobile industry, it starts jacking up the price for everyone else. COVID really showed this to us when the industry got shut down only for a few weeks and then maybe a month here and there. All these little shutdowns, all these little semiconductors not being made, really screwed with the pricing of automobiles. It killed off all these little entries used car dealerships, which mean all the entry level vehicles under $5,000 vehicles have disappeared from the marketplace today, sure, you can buy a used vehicle, but unless you're looking at close to $10,000, you're not getting anything really good anymore. COVID helped destroy the used car market.
 
       It still is easy to keep these old cars on the road. It's just harder to get them right off the bat. When I was a kid, I would go to a car dealership, even a brand-new car dealership in town. They would have cars ranging from $500 to $50,000. Today you're lucky to find a car on their lot for $1,500, let alone $5,000. But you'll find tons of them between the $10,000 to $40,000 range. Without these old cars sitting in these lots and getting resold to people, we're pulling an entire part of the marketplace out.
 
      And when these people don't get behind the wheel of a vehicle at a young age, they're not going to want to own one later on in life, because they're going to learn about public transit and become used to it. They're going to learn about rideshare programs. They're going to learn about Uber and Lyft using the trains, using the subways, all of that. What does that do? That strains our public transit system, because we've now developed a system for automobiles and we never updated our public transit. So, in the world today we still need to keep these old cars on the road. 

       ​I have a couple friends that still need these old cars to be able to get around. They can't afford, you know, even over five thousand dollars for a vehicle. They're mechanically inclined so they can keep them on the road and they know where to get the parts cheap. But they still need entry into this marketplace. The old car markets got to still kick around. We need this used car portion of the marketplace. No matter how much you want to get more and more people off the highways and into public transit, there are still people out there who rely heavily on this marketplace and thanks to companies like Rock Auto, automotive, Canadian Tire, who does repairs and even can get parts to your friendly neighborhood mechanic down the road, they all help keep these vehicles alive. All we need to do is to keep the market alive, because when that market starts dying, some of these shops and some of these part manufacturers start going with it. When that starts happening, then we're going to start forcing a lot of people out of the marketplace when Henry Ford brought everyone into the automotive marketplace. The revolution that is electric vehicles and less parts and less aftermarket serviceability and longevity of automobiles, the revolution of higher price vehicles is slowly coming in. So, yes, we need these old cars.
 
      Some of us just need them as an extra car to get back and forth to work. That Suzuki sits in my driveway in the summertime. I don't really use it much in the summertime because it's my winter beater. I prefer to use it in the winter. Go back and forth to work. That Suzuki sits in my driveway in the summertime. I don't really use it much in the summertime because it's my winter beater. I prefer to use it in the winter. Go back and forth to work occasionally every once in a while. It it's so old and so paid off. It's so easy to fix that. Literally just keep it around to save on a few extra expenses. Without that industry, the car would be in the trash right now. I would have had to walk away from I almost did once until I found the part at the right price. And when you find the part at the right price, it gives life to these old cars.
 
      So, if you like this podcast. Please like, share or comment about it on any of your social feeds or streaming sites. That you found the AutoLooks Podcast on, like us, share us, tell your friends, tell your family, tell your co-workers, tell your boss anyone else to like us to share us that find the auto looks podcast to get the word out. But all these automotive industries questions that you have and the answers that you now have you need to tell people. That guy that just started a job, if he can't afford to get one of those entry-level vehicles and public transit out to your location sucks. He might not be able to work there forever unless he's willing to bike his ass into work right. So, for that we need the old car industry, we need to keep these vehicles alive and for myself, being a love affair with the automobile industry and classic vehicles, we always need to make parts for the classics, because if my mustang can't get back on the road, that's a sad day for me. If I have to scrap it, good day for the metal guys, bad day for me.
 
      And after that, stop by the website, read some of the reviews, check out some of the ratings, go to the corporate links website page. Big or small, we have them all, car companies from around the globe, all available in one select location the corporate links website tab at the top of the page of AutoLooks.net. The AutoLooks Podcast is brought to you by e-commerce entertainment group and distributed by PodBean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at email at AutoLooks.net. So, from myself, Everett Jay, the owner of the AutoLooks.net website and the host of the AutoLooks Podcast, PodBean.com for getting us out into the world. And Ecomm Entertainment Group, strap yourself in for this one fun wild ride that these old cars are going to take us on.
 
Thank you.
Everett J.