mmarshall

Bean does have a point, though. First, it is indeed difficult to beat the reliability charts in Consumer Reports, for many reasons which we have already discussed at length in CAR CHAT and don't have to rehash here.

Second, many car magazines, especially the big "enthusiast " ones like Car and Driver, Road and Track, AUTOMOBILE, Autoweek, etc.... do tend to be excessively " sporty" in their outlook and philosophy and to want everything to drive, accelerate, and handle like a Porsche 911 or a BMW M-car..........I know that's a little exaggerated, but those magazines are clearly sport-oriented, and place a big emphasis on power, slalom speeds, braking distances, skidpad figures, and sporty interior features such as high-bolstered seats.

mmarshall

That 1975 CVCC engine was remarkable for being able to meet mid-70's emission standards without a catalyst........something few if any other production cars at the time could do. But its cold drivability was nothing short of horrendous ( my brother and girl friend at the time both owned this generation Civic ).
It operated by having two combustion chambers....a small rich-mixture one and the larger cylindrical lean-mixture one. The two-barrel carburator had a manual choke, and no matter how you fiddled with it the engine just would NOT run off-idle, in gear, until it had almost fully warmed up...then you were OK. The engine would idle fine when cold, but the moment the clutch engaged out it would stall or stumble severely. So you had to let it warm up all the way into the bottom end of the normal range before you could actually DRIVE it.....a pain in the a**.

The basic problem, as I saw it, was that the small, rich-mixture chamber fired OK when cold, but the larger, lean one under it could not..its mixture, even with the manual choke, was far too lean to run smoothly when cold. That was probably where the low emissions came from.


Remember the "Automotive Thanksgiving" thread I posted about a month ago....where I said that electronic computer-controlled fuel injection was one of the best features ever put on the modern car, and something that we should be supremely thankful for? Believe me.....I meant what I said.

vraa

iTrader: (2)

I love you guys btw

I don't get trends from anywhere except my head.

XeroK00L

Yeah, good names such as the Land Cruiser and the Legend come to mind, although the latter could be somewhat overreaching.

mmarshall

True.............many of us also do, but you can't necessarily get sales figures without checking other sources.

Still, if you are sharp and attentive, you can discern trends just by your own eyes, ears, and senses. A good case in point......by the early 90's I had started to see SO many Camrys, Accords, and Tauruses just about everywhere that I had concluded for myself that these were the country's 3 top-selling sedans, and I didn't need magazines to tell me that. The latest figures from the period only confirmed and proved what I had already figured out for myself.

However, making predictions before the actual sales figures verify them can sometimes be risky. One of my own past mistakes is when I predicted that the street-rod Plymouth Prowler, introduced in 1997, would be a big hit like the Miata was. It wasn't........it was a flop, primarily because of production problems, enormous markups, typical Chrysler-poor quality, the need to tow a small matching trailer ( which came with the car ) to have any trunk space at all, and a price way out of the range of the very people it was aimed at. In addition, its outrageous looks may have kept away some people who didn't want a cop magnet.

vraa

iTrader: (2)

Sales figure are for the weak, buy what you want

As you can tell, I'm a difficult individual.

mmarshall

I totally agree....and so are stereotypes.