Spring is here - or - the natural enemy of the classic car
03/09/2014
Recently, a colleague I know as a passionate classic car driver surprised me with the remark that he increasingly prefers modern everyday cars to classic cars. It wasn't that he disliked driving in an old car, but he said that it was becoming more and more complicated and difficult.
And he talked about the increasing number of speed checks. Nowadays, it is quite normal to pass ten of them for every five kilometers driven. And the permitted tolerance of 3 km/h (at 50 km/h) is less than the shaking of the speedometer needle in his vintage car. In general, today's road situations are only passable in an older car if you are very careful. And then he quickly prefers the modern passenger car, because automatic traffic sign recognition, but even more so cruise control, is almost a prerequisite for making unstressed progress. What's more, the traffic is usually so dense that a reasonable distance from the car in front, from a classic car driver's point of view, constantly tempts everyone else to jump into this supposed gap. To cut a long story short - my colleague summarized his experience by saying that he was increasingly leaving his classic car on the charger and under the cover.
Yesterday was a beautiful spring day, the temperature rose to 15 degrees, so I couldn't resist. And drove off in the classic car. And I could actually relate to all the points my colleague had mentioned. Driving an older car in a modern city, but even on the highway or country road, really requires a lot of attention and of course I would have reached my destination much more comfortably in the modern station wagon with contemporary equipment.
And yet I wouldn't have wanted to miss the drive in the old car, because driving a modern car is no longer a real experience ....
