ArcaMax

This 4th of July weekend, light off a bottle rocket to salute the four-wheeled-friend in your garage - to show your appreciation for all we've come to take for granted. Things like:

It starts most of the time

Even the humblest Hyundai rarely gives any real trouble. You get in, turn the key - and it starts. Every time. No need to work the gas pedal up and down; no "tricks" to get it to catch. It just does. Praise the Motor Gods - and modern fuel injection/engine management systems!

It stops

 With plenty of room to spare, too. Modern brakes are probably the single biggest improvement in new car design over the past 20 years. In 1980, only a handful of very expensive high-performance sports cars and top-tier luxury cars even had disc brakes at all four corners. ABS was all-but-unknown. Nowadays, all but the very cheapest cars have at least four-wheel-disc brakes - and ABS is becoming universal. Panic-stop skidding is almost a thing of the past - a piece of history along with vacuum-operated windshield wipers and bias-belted tires.

It doesn't rust

There was a time when quarter panels and wheelwells began to bubble and look like sickly Swiss Cheese after just a couple of years on the road - especially if you lived in an area where salt was used in the winter. But today's cars are so well-protected against rust - by galvanizing, multiple coats of protective undercoating and chip-resistant primers - that body rot is becoming as rare a sight as a wood-paneled Pacer. In fact, the body of your new car will almost certainly outlast the mechanical stuff - exactly the reverse of the way things used to be, when floorpans rotted away to create a Flintstones-style form of transportation long before the engine gave up the ghost.

It doesn't pollute

Well, not much. Over the past 25-30 years, engineers have reduced the harmful stuff coming out of your cars tailpipe to literally fractional levels, relative to what they once were. In fact, less than five percent of the combustion byproducts of a typical 2008 model year passenger car are other than harmless water vapor and carbon dioxide. Looked at another way, a 1970 mode year car put as much lung-choking garbage as a dozen (or more) '08 model year cars. It's a tremendous improvement that's gone largely unappreciated - but you should be thankful for it every time you take a breath.

It lasts longer than the loan

 Treated with any decency, almost any new car or truck should go at least ten years and 120,000-plus miles before showing serious signs of decrepitude - let alone hitting you up for a rebuilt engine. That is borderline miraculous to anyone old enough to remember how things were before about the mid-1980s - when engines began smoking at 70,000 miles (less was not uncommon) and few cars were anything other than beer can fodder or redneck lawn sculpture after a decade on the road.

It has AC. And power windows. Usually a not-bad stereo, too

 These were high-end luxury car features - or at ht every least, expensive options - as recently as the '80s. Nowadays just about every car - down to the lowest bottom feeding econo-compact - either comes with or offers AC, as well as power windows, locks, electric defrost and a gauge cluster with actual gauges,  not just a speedometer set in the middle of a bunch of next-to-useless idiot lights that came on only after something important stopped working.

It gets decent gas mileage

 Even the worst-offender 4,000-lb. V-8 SUV can approach 20-mpg on the highway - a phenomenal achievement that can be credited to the development of overdrive transmissions that reduce engine operating speeds (and thus fuel consumption) once the vehicle has reached road speed. Instead of turning 3,000 RPM at 65 mph, the engine is hardly idling at just over 1,800 RPM at the same road speed. Fuel injection has helped, too. It's much, much more efficient than old-timey carburetors - which have been gone for about 20 years now.

No more annual tune-ups

 Heck, you may never have to deal with a tune-up at all - unless you own the car longer than five years. More and more new cars have spark plugs that last 50,000 miles (or even 100,000 miles) and don't require more in the way of routine maintenance than the occasional oil/filter change. "Long-life" coolant has dramatically extended the time between mandatory "flush n' fills" - formerly an almost annual ritual if you cared at all about your radiator and hoped to avoid a summer boil-over. Coil-on-plug ignition  systems have eliminated spark plug wires - while solid state electronics have done away with any need to make periodic adjustments of the ignition system. No timing, no points - no hassle. Hooray!

You get your money's worth

Yes, new cars can be pricey -  or seem to be. But in fact they are cheaper to buy today (as a percentage of the typical person's income) than they've been in years - and historically low interest rates, amazing cash-back deals and rebate programs only sweeten the pot. But the most important thing is that almost any new car you buy can provide 10-15 years or more of faithful service - free of the major design flaws and premature failure of major components such as the drivetrain  - that were simply part of the equation since the dawn of the automobile age. Today, in contrast, you can reasonably expect to drive whatever you buy until the early 2020s, if you want to - more than long enough to amortize the purchase price and then some. After the loan's paid off, the rest is pure gravy - basically free transportation, less gas and routine service. And unless you manage to beat the thing into an early grave, even at the end of 10-15 years, there will still be some value left. As a trade-on, down payment - or a car for your kid to take to school. Whatever.

It's a lot to be thankful for - and well worth lighting off a bottle rocket or two to celebrate!

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www.ericpetersautos.com or EPeters952@aol.com for comments.