re: #235 Dr. Matt

And will last only a fraction of the time. :)

Give me a second while I hang the onions on my belt…okay. I landed my first job wrenching on cars when I was sixteen. That was fifty years ago this coming April. I still wrench on them. I have a Mazda Miata with over a quarter of a million hard driven miles on it and I do most of my own work because wrenching is still wrenching - you just need a couple of electronic tools to do it right. And you need time, something that most of us find too little of.

Cars today are way better and require less frequent maintenance than they did in the good old days. Even the cheapest ones last two or three times longer. Most cars back then were junked well before they reached 100,000 miles. Nowadays the interior usually wears out before the power train does.

All of those lovely old cars in Cuba are on the road because that’s all they have and all that they can afford. Many of them are American iron on the outside and a hodgepodge of East Bloc and European parts under the sheet metal. That’s a hell of an accomplishment and I hope that the Cubans who own them are able to get every cent of the considerable sums that the cars are worth.