"Old cars are much more comfortable than newer cars, and can acomidate anyone of any height, and have power steering that is effortless, while newer cars have have steering that stiff and is comparable to not having any power steering."
LOL!
Sean, nice world you live in.
Each generation comes along and says the *same* thing, but they refer to different decades of cars, just like almost everyone agrees that Saturday Night Live was funny some time ago and it's not funny anymore, but no one agrees on which season(s) are/were funny and which season it stopped being funny.
This nostalgia colors things. It gives listeners the impression that *everything* was *much better* back then, when very few things could be further than the truth. Some features were really nice. Some cars survived, but not most -- it's like people who say all songs from 1930's were better or that all classic music was better, but they were not alive to even have experienced that, their experience of classical music or songs from the 30's is the little that was good enough to survive, not the 90% of crap they used to have just like it's now for us.
Here's a little tidbit for you: Tom Selleck may be a bit taller than most people, but he's not the tallest person around either.
Magnum PI was supposed to have a *Porche* as the car -- Selleck couldn't fit in the car for love or money, so they switched it to a Ferrari. So much for accommodating people of any height. "Oh, frack, those are cars from Europe!" you say? I have friends who were barely a couple of inches higher than 6 feet, and they had to *squeeze* to fit in certain model years of Mustang, Corvette etc.
You know what? My relatives who were born in late 1800's/early 1900's used to say that younger people were useless, because they liked "new cars" and couldn't possibly drive "a good car from way back": they couldn't start a car by cranking up (with the implication that people were either too weak or would break a bone or two from the kick back), they didn't know how to set the distributor correctly depending on the car speed, they did not know how to use a manual choke, and they would just die in the rain because they couldn't crank the wipers manually, and also that they'd destroy a "good old car" first thing because they did not know how to double clutch, "imagine that, some new cars have even the 1st and 2nd gears with synchromesh!". You wouldn't want to get them started on when automatic transmissions, power steering and power brakes showed up.
I say it's all bullshit. No one is more of a man than someone else because their cars are more automatic. Any one of us could easily get used to a Ford Model T, and in fact, I had relatives from way back then who were women and cranked the engines to start themselves, drove cars with manual transmissions etc.
Just for Sean's information (and others who may not be up to date), there are more manual transmission cars all over the world than automatic transmission -- in most of the world, young girls learn to drive and get their drivers licenses using a manual transmission car.
I do not think we are in any danger of getting the cars more and more automated so people will get used to the idea of self-driving cars. Self-driving cars will show up one way or another, despite protests of people who think their dicks might fall off if they enter one -- they'll share the roads with other cars for a while until they get better several generations later, the thing that might make ordinary cars disappear is not a lack of people who want to drive, but the fact that at some point self-driving cars will be good enough to get into way less accidents than people, then the insurance for a self-driving car will be really cheap and super expensive for a "conventional" car.
As for "everything was better back then, you people are too lazy and probably not good enough drivers", LOL, we'll talk again when I see you driving a car during heavy rain without any "automatic" features, like my relatives used to do in early 1900's -- it's easy for me to complain that the rain sensor in such and such a car is better than the other one, of that the intermittent wipers on this car is better than the other one because it's speed sensitive, or this automatic transmission or that power steering.
Let's remove all of that and see who likes old cars.
The truth is that newer cars are safer, but it's not so much that safety is new -- most of the things we have now (limited slip differentials, AWD, 4WD, power steering, power brakes, ABS) etc showed up over 50 years ago, it's just that they used to be very expensive back then, and some of them did not work as well as the current versions. But a car from 1940's or 1950's shares *way* more with current cars than a car from 1920's.
The thing that makes me laugh at some here is that they are repeating stuff without any experience, they heard someone say it and they just parrot it. I have way more respect for people like Hans, who has *actual* experience with the cars than the parroting folks.
As for me, no, I did not *drive* some of the cars I'm talking about, but my uncles and relatives *did* and I was a passenger on their cars. One particular uncle had as a hobby buying any old cheap car he could find, spruce it up a bit during the 3-6 months it took him to get bored with it and then sell it to the next person and get another one. I lost count of the number of cars from 1930's to 1950's he had (this was during the 60's to the mid-70's) while he claimed no new cars were any good. Eventually, the energy crisis happened, he sold all the old cars and got a "modern" car. My older relatives were more stubborn, they kept their Ford Model T and Chevys from the same era until they got too old to drive. While I can now laugh it off and tell people it was "interesting" riding in the cars with them during heavy rain, water pouring into the car from all kinds of different places and the driver sometimes had to ask a passenger to crank the windshield wiper for them to be able to switch gears, at the time, when I was a kid, I was scared for my life, particularly at the lack of effective brakes -- some of those cars did not even have hydraulic brakes (not talking about power brakes, just what we call today "ordinary" brakes) and the brakes were actuated by a rod and you had to have good muscles in your legs to step hard enough on the brakes to make them work; and yes, some of my aunts drove those cars, there are men who go to the gym nowadays who have weaker legs than my aunts, deal with it.
There is one thing I can say about cars like Model T and similar aged/build cars: they seemed to be better at climbing up/down rocks in places that had no good roads, like farms. Most cars couldn't even go to places like that, you'd need a truck with high clearance or something built specifically for off roading. Then again, they couldn't go to the same farms when it rained, the tires were so not very wide and they'd get stuck in the mud. Oh, well.
Cheers,
-- Paulo.
A little safety nudge from the "malaise" era 
