Waiting for the glory days

I recently saw a chart comparing major eras in U.S. automotive history to economic cycles like recessions and unemployment trends. What emerged was a pattern: the quality, popularity and character of car manufacturing seem to rise and fall with the broader economy. Arguably we’re currently in a car culture downturn, leaving us to anticipate the next revival.

The Vice Grip Garage era

When you try to figure out which is the cause and which is the effect, you’re faced with a classic chicken-or-egg paradox. Do high quality and popular cars boost the economy or are good times the reason cars get better and popular?

The 1960s marked what many consider the golden age of the American automobile. Let’s call this the Vice Grip Garage era, with a nod to a popular YouTube series that documents restoring classic American cars.

There’s a massive amount of survivor bias, but generally speaking, whether it’s the Shelby GT500, the Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray, the Pontiac GTO or the Ford Mustang, everybody loves these cars.

Notably, the 1965 Chevrolet Impala sold over 1 million units, setting a still unbroken record for a single model year in the US. And abroad, there were memorably non-U.S. icons too: Jaguar E-type, Aston Martin, Mini Cooper, Citroën 2CV.

Surely, the 1960s were iconic, albeit not without reliability or safety issues. By the early 70s, the party was over. The oil crisis, new regulations, and economic turmoil hit hard.

New safety regulations made cars bigger and uglier. New emissions regulations brought us smog pumps, catalytic converters, charcoal canisters, feedback carburetors, electronic ignition. On top of that was a long recession, an oil embargo, and a decade of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in a mad rush to build smaller, cheaper cars.

The OBD Toolkit era

Luckily for the car enthusiast, things turned around in the 80s. Let’s call it the OBD Toolkit era.

With the introduction of (primitive) computers in the car, there came On-Board Diagnostics, abbreviated everywhere as OBD. It started appearing in the early to mid-1980s. Annoyingly these OBD1 systems were proprietary and not standardized, making car mechanics lose their hair early. Computer driven electronic fuel injection had a bit of a rocky start, but once we got it figured out and got a handle on the other emission systems, we really entered what I think is another golden age of the automobile.

By the time OBD2 came along in 1996, we enter the world of standardized onboard diagnostics and mature electronic fuel injection. And I’ll bet dollars to donuts in the next 10 years, the cars from this era are going to replace the 60s muscle cars.

Just like the muscle cars replaced the hot rods and the hot rods replaced the speedsters and the speedsters replaced the penny-farthing bicycles or whatever came before them.

The Pico Scope era

By the mid 2000s, history was primed to repeat itself with a downturn and another economic bubble bursting.

And so we enter the Pico Scope era. This is a niche diagnostic tool that can pinpoint where the multitude of electric signals are getting out of control. Since then, no respectable diagnostic mechanic can afford to live without being able to trace signals across the many computers, sensors and actuators of a modern car with oscilloscope-level precision.

A wave of new emissions and safety regulations arrived that brought us things like high-speed CAN bus networks that were really safety systems designed to reduce the latency of signals, like for airbag deployments, but ended up in (some would call it infect) every corner of our cars.

New materials like high strength steel and aluminum entered the car manufacturing process. They are great for weight reduction, but they really complicate crash repairs. You often hear about cars being totaled from what used to basically be a fender bender.

Engines got smaller and a lot more complicated. Suddenly everything had four timing chains and two turbos. And the wave of new acronyms hasn’t stopped since: VVT for Variable Valve Timing, DOD for Displacement On Demand, AFM for Active Fuel Management, EGR for Exhaust Gas Recirculation, VSC for Vehicle Stability Control, I could go on.

In the middle of that came a massive recession around 2008 that nearly killed the entire automotive industry. However, it turns out, the US car industry is too big to fail.

It took almost a decade to get a handle on things, but there was a very brief time, say 2016–2020, where cars were sort of okay, and it looked pretty promising. But that came to a screeching halt in 2020 when covid hit. Supply chain disruption galore.

