kev84 wrote:
i think it safe to say, any cars above 25 years should be considered as classics, this is what most communities would regard it as about
i guess that applies for JNC cars above 25 years.
OK, that is going to imply that nostalgic includes cars that are not classic or less than 25 years old. But that does not agree with some other moderator opinions/comments.
That becomes another difficult definition. Nostalgic Hero sets a hard cutoff of 1979, not an age based definition.
And there is no stated definition outside discussions.
Old school is even more vague. The phrase is a negative that depends on the opposite term for its definition. So what's New School? That would be current, state-of-the-art, the latest, or new.
Look at the demographic funding all of this. Everyone wants the 18-25 year olds, because they have the money to spend and no wife or children to keep them from spending all that money on cars and mens toys. These are people who were not born or not old enough to have much of a memory the world before 1995.
That's age group is who the import and performance culture/lifestyle magazines are trying to attract. And what cars are getting written up in articles or are in the large advertisements from parts companies? Current models, and cars that are five or six years old. The exceptions are some that might still be of interest to these young people.
Look at the shows and events. Bikini contests, burnout contests, and currently popular music. It's not a VH1 crowd or VH1 entertainment, not the music you would have heard when 15 and 20 year old cars were rolling out of the dealerships.
So New School is under ten years old. There is no Middle School. The rest becomes very plausibly Old School.
Going a little further, SCCA Touring class club (circuit) racing, and Rally America, both place age restrictions on participant vehicles.
Quote:
Touring Category Classes are intended to provide the Membership with the opportunity to compete in commonly-available, recently-produced
automobiles in as near the legal, street-driven form of those automobiles
as is practically and safely possible under racing circumstances.
...
b. Cars will be eligible for competition from the time they are classified until the end of the tenth calendar year of competition of the latest model year listed on the specification line.
That lends a little more to New School being ten years and under, and everything above that being something other than New School.
I've said before that I never had anything that was in style, fashionable, or popular. Possibly never New School if being embraced by the media or public as a whole is part of being New School.
I'll throw out some reasons to support this.
I'm working on a 1991 four door compact car. (I actually have several of this specific car and an additional one that I am responsible for the care of is owned by another family member). Make and model is unimportant. The car was made from 1989/1990 through 1992/1993 (production year vs. model year). Replacement parts from the dealership became difficult to get around 2002, and by 2007, I had a growing list of discontinued parts. By 2009, my default setting had evolved to sit down and draw the broken part in autocad and talk to the machinist about having the replacement part made from scratch. In effect, my normal maintenance routine is now the same as if I were trying to keep a Model A running as a daily driver, but rarer, as if the Model A I was trying to maintain is the only one left in existence. And add the complexity of dealing with electronics, plastics, computer designed parts, and trying to replicate modern manufacturing techniques.
For the last four years, I have been trying to find quarter panels and floor panels to repair rust. Every car I have found within 500 miles is rusted worse than what I am trying to repair. This year's Christmas Miracle is that one of these cars showed up at the local salvage yard, and it has less rust than the cars that I am trying to repair. Thursday, 40 degrees and raining, and I was in the salvage yard for six hours removing all pieces to allow cutting the panels out of the junked vehicle. Friday, 40 degrees, I rented a saw and generator, cut both quarter panels, both B pillars, and the right front A pillar out of the vehicle and bought them. It took the whole day. Saturday, 30 degrees and raining, and I was back at the salvage yard pulling and buying spindles and axles, buying the rear bumper, tail lights, assorted plastic panels, and then preparing the engine to be pulled. Today, 20 degrees, snow, 30 MPH wind, and everything is closed for the snow storm. Monday it is going to be 20 degrees, and I will have to go back to hoist the engine and buy it.
Now, I may be a little sensitive to the chrome bumper and carburetor crowd, with all the comments about which cars are nostalgic or old school and which cars are not. But I think I'm entitled to that. Because I am going through as much, if not more, with the cars that I work on in the 15-25 year old age group, as I or anyone else do with cars in the 40+ year age group. In fact, I will say without hesitation that if I had not already been well trained with having to design and build my own replacement parts for the pre-classic cars, I would be completely unprepared and helpless with working on and dealing with the problems of a 40+ year old cars.
And I'll add that I dream about something easy like finding parts and information for a Hakosuka or a Cosmo, because if the owners of those cars went through what I do just to keep these 1991 cars going, they would have given up long ago and bought Priuses or bus passes.