The Boogeyman Garage era

And since then, we’ve been in what you can call the Boogeyman Garage era. My limited observation is that since 2020, prices skyrocketed while quality has at best stayed the same—or in some cases, actually declined. It certainly seems like we are repeating the cycle yet again and there’s been an endless stream of excuses for why that’s happening.

I suspect those excuses are also there to distract us from another big problem, which is that despite what the official numbers are trying to tell us, the economy, - for the common folk - seems more shaky than what politicians want to admit. Indeed, the early 2020ies economy showed noteworthy increasing inflation numbers, affecting among others the prices in the second hand car market.

Kelly Blue Book found in 2025 that new car prices are about $10,000 higher than five years earlier. Cox Automotive projects that new vehicle prices will rise by 4% to 8% by the end of 2025 (that’s an extra $2,000 to $4,000), with the introduction of 2026-model-year vehicles expected to drive further increases. Their analysts expect the new average car price in the US to break the $50,000 barrier later in 2025.

US imposed tariffs on imported cars, car parts and some raw materials will surely have an as yet unclear impact on likely higher prices in 2026. Thus far in 2025, automakers and dealers have largely absorbed the tariff costs. Ford, for instance, sold 14.2% more cars in the second quarter of 2025 than it did in Q2 2024, but the company lost a lot of money doing so, including paying $800 million for adverse tariff-related impacts.

Meanwhile, EVs are gathering steam

So what about EVs, I hear you say?

As of February 2025, electric vehicles account for 7.9% of new vehicle sales in the United States, according to Edmunds data. So one in 12 new cars are EVs. Compare that to Norway where according to the Norwegian Road Traffic Information Council, EVs accounted for a whopping 97.2% of new car sales.

There’s a lot of well-justified skepticism in the combustion world about electric vehicles. Some to do with quality, some with the high pries.

However, recent data indicates that while early battery electric vehicles were less reliable than internal combustion engine vehicles, newer EVs have made significant strides in longevity and quality due to rapid technological advancements. In the US, the EPA found that since model year 2016 EV battery packs have had less than a 0.5% failure rate, which was almost always covered by warranty. In Great Britain, studies using MOT test data show that newer BEVs now have comparable or longer lifespans compared to ICEVs, even when subjected to more intensive use.

The current verdict must be that EVs are becoming increasingly reliable and can match or exceed the lifespan of ICEVs. Ongoing improvements in technology can be expected to further enhance their longevity and reduce maintenance costs.

And surprisingly, at least to me, those improvements include batteries. The average EV battery life is on par with the average vehicle life. And multiple companies (most prominently CATL with their - cheaper? - salt based battery technology) are starting to project 20 years of usable life on a battery pack to arrive in the near future, which is pretty incredible, considering where we started just a decade ago.

It’s the economy

I guess the overall point of these musings, if I have one, is that things in the automotive world change frequently and not always for the best, and the ups and downs seem to follow the economy as a whole.

There’s just not that much we can do about it.

Mostly these car era developments are reactions to outside forces over which the average mechanic and consumer has very little control. So, it’s easy to be pessimistic.

However, to counter that, we need to remember that things in the world of cars are still pretty good.

Amazingly so, in fact. Compared to the average car in 1965, the average car in 2025:

• Lasts about twice as long (from ~100,000 miles to over 200,000 miles),
• Has roughly twice the power (or four times in trucks),
• Uses about half the fuel per mile (remarkable considering the power increase),
• Produces around 90% less tailpipe emissions,
• Is significantly safer. Modern cars reduce driver fatalities by up to 80% compared to 60s models, according to IIHS and NHTSA data.

Reasons to be cheerful

In retrospect, generally the trend has always been positive in terms of reliability, and there’s no reason to think that it won’t get better. But that optimistic note doesn’t erase the very real desire for an end to the current Boogeyman Garage era.

Perhaps lower car prices are in our future once the economics allow it? And, like it or not, it appears an electric and hybrid era, even in the US, could be next?

- thanks to Wes for insightful and entertaining observations